11,000 U.S. Citizen Kids Lost a Parent to ICE Detention in Seven Months

50 Kids a Day

ICE arrested the parents of at least 11,000 U.S. citizen children in the first seven months of the second Trump administration. That is an average of more than 50 children per day losing a parent to detention. ProPublica obtained the numbers through a public records lawsuit filed by the University of Washington Center for Human Rights.

4.71 million U.S. citizen children have at least one undocumented parent. 11,000 lost a parent to ICE detention in seven months. 22,000 lost every parent in their household.

Trump is deporting mothers of U.S. citizen children at roughly four times the daily rate under Biden. Sixty percent of detained mothers were deported. Seventeen percent remained in detention. Twenty-four percent were released. The children are citizens. The parents are not. The government treats this as someone else’s problem.

A 5-Year-Old Walking Home From School

Liam Conejo Ramos is 5 years old. In January 2026, masked ICE agents detained him while he was walking home from school in Columbia Heights, Minnesota. They held his Spiderman backpack as they placed him in a black SUV. He was flown with his father to a family detention center in Texas.

A federal judge ordered their release on January 31. The government sought to detain them again in April. His parents say he “is very different” now. He constantly worries about being detained again.

He is not an outlier. He is one of thousands.

Pre-Dawn Raids With Children in the Beds

On an October 2025 morning at 1:00 AM, approximately 300 federal agents raided an apartment building in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood. Some arrived by helicopter. Witnesses reported that children were zip-tied, dragged from beds, and held for hours. Four of the children were U.S. citizens. Governor Pritzker cited “widespread reports of children being zip tied, separated from their parents.”

A mother and her 5-year-old daughter were surrounded by 20 armed officers in “full riot gear” at a Chicago laundromat. They were detained at a Chicago airport for days with no showers, phones, or edible food, then transferred to the Dilley, Texas detention center.

In Portland, a 7-year-old was taken from a hospital parking lot with her family after her parents brought her to the emergency room. In San Diego, Estefany Pineda and Reinaldo Chirino were arrested just after dropping their children at school in Chula Vista. The children are 5 and 14. Their parents were given two options. Find a guardian or the children go to foster care.

600 Kids in Government Shelters

ProPublica found that 600 children were placed in government shelters by ICE in 2025 alone. That is higher than the previous four years combined and the most since recordkeeping began a decade ago. The average length of stay grew to nearly 6 months, up from 1 month under Biden.

In most cases ProPublica examined, the children ended up in shelters after routine immigration court hearings or because they happened to be present when ICE arrested someone else.

Foster care placements due to parent detention increased 49% in fiscal year 2025. Georgia placed 34 children, up from 10 the year before. New York placed 28, up from 18. Vermont placed 4 toddlers between ages 1 and 3, each spending at least 3 months in state custody. The federal government does not track how many children enter foster care because of immigration enforcement.

Brookings estimates that 22,000 U.S. citizen children lost all co-resident parental care when every parent in their household was detained. Thirty-six percent of affected children are under age 6.

The Kids Stopped Coming to School

After the Chicago raids, 3,000 more English Language Learners stayed home compared to the same week the previous year. In California, student absences rose 22% after ICE operations. Los Angeles and Miami-Dade County both saw 4% enrollment decreases for the 2025-2026 school year.

In West St. Paul, Minnesota, more than 50 students did not return to one elementary school after winter break.

An NBER study of a Florida school district found that each one-point increase in enforcement intensity reduced test scores by 0.71 percentiles among Spanish-speaking students. Both U.S.-born and foreign-born students were affected. Enforcement does not just harm the children of immigrants. It harms every child in their school.

The Urban Institute found that 10% of adults from immigrant families stopped sending their children to school because of enforcement fears. Chicago’s Safe Passage program, which protects children from violence on their routes to school, was disrupted by ICE operations happening along those same routes.

Families Lost 70% of Their Income

Within six months of a parent’s immigration arrest, families lost an average of 70% of household income. Removing undocumented residents from mixed-status households would drop median household income from $41,300 to $22,000.

An estimated 908,891 households with at least one U.S. citizen child would fall below the poverty line if undocumented breadwinners were deported. The Center for Migration Studies estimates that if one-third of U.S.-born children remained after mass deportation, the cost of raising them through adulthood would total $118 billion.

The American Academy of Pediatrics stated in November 2025 that “witnessing harm and living in constant fear disrupts brain development and has long-term negative effects on health and well-being.” A national study of nearly 1,800 U.S.-born Latinx adults found that those whose parents were deported during childhood had more than twice the odds of PTSD symptoms years later.

These are U.S. citizen children. Their government is traumatizing them to punish their parents.

What You Can Do

Call your U.S. senators and demand they oppose family detention and enforcement operations near schools and hospitals.
If you are in a state without protective custody laws, ask your state legislators to pass family preparedness legislation allowing parents to nominate guardians in case of detention. California and Nevada have already done this.
Support organizations providing legal representation to families, including the National Immigrant Justice Center and Kids in Need of Defense.

Read more on the Immigration hub and the immigrant taxpayer brief.