Federal Immigration Enforcement Leaves Hundreds of Thousands of Children Without Parents, Study Finds

Over 200,000 children — 145,000 of them U.S. citizens — have had at least one parent detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement since President Trump returned to office, according to a recent Brookings Institution analysis. A third of those children are under age 6.

The material costs are mounting fast. The federal government has allocated over $200 billion toward immigration enforcement, including funding from the GOP’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act and a $70 billion appropriation Trump signed this month. More than 4.6 million U.S. citizen children live with a parent at risk of deportation, per the report.

The human costs, documented in dozens of cases across California, include children exhibiting speech delays, talking about suicide, and refusing to leave their homes. Research ties parental separation directly to increased risk of depression, anxiety, PTSD, weakened immune systems, developmental delays — and, in adulthood, heart disease, diabetes, and cancer.

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Saúl Zermeño, a 45-year-old single father, went to a routine ICE check-in appointment on Oct. 3 — a requirement he’d complied with for years while holding deferred action that allowed him to work in the U.S., according to his attorney. Officers deported him to Mexico that day, where he hadn’t lived since age 9. His 15-year-old son Damian, a U.S. citizen with ADHD, autism, epilepsy, and neurofibromatosis Type 1 (a genetic condition causing tumors on nerve tissue, including one in his head requiring regular monitoring), came home from school to find his aunt sobbing at the table.

“I thought it wasn’t true,” Damian said. “I just went to my room. I didn’t want to leave. I didn’t even want to eat.”

ICE officers didn’t ask Zermeño about his son or check on Damian’s well-being when they deported him, Zermeño told reporters. The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that ICE does not separate families and that parents are asked whether they want to be removed with their children or designate a safe person for them to stay with in the U.S. However, a report by the Women’s Refugee Commission and Physicians for Human Rights found that many parents aren’t given that choice, and that ICE often doesn’t ask detainees if they have children or take steps to ensure children left behind are safe.

In Los Angeles, immigration officers detained Jacob’s mother (KFF Health News withheld the family’s real names due to asylum-case concerns) at a check-in appointment in January while the 9-year-old and his father sat in the waiting room. The mother has a pending asylum application and no criminal record, the father said. Officers handed the father a bag with his wife’s wallet and cellphone. Jacob, who’d fled Colombia with his parents in 2024 after paramilitary threats and had recently stabilized with school-based therapy, became inconsolable.

“He was terrified,” the father said. “He was crying with rage.”

Jacob stopped eating and going to school. His teacher called home to ask why he was crying in class. He couldn’t sleep. He blamed his dad. After almost five months at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center — the privately run facility closest to Los Angeles, holding a daily average of over 1,700 people as of April — Jacob’s mother was released based on a habeas corpus petition in May. The family is still living in fear of detention or deportation; the father is appealing a removal order for him and Jacob.

At an ICE office north of Los Angeles, immigration agents smashed a car window and forced Noemi’s partner out while he waited for her and their three children (ages 9, 7, and 1) to finish a check-in appointment. Officers tried to separate Noemi, a Guatemalan asylum seeker, from the children inside, but gave up after they started screaming, she said. Her partner, a Mexican national who’d lived in the U.S. for almost 20 years, was sent to Adelanto. Glass from the car scattered at the children’s feet in the parking lot.

“It was something tragic, something inexplicable that happened that day,” Noemi said. “It’s something that marks you for your whole life. My family was broken.”

Since her partner’s detention in December, Noemi said, their 7-year-old daughter became depressed, refused to eat, and saw her grades plummet — she forgot the names of letters and numbers in both English and Spanish. The 9-year-old son struggled to sleep and asked constantly if his father was taken because they’d done something wrong. The youngest daughter, who’d already learned to walk, went back to crawling for three months and cried out “Pa! Pa!” in her sleep.

Sofia Mendoza, a therapist at a community clinic in Los Angeles County, said separated children experience a form of grief that’s hard to process because the parent is alive but not with them. This can disrupt the child’s bond with that parent and their ability to form trusting relationships in the future. Young children often complain of stomachaches, develop separation anxiety, and regress to earlier behaviors like bed-wetting. Older children may have panic attacks, nightmares, and difficulty focusing. Caregiver loss is also associated with increased risk of suicide and substance use in children, Mendoza said.

Damian, now living with his aunt Claudia Zermeño in East Los Angeles, said his grades have dropped because he can’t focus. He no longer wants to do things he used to enjoy with his father, like going out to eat. “Fun is over,” he said. “It’s time to be an adult right now.”

He’s learned breathing exercises in therapy, but still feels sad and worried most of the time. Sometimes he feels angry. “I try my hardest to think, to stay focused,” he said. “But with everything that’s going on, I can’t keep the facade of ‘everything’s normal’ when I feel heartbroken.”

His father, now in Guadalajara, is working with an attorney to get permission to legally return to the U.S., but the process is complicated and uncertain. Damian hopes to visit him in Mexico but doesn’t have a passport, and as a minor under 16, there are more requirements to get one without his father present. He’s making plans to get his driver’s license when he turns 16 this month. He’s given up his goal of going to college and instead wants to get a job right after high school to help his aunts and send money to his dad.

The Breakdown

• Over 200,000 children have had at least one parent detained by ICE since Trump returned to office, per a Brookings Institution analysis — 145,000 of them U.S. citizens, about a third under age 6.
• The federal government has allocated over $200 billion toward immigration enforcement, including funding from the GOP’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act and a $70 billion appropriation Trump signed this month.
• Most people detained have no criminal conviction; being in the U.S. without authorization is typically a civil offense, not a criminal one.
• DHS says ICE does not separate families and that parents are asked whether they want to be removed with their children or designate a safe person for them. A report by the Women’s Refugee Commission and Physicians for Human Rights found many parents aren’t given that choice, and ICE often doesn’t ask detainees if they have children or take steps to ensure children left behind are safe.
• Research ties parental separation to increased risk of depression, anxiety, PTSD, weakened immune systems, developmental delays in children — and heart disease, diabetes, cancer in adulthood.

What This Means for You

This is federal policy set by an elected administration playing out in real time. Over 4.6 million U.S. citizen children live with a parent at risk of deportation, per the Brookings report — the enforcement apparatus funded by Congress and directed by the President is producing measurable health and developmental harm to hundreds of thousands of children, most of them citizens. Fresno sits in the Central Valley, an area with a large immigrant population and significant ICE activity. Whether you voted for Trump or not, this is what over $200 billion in federal enforcement spending is buying: children who can’t sleep, can’t focus in school, and are giving up on college to support families shattered by detention operations. The question for voters is whether this is an acceptable return on that investment, and whether the officials who funded and directed it should continue to hold those offices.

What to Watch

The Brookings analysis expects the number of children with detained parents to grow as enforcement spending ramps up. The material provides no breakdown of how that $200 billion is being spent — how much goes to detention facilities like Adelanto (a privately run center holding over 1,700 people daily as of April), how much to ICE operations, how much to legal proceedings. That’s the cost side.

The return side: DHS claims ICE doesn’t separate families and gives parents a choice. The Women’s Refugee Commission and Physicians for Human Rights found otherwise — many parents aren’t given that choice, ICE often doesn’t ask about children, and children are left without safeguards. Three cases in this material alone describe parents deported or detained at check-in appointments without officers asking about their children’s welfare. If the stated policy is “we don’t separate families,” and the documented pattern is “we do,” voters funding this operation are entitled to know which version is accurate and who’s accountable for the gap.

A separate question: why are people with no criminal record, pending asylum applications, or years of compliance with check-in requirements being detained or deported at all? Being in the U.S. without authorization is a civil offense, not a criminal one. The cases here include a single father with deferred action (legal permission to stay and work), an asylum seeker with a pending application, and a man who’d lived in the U.S. for almost 20 years. The stated rationale for enforcement at this scale and cost isn’t clear from the material — but the documented outcome is children regressing developmentally, talking about suicide, and abandoning education plans. That’s the trade-off voters are being asked to accept.