More Than 650 California Children Detained by ICE Under Trump Administration
Federal immigration authorities detained more than 650 children in California during the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term, according to an EdSource analysis of federal data obtained by the Deportation Data Project at UC Berkeley and UCLA. Most arrests happened in California communities rather than at the border, involving minors who lived and attended school in the state.
The number of children detained in the state’s interior rose 90% compared to the prior year under the Biden administration. More than 100 of the children detained were age 5 or under.
The rise in child detainments began soon after Trump took office in January 2025. Starting immediately and escalating over the summer of 2025, ICE agents conducted large-scale operations in neighborhoods with large immigrant populations. Some children were detained while accompanying parents to routine ICE check-ins.
The children detained include a 17-year-old honors student from Los Angeles County who was detained in June 2025 and deported to Guatemala; a 9-year-old boy from Torrance who, along with his father, was detained at an immigration hearing that same month and deported to Honduras; and a 6-year-old deaf student who, in March, was detained without his hearing aids and deported to Colombia along with his mother and younger brother.
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told EdSource the data is “being cherry-picked” to “peddle a false narrative.” ICE, the spokesperson said, is “not targeting children.”
“ICE does not separate families,” the unidentified DHS spokesperson said. “Parents are asked if they want to be removed with their children or ICE will place the children with a safe person the parent designates.”
According to EdSource’s analysis of ICE’s data, none of the 666 detained children in California under Trump had any felonies or previous convictions listed. Twelve minors were listed as having pending criminal charges, including three girls between ages 6 and 9. The nature of those pending charges is not disclosed.
During his second term, Trump reopened family detention facilities, including the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley and the Karnes County Immigration Processing Center in Texas. In California, 250 detained children were ultimately sent to these family facilities.
A 12-year-old from Los Angeles, identified by the initials G.S., gave a declaration in federal court describing their experience living inside the South Texas Family Residential Center during a 64-day detainment with their parents and younger sister. The child said ICE agents detained the family during a routine ICE check-in in Los Angeles. The family lost their apartment and belongings, according to the May 22 declaration.
“It makes me feel hopeless to be here for so long, because now it’ll take me and my whole family a long time to get back to normal because of how much money and education we have lost,” the child said in their declaration. “If I could change one thing here, it would be to shut down the whole facility.”
The declaration from the Los Angeles minor is one of several included from children and parents in a lawsuit claiming their rights under the Flores Settlement Agreement have been violated. The 1997 agreement provided rights for immigrant children in U.S. custody and prohibited most detentions from lasting more than 20 days.
Attorneys representing the Trump administration argued in court in June 2025 that conditions at detention centers for children have “drastically improved” since the original agreement. Referencing the high number of immigrants at the border, the administration said the Flores Settlement Agreement “hamstrung the government in addressing this catastrophic illegal migration.”
Medical professionals and advocates contend that no period of time in detention is safe for children. In 2016, a Department of Homeland Security Advisory Committee recommended discontinuing the use of family detention, writing “detention is never in the best interest of children.”
“The kids that are in detention in these facilities, they’re losing their childhoods every single day that they’re in there,” said Wendy Cervantes, who oversees research and advocacy of immigrant families at the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Law and Social Policy.
Shortly after Trump began his second term, medical professionals wrote an open letter to the president and then-Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem warning that “detention itself poses a threat to child health.”
“We have endless amounts of research and expert testimony on how harmful detention is to children,” said Michelle Brané, who was the immigration detention ombudsman under the Biden administration, and now leads the nonprofit Together and Free, which supports asylum-seeking families. “You see kids with extreme depression. You see kids really regressing, kids going back to wetting the bed after they’ve been trained for years.”
State education officials say the practices have kept some students from attending school. In some California communities, parents, teachers and neighbors have formed rapid-response networks to report sightings of ICE agents for students and their families to avoid while commuting to and from school.
The Breakdown
- EdSource analyzed federal detainment data obtained by the Deportation Data Project at UC Berkeley and UCLA covering October 2022 through March 2026.
- During the first year of Trump’s second term, adults were detained in California’s interior at more than four times the rate they were held during the last year of Biden’s administration, while the rate of child detainments rose by 90%.
- Biden prioritized placing some unaccompanied minors who arrived at the border with sponsors and ended the practice of family detention that resumed under Trump.
- California has passed laws and issued guidance with the aim of shielding schools from federal immigration enforcement. Under California law, school officials cannot allow immigration officials on campus without a judicial warrant.
What This Means for You
This is federal policy shaped by who holds the presidency. Trump won office on a promise to carry out mass deportations, and his administration’s approach — reopening family detention facilities, conducting operations in California neighborhoods, detaining children as young as 5 — is the direct exercise of executive authority voters chose when they elected him. The lawsuit claiming violations of the Flores Settlement Agreement asks whether his administration is following the law. Fresno voters deciding how to judge this presidency, or how to weigh immigration enforcement when they vote for president in the future, now have a concrete record of what this approach has meant for children living in California.
What to Watch
The lawsuit claiming the Trump administration violated the Flores Settlement Agreement — the 1997 agreement that prohibited most child detentions from lasting more than 20 days — will test whether the administration’s argument that “conditions have drastically improved” holds up in court, or whether the children’s own testimony about losing apartments, education, and childhood itself carries more weight. That outcome will either set a limit on how long children can be held, or remove one. Watch for the court’s ruling.
The DHS spokesperson’s claim that ICE is “not targeting children” rests on the explanation that children are detained because their parents are. But that doesn’t answer the question the data raises: why are immigration operations happening at routine check-ins and in neighborhoods where families with school-age children live, rather than only at borders or worksites? The answer to that question — whether it’s deliberate policy or an unavoidable side effect — shapes whether detaining 650 children, including more than 100 age 5 or under, is something the administration considers acceptable or something it’s working to avoid.
