Traumatizing children in the name of immigration enforcement

There is no honest way to talk about Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and children without confronting a brutal truth: the U.S. government is knowingly inflicting trauma on minors—and then refusing to count the damage fully.

Ask a simple question—How many children has ICE deported? How many children are currently in ICE custody? How many have been separated from their parents?—and the federal government suddenly becomes evasive. Numbers disappear. Categories blur. Agencies point fingers at one another. What remains unmistakably clear is not the data, but the harm.

We know ICE is deporting children. We know ICE is detaining children. We know children have been—and continue to be—separated from their parents by ICE. What we do not have is a transparent, comprehensive accounting of these actions. That absence is not accidental. It is a shield against accountability.

Recent analyses of ICE records show that thousands of children have been booked into ICE custody in recent years, including infants. Some are detained with parents in so-called “family detention,” a euphemism that does nothing to soften the reality of incarceration. Others are separated, transferred into shelters, or deported outright. Yet ICE does not publish a precise, regularly updated tally of how many children it detains or deports. The agency that insists it must operate with sweeping powers in the name of “law and order” somehow cannot manage basic transparency when children are involved.

The consequences of this system are devastating—and well documented. Pediatricians, psychologists, and child welfare experts have warned for years that immigration detention and family separation cause severe, lasting harm to children. Anxiety, depression, regression in speech and behavior, sleep disorders, and post-traumatic stress are common. These are not side effects; they are predictable outcomes of forcibly removing children from their parents or locking them behind fences under armed guard.

The government knows this. It has been known for years.

After the public outcry over the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy, Americans were assured that family separation was a dark chapter that had been closed. But the truth is more unsettling: family separation never ended. It merely became quieter, more bureaucratic, and easier to deny.

Human rights groups estimate that more than a thousand children separated during earlier enforcement campaigns still have not been reunited with their parents. Meanwhile, current enforcement practices—interior arrests, expedited removals, revived family detention—continue to place children in ICE custody or rip them from caregivers under different legal justifications. The moral injury is the same. The paperwork has just changed.

Defenders of ICE often argue that the agency is simply enforcing the law. But laws are not self-executing forces of nature; they are choices. And the choice to enforce immigration law in ways that terrorize children is precisely that—a choice. The United States could prioritize alternatives to detention. It could expand community-based case management. It could end family detention entirely. It could stop arresting parents at schools, courthouses, and workplaces, where children are left behind in panic.

Instead, we have chosen spectacle over humanity.

Children are old enough to understand fear, but not old enough to know why armed agents take their parents away. They are old enough to remember the sound of a door breaking open, the image of a parent in handcuffs, the moment their family ceased to exist as they knew it. They are not old enough to consent to being used as collateral damage in a political fight over immigration.

And perhaps most damning of all is this: even as ICE claims these actions are necessary, it refuses to measure their scope fully. When a government will not count the children it cages, deports, or separates, it is signaling that those children do not count.

This is not border security. It is not public safety. It is state-sanctioned trauma inflicted on the most vulnerable people in our society, carried out behind a fog of incomplete data and bureaucratic indifference.

History will not be kind to this era. It will ask why, when we knew what this did to children, we allowed it to continue. And “we didn’t have the numbers” will not be an acceptable answer.