The Trump administration has created a new form of family separation

A mother was forced to leave her 6-month-old baby with her sister when she was deported and flown to Honduras. When he landed, his sister had also been detained and had no idea where her son was.

A father begged immigration agents to make a phone call when he was detained at work because his son was with a babysitter. He made the call and the babysitter was able to stay a few more days, but he was deported without his son.

A 22-year-old pregnant woman in Florida was stopped by immigration agents while traveling through Louisiana and detained for a month before being deported without her 2-year-old daughter. “They didn’t ask me anything. They didn’t talk to me, only to yell at me, to humiliate me. They never told me ‘you have a daughter, you can bring her,’ because I would have brought her home.” [Honduras]she is glued to me,” he said.

Another woman was arrested while dropping off her disabled son at school. “He doesn’t even know I was deported,” she said, adding that she was never given the option to bring him with her.

These are just some of the stories that immigrants deported from the United States to Honduras told the Women’s Refugee Commission, a nonprofit organization that interviewed people as they arrived. Every day for the last year, at least 300 immigrants have landed at the La Lima airport, many of them without their children and without knowing where their children are or who cares for them.

Zain Lakhani, director of justice and migrant rights at the WRC, estimates that hundreds of parents deported to Honduras have been separated from their families.

Immigration advocates say what is happening amounts to a new form of forced family separation, one notable for the speed and scale at which it is occurring, and the particular way in which immigrants are being targeted. People are detained during routine traffic stops, detained outside their children’s schools or disappear on the way to work, then expelled from the country within days, often leaving their children and loved ones completely unaware that they were kidnapped.

Yosef Amaya/Reuters

“I would say these are very different types of deportations, designed to lead to family separation,” said Michele Heisler, medical director of Physicians for Human Rights, an international NGO that traveled to Honduras alongside the WRC to document human rights abuses.

Tricia McLaughlin, deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, told News themezone that Immigration and Customs Enforcement does not separate families when the agency deports a parent or primary caregiver. “Parents are asked if they want to be picked up with their children or if ICE will place the children with a safe person the parent designates,” he said. “This is consistent with previous administrations’ immigration law enforcement.”

DHS did not respond to a question about whether it is currently tracking family separations. The White House referred News themezone to DHS when contacted for comment.

This form of family separation is different from what occurred during Trump’s first term, when his administration notoriously separated families at the US-Mexico border, holding children and parents in different detention centers upon arrival.

But even during that era (the most egregious and sweeping example of family separation in recent history) there were stronger directives aimed at minimizing family separation.

In 2013, then-President Barack Obama created a federal immigration policy called parental interest directives, which said ICE and Customs and Border Protection should not detain someone who identifies as a parent or primary caregiver in hopes of keeping families together. The policy remained largely the same during the Obama and Biden administrations (although both still separated many immigrant families), and Trump adopted a somewhat weaker but generally similar policy during his first administration.

That changed last July, when Trump issued a new parental interest directive that contains only two mandatory requirements for immigration agents when detaining parents: They must ask the people they detain if they are parents, and they must give detained immigrants the opportunity to decide whether they want to be deported with their children.

But in practice, defenders say the Trump administration is not even following through on its own watered-down policy.

“Those are the only two ironclad obligations or requirements left… and they’re not even doing that,” Lakhani said.

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And because the administration has focused so much on finding and detaining people who have been living in the United States for a long time, rather than detaining people when they try to enter the country, officials have been detaining more immigrants when they are not with their children.

More than 30 children in seven states have entered foster care after their parents were deported, a acquaintance research found, and there are likely many more, as there is no comprehensive national database that tracks where children end up after their parents are deported.

The lack of data around The number of families that have been separated leaves advocates struggling to understand how to help, and could lead to families being separated for longer periods of time or never being reunited at all. The number of children separated during the first Trump administration was unknown for years because there was no formal tracking system and lack of coordination between relevant agencies. A 2020 government report revealed that at least 2,700 children They were separated from their parents at the southern border of the United States between 2018 and 2019.

During a six-day trip to Honduras, WRC and PHR advocates spoke with dozens of immigrants getting off planes from the United States who were not given the option of contacting their children or bringing them with them. Honduran service providers who welcome migrants at the airport and document cases of family separation said they have seen hundreds of adults separated from their children, according to WRC report. Service providers include social workers, physicians, and psychologists who conduct the intake as part of a Honduran government initiative to support people returning to the country.

“All you could see were women crying because their children had been taken from them… We were all crying on the plane, all of us, thinking about our children,” a 38-year-old mother separated from her 5-year-old son told WRC and PHR.

“The women came in sobbing and said they didn’t even ask them if they had children.”

– Michele Heisler, medical director of Physicians for Human Rights

A service provider working in the reception area of ​​La Lima, interviewing recently deported immigrants, said that about 80% of the people they spoke to had similar stories of family separation, according to WRC.

“We didn’t think we were going to find so many cases of really forced family separation,” Heisler said. “The women came in sobbing and said they didn’t even ask them if they had children.”

With at least 300 immigrants deported to La Lima each day and Trump’s deportation agenda accelerating over the past six months, the lowest estimate of how many people have landed at La Lima airport since July is just over 54,000. This is a shocking and unprecedented number of people expelled from the United States, advocates said.

It is common for people to languish in detention centers for months after being detained by federal agents. Prolonged detentions present their own problems, but in theory they give parents more time to defend themselves and alert ICE that they have children.

But WRC and PHR spoke to dozens of parents who were detained and deported within four or five days, during which time they were moved to multiple facilities. “You don’t have the opportunity to really stand up for yourself or to be able to tell anyone, ‘I have kids. I want to bring them with me,'” Lakhani said.

Once someone is deported without their child, the process and possibility of reunification is extremely difficult. Of the 2,700 children who were separated from their parents under the first Trump administration, more than 1,300 have yet to be reunited with their parents, according to a 2024 DHS study. report.

Honduras does not have the infrastructure or resources to try to facilitate the reunification of parents and children, advocates told News themezone. Child welfare agencies in the United States do not have the resources necessary to do this type of work, which often involves complicated, time-consuming reunifications in third countries.

Trump’s heavy hand on immigration is hurting families across the United States, even those still together. Many parents have chosen to remain in detention with their children to give them the best opportunity to remain together.

There are now six times as many children detained in ICE detention centers as there were at the beginning of 2025, according to The Marshall Project. Children as young as 18 months are detained in facilities like the one in Dilley, Texas, where children as young as 5 Liam Conejo Ramos was held after ICE detained the preschooler and his father in a Minneapolis suburb. Many of these children are being held well beyond the legal limit of 20 days.

“The levels of psychological trauma that children face and will face are truly heartbreaking,” Heisler said. “We are going to have a generation of deeply traumatized children.”