Trump administration family separation policy

Based on Wikipedia: Trump administration family separation policy

In the summer of 2017, something unprecedented began happening at America's southern border. Federal agents started taking children—including infants—away from their parents. Not because of abuse. Not because of trafficking. Simply because these families had crossed the border together.

By the time the policy officially ended a year later, more than five thousand five hundred children had been separated from their families. But here's what made this particular chapter of American immigration enforcement uniquely cruel: the government had no plan to reunite them.

The Quiet Beginning

The family separation policy didn't arrive with a press conference or a presidential signature. It crept in through a border patrol sector in Yuma, Arizona, starting in May 2017—nearly a year before the public would learn about it.

Under a program called the Criminal Consequence Initiative, agents in Yuma began prosecuting first-time border crossers as criminals rather than simply deporting them. When parents were charged, their children became a problem to solve. The solution? Reclassify them as "unaccompanied minors"—a legal fiction that allowed the government to place them in shelters while their parents went to jail.

Between May and December of 2017, more than two hundred thirty-four families were torn apart in just this one sector. No public announcement was made. No policy memo was released. Children as young as ten months old were taken from their parents' arms.

A similar experiment ran simultaneously in El Paso, Texas, from May to October 2017. The government later characterized it as a "pilot program." During those months, approximately two hundred eighty-one individuals were separated from their families. The program was considered successful by officials—not because it protected children, but because border crossings dropped sixty-four percent.

What Made This Different

To understand why this policy shocked so many people, you need to understand what came before it.

For decades, the United States didn't routinely separate migrant families. When families were caught crossing the border together, the government generally kept them together. They might be held in family detention centers while awaiting deportation hearings. They might be released with ankle monitors and required to check in with immigration officials. But the default assumption was that children belonged with their parents.

Separations did happen, but only under narrow circumstances: when authorities suspected human trafficking, when a parent had an outstanding warrant, or when there was evidence of fraud about the family relationship. These were exceptions, not policy.

The Trump administration made separation the rule.

The Intellectual Architecture

Every policy has its architects. For family separation, two names stand out: Thomas Homan and Stephen Miller.

Homan had been an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official for years. Back in 2014, during the Obama administration, he had proposed separating families as a deterrent. The idea was quickly rejected. But when Donald Trump took office in January 2017, one of his first moves was to demote the existing director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement—known as ICE—and replace him with Homan.

The journalist Caitlin Dickerson, in her Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation, described Homan as the "intellectual father" of family separation. His ideas, once dismissed, had found a receptive audience.

Stephen Miller, Trump's senior adviser, was the policy's chief evangelist within the White House. According to officials who attended senior adviser meetings, Miller warned that not enforcing zero tolerance immigration policy "is the end of our country as we know it" and that opposing it would be un-American.

The Public Announcement

On April 6, 2018, nearly a year after family separations had quietly begun, Attorney General Jeff Sessions made it official. He directed federal prosecutors to adopt "immediately a zero-tolerance policy for all offenses" related to improper entry into the United States.

The distinction matters. Crossing the border without authorization had been a misdemeanor since 1929—a minor criminal offense, like shoplifting or disorderly conduct. For decades, the government treated it as a civil matter, not a criminal one. People were deported through administrative proceedings, not prosecuted in federal court.

Sessions changed that calculus. By charging every border crosser criminally, the government created a legal pretext for separation. Adults went to federal jail to await trial. Children couldn't go to jail. So they went somewhere else.

On May 7, Sessions made the logic explicit:

If you cross the border unlawfully, then we will prosecute you. If you smuggle an illegal alien across the border, then we'll prosecute you. If you're smuggling a child, then we're going to prosecute you, and that child will be separated from you, probably, as required by law.

That phrase—"required by law"—would become a talking point. Administration officials repeatedly claimed they were simply enforcing existing law, that their hands were tied. This was misleading. No law required the government to prosecute every border crossing criminally. No law required the separation of families. These were policy choices, presented as legal necessities.

Inside the System

What happened to the children after separation reveals the true chaos of the policy.

First, children were held in Border Patrol stations—facilities designed for short-term adult detention, not childcare. Some children spent three weeks or more in these overcrowded centers. Reports described minimal food, no access to clean clothes or bathing facilities, and no adult caretakers. Girls as young as ten were left to care for younger children.

Eventually, children were transferred to the Department of Health and Human Services, which operates a network of shelters for unaccompanied minors. But these shelters were designed for a different population: children who had crossed the border alone, without any parent. The system wasn't built to track which child belonged to which adult in federal custody.

And that's where the policy's deepest flaw emerged.

The Missing System

When you take a child from a parent, you need to know where both of them are. You need a way to reconnect them. You need a database, a process, a plan.

The Trump administration had none of these things.

Scott Lloyd, who directed the Office of Refugee Resettlement—the agency responsible for the children—instructed his staff not to maintain a list of children who had been separated from their parents. Matthew Albence, who headed enforcement and removal operations for ICE, told colleagues to prevent reunification even after parents had been processed by the judicial system. His reasoning, according to reports: reunification "undermines the entire effort."

This wasn't an oversight. It was, by some accounts, the point. The cruelty was the deterrent. Making reunification difficult—or impossible—was part of the message the policy was meant to send.

When the administration later claimed they would use the government's "central database" to reconnect families, a release of emails obtained by NBC News revealed the truth: the government had only enough information to reconnect sixty children with their parents. Sixty. Out of more than five thousand.

The Backlash

By June 2018, images and audio from the border had turned family separation into a national crisis. Recordings of children crying for their parents circulated widely. Pediatricians and child psychologists warned of lasting trauma. Former first ladies from both parties—Laura Bush and Michelle Obama—spoke out against the policy.

The pressure worked, at least partially.

On June 20, 2018, Trump signed an executive order ending family separations. Six days later, a federal judge in San Diego, Dana Sabraw, issued a nationwide injunction and ordered all children reunited with their parents within thirty days.

But ending a policy is easier than undoing its effects.

The Long Search

The government had separated the families. Volunteer organizations had to put them back together.

The administration refused to provide funds for reunification efforts. Lawyers, nonprofit workers, and volunteers spent years tracking down parents who had been deported—sometimes to countries they hadn't lived in for decades—and children scattered across a network of shelters and foster homes.

By November 2020, lawyers working on reunification reported that six hundred sixty-six children still hadn't been found.

That number grew. By March 2024, the American Civil Liberties Union estimated that two thousand children remained separated from their families—more than six years after the policy officially ended.

Some of these children were infants when taken. They're now school-age, having spent most of their lives without their parents. Some parents were deported and can't be located. Some children were placed with foster families in the United States. The bureaucratic trail went cold.

The Flores Settlement and Its Shadow

To understand how this policy intersected with existing law, you need to know about the Flores Settlement Agreement—a 1997 legal settlement that still shapes how the United States treats immigrant children.

The story begins in 1984, when the Immigration and Naturalization Service—the predecessor to today's immigration agencies—introduced a policy that unaccompanied minors could only be released to a parent or legal guardian. This sounds reasonable until you realize the consequences: children were detained for "lengthy or indefinite" periods, sometimes in poor conditions, when no parent or guardian could be found.

Lawsuits followed. After years of litigation, the government agreed to the Flores Settlement, which established strict standards for how the government must treat detained children. Children must be kept in the least restrictive setting possible. They must be released promptly. They must have food, water, medical care, toilets, temperature control, and protection from harm.

In 2016, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that under the Flores Settlement, children—whether accompanied by parents or not—could only be held in detention for about twenty days.

This created a genuine tension. If families couldn't be detained together for more than twenty days, and deportation cases often took longer, what should happen? The Obama administration's answer was generally to release families together, with requirements to check in with immigration authorities. The Trump administration's answer was to separate them.

The Deterrence Logic

The policy's defenders argued it was necessary. Without consequences, they said, more families would attempt the dangerous journey north. Separation was harsh but humane in its ultimate effects—it would save lives by discouraging crossings.

This logic has a certain cold rationality. It also rests on empirical claims that didn't hold up.

Border crossings did decline during the El Paso pilot program. But the relationship between enforcement policies and migration decisions is complex. People flee violence, poverty, and persecution. They make decisions about migration based on conditions in their home countries, not just policies at their destination. Studies of deterrence-based immigration enforcement have produced mixed results at best.

What is not in dispute is the harm the policy caused. Children experienced trauma that child psychologists describe as potentially lifelong. The American Academy of Pediatrics called family separation "government-sanctioned child abuse." The toxic stress of sudden separation from parents can alter brain development, particularly in young children.

The Paper Trail

Years of investigation, litigation, and journalism have revealed how the policy developed behind closed doors.

Just two weeks after Trump's inauguration in January 2017, the administration reviewed the idea of separating children from mothers as a way to deter asylum-seekers. In March 2017, the Department of Homeland Security confirmed the policy was under consideration—then denied it.

The director of the National Immigration Law Center, speaking at the time, called the proposed policy "state-sanctioned violence against children."

On April 5, 2017, the Department of Homeland Security said they were no longer considering family separation. But even as they made this statement, the pilot programs in Yuma and El Paso were already underway or about to begin.

This pattern—public denials while quietly implementing policy—characterized the administration's approach throughout.

Asylum Seekers, Too

One of the policy's cruelest aspects was its application to families seeking asylum.

Asylum is a legal protection. Under both U.S. and international law, people fleeing persecution have the right to request protection. They can do this at official border crossings—they don't need to sneak across. Presenting yourself at a port of entry and asking for asylum is following the rules.

Yet multiple reports, including direct testimony from detained migrants to members of Congress, documented that families lawfully presenting themselves at ports of entry were also being separated. Senator Susan Collins of Maine said that the Secretary of Homeland Security had testified that asylum-seeking families were subject to separation.

This contradicted the administration's own talking points. Officials had claimed the policy only applied to people crossing illegally. The reality was messier and harsher.

What Came Before

Supporters of the Trump administration sometimes claimed that family separation was equivalent to policies under Obama or other predecessors. Journalists and nonpartisan fact-checkers consistently described this claim as false.

Yes, children were sometimes separated from adults before Trump. The 2011 estimate that fifty-one hundred children were in foster care while their parents were detained or deported reflects real family disruption under previous administrations. But these separations were generally the result of child welfare investigations or cases where the adult's identity or relationship to the child was in question—not a blanket policy of criminal prosecution designed to separate every family crossing the border.

The Obama administration actually rejected family separation when it was proposed. In 2014, during a surge of women and unaccompanied children arriving at the border, the administration assembled a team to develop new immigration policies. Thomas Homan proposed separation as a deterrent. The proposal was "quickly rejected."

Instead, Obama expanded family detention, keeping families together in facilities designed for that purpose. This approach had its own critics—advocates argued that even family detention was harmful to children. But it was a fundamentally different choice than deliberate separation.

The End and After

Officially, family separation as policy ended in June 2018. In practice, separations continued.

Between June 2018 and the end of 2019—an eighteen-month period after the policy was supposedly terminated—an estimated eleven hundred additional families were separated. The criteria shifted: parents with any criminal history, parents deemed a threat to their child's safety, or cases where the family relationship was questioned. But the separations continued.

The Trump administration also ended programs designed to keep families together outside of detention. In June 2017, claiming it would save twelve million dollars annually, they terminated the Family Case Management Program. This ICE program had kept asylum-seeking mothers and children supervised but out of detention, with ninety-nine percent compliance rates for court appearances. It was eliminated.

What Remains

More than six years later, the full accounting of family separation is still incomplete.

Some children have been reunited. Some have aged out of the system, turned eighteen, and are navigating the world as adults who spent formative years separated from their families. Some have been adopted by American families. Some parents, deported years ago, are still being located by volunteer organizations.

The policy changed the landscape of immigration debate. It demonstrated both the power of executive action—a president can reshape enforcement dramatically without new legislation—and its limits. Public outcry forced a reversal. Courts intervened. But the harm done in those months and years cannot be fully undone.

Two thousand children, by the most recent estimates, remain separated from their families. They are the living legacy of a policy that treated cruelty as deterrence, and families as a problem to be solved by breaking them apart.