Trump arrested parents of more than 11,000 U.S. citizen children

The baby needed a place to go. So, in the frantic hours before the police arrested his parents, his mother turned to their pastor and his wife. As police cars waited outside the family’s Lakeland, Fla., trailer, she gave them a crash course in how to care for the 4-month-old.

Briany, with her chubby cheeks and full head of black hair, wasn’t normally this difficult. But it was late in the January night – around midnight – and she was still hungry. Her mother, Doris Flores, had tried to treat her to calm her down. It didn’t work. When she breastfed Briany, the milk didn’t come. Flores believed it had to do with the panic that set in after officers arrested the baby’s father and told him she was next.

The baby also drank formula. The pastor and his wife, who never had children, should also take his bottles and the yellow cans of formula, and follow the directions on the label. They should use distilled water, never tap water. Briany drank 5 ounces at each feeding. She needed to eat every two to half past two hours.

She was due to receive her next round of vaccinations soon. She was getting big enough for size 3 diapers. What made her happiest was being held in someone’s arms.

The soft-spoken Rev. Israel Vázquez, 58, with short-cropped hair, had previously held Briany in his arms, when he formally presented the baby to God during a ceremony at his Pentecostal church in Lakeland. If he and his wife, another pastor at the church, did not take the girls in, they would have to be placed with a foster family. “What else could we do?” he said.

It would be easier for the older couple to care for the baby’s half-sister. Eight-year-old Briana was calm and humble. She preferred to speak in English rather than Spanish. His favorite color was blue.

Deputies from the Polk County Sheriff’s Office helped load a stroller and inflatable swing into the couple’s car. Then the agents, employed by one of hundreds of Florida agencies enforcing immigration on behalf of the Trump administration, handcuffed Flores as he sobbed.

Incidents like this one, involving the arrest and detention of immigrant parents with U.S. citizen children, occurred twice as often after President Donald Trump returned to office, according to an analysis of a new national Immigration and Customs Enforcement data set shared exclusively with ProPublica. In the first seven months of his second term, authorities arrested and detained the parents of at least 11,000 U.S. citizen children — a number that, if the pace continues, will now have roughly doubled. That’s an average of more than 50 U.S. citizen children per day who have a parent in custody.

The data underlying this analysis was obtained by the Center for Human Rights at the University of Washington. in ongoing public records lawsuit. It covers the last three years of the Joe Biden administration and the Trump administration through mid-August 2025.

The differences between the fates of immigrant parents detained under the two presidents are striking, our analysis shows. The impact on mothers is particularly pronounced. Trump deports about four times as many mothers of U.S. citizen children every day as Biden.

Immigration authorities are arresting more of these mothers, but that doesn’t explain all of the increase in deportations.. If they are arrested, they are rarely allowed to return home to their families.. Under Biden, about 30% of those arrests resulted in deportation. Under Trump, nearly 60% of them resulted in deportation.

Compared to the Biden administration, Trump officials are detaining far more relatives with only minor criminal history or none. Under Trump, more than half of detained fathers of U.S. citizen children, and about three-quarters of mothers, had no criminal convictions in the United States except for traffic or immigration offenses.

Current and former Department of Homeland Security officials have said such separations do not necessarily constitute a violation of policy. Instead, guidelines on how officers should exercise their discretion have changed. Among the changes: A document formerly known as the Directive on Parental Interests received a new name under Trump – the Directive on detained parents. And its preamble, which once directed agents to treat immigrant parents in a “humane” manner, has been removed.

John Sandweg, who oversaw ICE when the initial directive was adopted under President Barack Obama, said, “At the time, we assumed that family unity is paramount. » Tom Homan, then a senior ICE official and now Trump’s border czar, presented the directive to field offices across the country. If agents met with parents, the directive would help them enforce immigration laws without “unnecessarily infringing on their parental rights,” according to his August 2013 talking points, obtained by ProPublica.

Now, Sandweg and other former officials said, the second Trump administration has set aggressive enforcement goals like arrest 3,000 immigrants per day above, concerns about the harms associated with the hasty separation of children from their parents.

ProPublica sent detailed questions about our findings to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE. DHS Acting Deputy Secretary Lauren Bis said in an emailed statement that the agency “cannot verify the veracity of the data” analyzed by ProPublica. (We validated the data the agency provided through the Freedom of Information Act, as well as our approach with outside experts.) Bis also said in the release: “ICE does not separate families. »

Immigrant parents can choose to leave the country with their children or designate someone to care for them, Bis said, which “is consistent with the policies of the previous administration.” The revised directive simply “standardizes the required forms.” She added that “under President Trump’s leadership, ICE will not ignore the rule of law.”

A White House spokesperson wrote in a statement that those in the country illegally “who wish to avoid the deportation process should self-deport.”

The disintegration of Flores’ family began with another child’s alleged threat to 8-year-old Briana.

According to a Jan. 15 police report, the girl’s school bus driver contacted the Polk County Sheriff’s Office after Briana claimed a student at her elementary school, a boy with blond hair and blue eyes, had threatened to kill her.

The sheriff’s office sent a deputy to the family’s mobile home, where she introduced herself to Flores and her fiancé, Egdulio Velasquez, and asked to speak with Briana. The 8-year-old was “shy,” according to the police report, and initially denied any problems with peers. The family said the deputy questioned Briana alone outside the trailer. Eventually, the girl suggested that her classmate had indeed bothered her, hitting her back and face with his fingers — but did not say that the boy had threatened to kill her, according to the police report.

The deputy went to the classmate’s house and the boy told him it was Briana who made the threats. He said she pointed a broken pencil at him. The deputy completed two threat assessment forms, one for the boy, one for the girl, noting that she had not checked the boy for guns because his “father was not cooperative” but had searched Briana’s trailer.

“I was unable to determine probable cause,” the congresswoman wrote in her report. She should drop the case. But his inquiry The investigation revealed something else: Flores and Velasquez were both immigrants from Honduras.

A second sheriff’s deputy arrived at the trailer shortly afterward and took their passports. He then called an ICE hotline, a requirement stemming from Florida’s close cooperation with the agency, according to police records. An operator told him that both parents had been subject to deportation orders: Velasquez following a drunken driving conviction and Flores following a missed asylum hearing.

Flores said she missed the hearing due to computer problems and was trying to appeal the decision. She had crossed the US border and requested asylum in 2023, after a man in Honduras threatened to kill her. The DHS Bis confirmed that Flores entered the country in 2023 and was subject to a deportation order in May 2025.

Flores had met Velasquez, a native of the same rural Honduran province of Olancho, in the United States. Briana, his daughter from a previous relationship, was born in Honduras. The family built a life together in Lakeland, where he worked in a factory making shipping pallets, and they became members of Vázquez’s church.

A third police car appeared outside the trailer. Police initially arrested Velasquez, keeping him handcuffed in the back of one of the cars for hours. But before they could arrest Flores, they had to figure out what to do with the children.

“Don’t be like that,” Flores recalled telling officers as she held baby Briany. “My daughter needs me.” She said they told her they were just doing their job. She said she prayed to God, “Lord, I commit everything into your hands. »

According to Flores and Velasquez, one of the deputies took a liking to a family kitten and offered to take it home. Velasquez said he later saw the kitten clinging to the officer’s pants. .

The Polk County Sheriff’s Office did not respond to specific questions about the incident, instead sending an emailed statement describing its state-mandated cooperation with federal immigration authorities.

It was nearly 11 p.m. when a Florida Child Protective Services investigator finally arrived, the family said. She informed Flores that if she didn’t find someone to take the children, the state would place them in the foster care system. So Flores called his pastor.

Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd recently began pushing for a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who have committed no crimes and have strong community ties. A spokesperson for the sheriff’s office wrote in a statement to ProPublica that deputies don’t make decisions about who to detain: They report suspects to ICE, and ICE makes the decision.

But she noted that they are now working to determine citizenship status.

“Nothing has changed in the way we provide law enforcement services in our community on a daily basis,” she wrote, “other than asking everyone we interact with where they were born.”

Federal policy still states that ICE agents should ask people they arrest if they are the parents or legal guardians of minors — and if so, they should be allowed to make child custody arrangements. The Trump administration’s July revision of that directive, one that removed the word “human” from the preamble, also added a new line. It clarifies that the directive “in no way limits the ability of ICE staff to make enforcement decisions on a case-by-case basis.”

In practice, cases where parents are spared are becoming increasingly rare, said Andrew Lorenzen-Strait, a former ICE official who oversaw implementation of the directive at ICE during the Obama and Trump administrations. “It can happen on a case-by-case basis, because an officer in himself has humanity,” he said.

ProPublica followed several families through their sudden separations — examining the moment itself and its aftermath — and found a wide variety of outcomes for the children.

Fernanda, a Florida restaurant worker, made a heartbreaking decision after her children’s father was arrested and deported: She would send their infant son and 4-year-old daughter to Guatemala to live with him. She feared it would only be a matter of time before immigration officials came knocking on her door. She didn’t want the children, both U.S. citizens, to be stranded.

Fernanda asked to be identified only by her middle name due to her immigration status. The Guatemalan-Maya Center, a nonprofit, helped her take the children to the Fort Lauderdale airport in early February, the little boy dressed in a Spider-Man outfit, the little girl in a CoComelon sweatshirt and pink hat, and put them on a plane.

Griselda, a single mother from Honduras, had to leave her young daughters with their babysitter for four months. She said she was on her way to a house painter in Melbourne, Florida, when the car’s brakes failed and she crashed into a stop sign. Police officers showed up, she said, then called ICE.

A domestic violence survivor who asked to be identified only by her first name, Griselda said she told police officers and then ICE about her children, but was sent out of state to be detained in Dilley, Texas, without them. Griselda desperately needed to reunite with her 4-year-old child, who was born in Mexico on her journey to the southwest border, and her 1-year-old child, a U.S. citizen. She said she decided not to appeal after a judge denied her asylum request and an ICE agent and social worker were sent to Florida to pick up the girls. Then, she said, she and her daughters were escorted to the border to cross into Mexico on foot — where they knew no one and had no money.

A DHS spokesperson confirmed the family was sent to Mexico together.

Mauricio Ayala, a 24-year-old engineer working at a downtown Seattle company, called 911 after immigration agents arrested his father last April. “My father was illegally detained,” he told the dispatcher nervously, stumbling over his words. “A group of masked men in unmarked vehicles stopped and arrested him.” (A DHS spokesperson wrote in a statement that “our agents identify themselves verbally” and wear badges and vests that display their agency name.)

His father, a roofer, had been swept away in one of the first large-scale workplace raids of the new Trump administration. It was the start of a role reversal for Ayala, her college-aged sister and her high school-aged brother. All citizens, they would be the ones who would support their parents. Their mother had been forced to leave the country after an immigration arrest more than a decade ago, Ayala said, but officers did not arrest her father at the time because there were young children in the house. His father was convicted of dangerous driving in 2015, but has no other criminal convictions that could be found in the United States. But now that the siblings were adults, their father was also going to be deported.

To cut costs and send money to her parents in Mexico, Ayala moved out of her Seattle apartment and into the trailer her father owned in a small town 90 minutes away. Her sister did the same. Their little brother found a part-time job.

Maria Magdalena Callejas, her boyfriend and her 14-year-old son were arrested in Texas while on a road trip last spring. She called a friend in California who she had asked to look after her two youngest children, both U.S. citizens, until she returned. She begged the friend to take care of them even longer.

Callejas’ boyfriend was deported. She and her eldest son, Edwin, were held in family detention, where he said he was stressed because it made him feel like he was in prison. He said he lost 10 pounds in a week after getting sick. He was so discouraged, his mother said, that she thought her only option was to allow them to be sent back to El Salvador, a country Edwin left when he was 5 years old. (ICE said conditions at its facilities were safe for families and everyone received appropriate medical care.)

Callejas said she agreed to return to El Salvador only because she understood that her children, ages 6 and 4, would be allowed to join her and their older brother.

The children’s father previously pleaded no contest to domestic battery and had a restraining order against him, allowing brief supervised visits. (Lawyers for both parents said Callejas allowed him to spend time with the children despite the order.) When he found out their mother had been deported, he objected to the children leaving the country and decided to fight for custody. Since Callejas’ deportation, the children have been in the care of a guardian and a judge has granted their father more time with them, according to lawyers for both parents. The result: a months-long battle in a Los Angeles court — with Callejas attending the hearings virtually from El Salvador.

Back in Lakeland, Israel Vázquez takes no credit for feeding the baby that first night or subsequent nights. “This girl can drink milk!” he said. His wife, the Rev. Raysa Vázquez, woke up every two hours and tended to Briany, sitting with her in the brown recliner in the living room, rocking her back to sleep.

They didn’t know how long the girls would stay with them. They decided that 8-year-old Briana should stay in the same elementary school, so she could stay with her friends and her teacher. They traveled about 45 minutes round trip each day to school.

Meanwhile, the girls’ parents moved between holding rooms, prisons and detention centers. In detention, Flores said, she began experiencing painful swelling, which she said might be due to mastitis brought on by her inability to breastfeed her baby. His chest became hot to the touch, his whole body felt feverish. The fever lasted a week.

The couple wanted to do everything they could to make the girls feel at home. But they also wanted to make sure the girls could reunite with their parents. If Flores and Velasquez were to be deported, the pastors wanted the girls to accompany them. And to accompany them, Briany would need a passport. Pastors should obtain signatures from both parents while in custody.

Briany was sitting on Raysa’s lap as they watched TV in the living room, babbling as she listened to the couple talk, when Israel’s phone rang. He was an ICE deportation officer. He said Flores would soon be kicked out of the country and the window to get his daughters on a plane with her was closing. He offered to help the Vázquezes obtain the parents’ signatures and said ICE would bring Flores to Tampa.

The next day, they went to a government office in Tampa to get Flores’ signature, where the girls were allowed to see and hug her. She let out a loud cry and began to cry at the sight of the children. In Mississippi, volunteers rushed to the detention center where Velasquez was being held and also obtained his signature.

The couple drove Briany to Miami a few days later and collected his passport. Then they took the girls to the Tampa airport.

They met Flores at the terminal. She was dressed in a sweatshirt and teary from early morning. Israel gave him the diaper bag he was carrying as well as the bottles. Flores’ fiancé would be deported a few weeks later on another flight to Honduras. His eldest, a son from a previous relationship who had to go live with his father after his arrest, would remain in the United States. For now, it was just Flores and the two girls. They posed for a photo, then said goodbye.

The family now lives in Velasquez’s father’s house in the town of San José, deep in the Honduras countryside. The baby is no longer suckling. She hasn’t done it since the night the police separated her from her mother. “I carried her to my breast,” Flores said, “but she doesn’t want it anymore.”

Briany’s favorite formula costs the family too much. To feed the baby, they rely again on their church. A box arrived recently, enough to last several weeks, sent by the Vázquezes and their congregation in Lakeland.

How we measured family separations with U.S. citizen children

Our story is the most detailed yet about U.S. citizen children whose immigrant parents have been arrested, detained, and in many cases deported. The analysis relies on a database of ICE I-213 records obtained by the University of Washington. Immigration officials file Form I-213 when they arrest someone alleging they are in the country without authorization. Among other information, it records the citizenship and number of minor children of each arrested person.

The data appears to contain only arrests made by ICE and does not cover arrests made by Customs and Border Protection. It covers the end of 2021 to mid-August 2025. We used this data to calculate the number of parents of U.S. citizen children arrested each day.

To find out what happened to parents after their arrest by ICE, including detention, permanent release from ICE custody in the United States, or removal from the country, we combined I-213 data with ICE records. Deportation Data Projectwhich covers late 2023 through mid-October 2025. The I-213 dataset contains approximately 17% fewer ICE arrests in a given month than the Deportation Data Project arrest dataset.

We were able to combine these two datasets using fields common to both, including date of arrest, gender, age, nationality, location and mode of arrest. We compared approximately 85% of the arrests in the I-213 data to a single record in the ICE arrest and detention data. (An additional 7% had multiple possible matches, so we did not include them, and about 7% had no possible matches. These rates were similar across presidential administrations.)

We used the overlapping 85% to report on the number of U.S. citizen children with a parent arrested and detained by ICE since Trump returned to office and the criminal status of their parents. We also used these combined records to compare how their mothers were treated differently by the Trump and Biden administrations.

To calculate that more than 11,000 U.S. citizen children had a parent arrested and detained by ICE, we counted only the children of fathers. We did this to avoid counting children twice in cases where both parents were detained and fathers made up a large majority of detained parents. We were limited to the first seven months of Trump’s second term, the period covered by the I-213 data. If a father was arrested and detained more than once under Trump, we only counted his children once. All other calculations were done at the arrest level, meaning that in a very small number of cases the same parent could be included more than once for each time they were arrested, detained, released, or deported.

The government cannot legally detain U.S. citizen children with their parents or deport them. According to current and former immigration experts and officials, the arrest and detention of parents of U.S. citizens often leads to family separation, even if it is brief.

We counted a parent as having been detained by ICE if they were booked into a facility for any length of time, according to Deportation Data Project detention records. In a very small minority of cases during the Trump administration, parents were released from ICE custody in less than a few days. This was more common under Biden. When we calculated the criminal histories of parents arrested and detained by ICE, we relied on the criminal charges contained in those detention records.

To calculate that Trump deported mothers of U.S. citizen children four times faster than Biden, we calculated the total number of mothers deported under each administration during the period covered by our data and divided by the number of days each president was in office during that period. We used the period from November 2023 to mid-August 2025 to minimize undercounting at the beginning and end of our detention dataset. We also compared equivalent seven-month periods in 2024 and 2025, which produced a similar result. For the purposes of our analysis, we counted as deported a small number of detained mothers who agreed to leave the country voluntarily.

Validate our approach

We verified our matches between the two data sources in several ways. First, there were three fields in the I-213 data that were found in other parts of the Deportation Data Project data but were not used as part of the matching process: marital status, processing disposition, and date of entry. For the records we linked that contained values ​​in these fields (some were empty in one or both data sets), we found that these data points matched more than 98% of the time.

Next, we verified that there were no systematic differences in which ICE arrests appeared in the I-213 data set compared to those contained in the Deportation Data Project records. We verified that women and men were equally represented, that the different ICE field offices were equally represented, that nationalities were equally represented, etc. We found no appreciable differences between the two data sets.

We also compared records where we found a match between the two datasets to records that had no match and found no strong trends suggesting systematic differences between the two.

ICE publishes the number of relatives of U.S. citizens arrested on its detention management website and in reports to Congress. We compared our analysis to these numbers and found that for fiscal years 2023 and 2024, our data showed approximately 15% fewer parents arrested by ICE than the official statistics reported. We’re not sure why, although it is consistent with the fact that we have fewer I-213 records than arrest records in the Deportation Data Project.

We analyzed our findings and methodology by Phil Neff, a researcher at the University of Washington Center for Human Rights, and Joseph Gunther, a mathematician who studies immigration-related datasets and former ICE officials.

We were also able to link some data to leaked ICE flight manifests, which in some cases allowed us to find the full names – redacted in most other data – of some of the deported parents. In a handful of these cases, we found their phone numbers or those of family members, and contacted them to hear their stories.

We conducted interviews in Spanish and English with nearly two dozen detained or deported parents or their relatives or attorneys. We also spoke with o Nonprofit organizations like the American Friends Service Committee and Each Step Home, which help immigrant families — including Flores’ family — after they are separated.

The parents we followed throughout the arrest process were from various Latin American countries: Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico and Ecuador. They and their children had made a living across the United States, including California, Washington State, New York, Massachusetts and Florida. Most of the parents we interviewed were mothers.