The Trump administration’s immigration crackdown has put a number of families in an uncomfortable predicament where an undocumented parent is deported while their American citizen child remains in the country.
In some cases, both caregivers are deported and the child is left with no parent at all.
The Brookings Institution estimates that there are more than 35,000 kids in this exact situation.
Caitlin Dickerson, a staff writer with the Atlantic, covered the issue in a recent piece and joined Texas Standard for a discussion.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: Your story opens with a woman named Estela who’s caring for a two-year-old that isn’t her child, right? Say more about Estela and that child.
Caitlin Dickerson: So Estela lives outside Mobile, Alabama, and she got a phone call toward the end of last year from some of her former coworkers asking if she could take in, at the time it was two children — Eber, who was only one year old, and his elder brother, Isaac, who is seven.
The reason that Estela got this phone call is because she was the only person that these undocumented workers from the nursery knew who had United States citizenship, and they needed her help because the boy’s mother was detained by ICE in November.
It’s important to point out, she came into the United States legally. She was in the process of requesting asylum, so she didn’t have permanent status, but she was pulled over in a traffic stop by a police officer who asked her about her immigration status. She showed the officer she’d been attending her ICE check-in appointments and that she had an upcoming court date she planned to attend. He took her into custody anyway, and she spent the next several months detained.
She begged to be reunited with her children — first to be released from custody, but then eventually when she accepted her own deportation, she said, fine, please just give me my kids back before I’m deported. And ICE didn’t heed that request.
They sent her back to Venezuela. So now Estela is left caring for the younger child who just turned two years old, Eber. His brother did manage to get back to Venezuela after lots of effort. But getting Eber back has still eluded both families who are working hard to make it happen.
Let me just stop right here because I’m still trying to wrap my head around the description that you had with the mother wanting to be reunited with the child, but then ICE deporting the parent without what, having any plan as to what happens to the child? Or is anyone within ICE dealing with that side of the situation?
So in my reporting, I found that in a lot of cases they’re not, and some context is that ICE in recent years had a policy that was designed to prevent exactly this kind of separation, so it required ICE officers to either establish who was going to take custody of a minor child when their parent was detained or deported, or to allow a parent to elect for a joint reunification — joint deportation, what they call — so reuniting the parent and the child and deporting the parent.
But what happened in 2025 is that the Trump administration modified that policy. They reissued it with a bunch of caveats that basically allow ICE officers to skip those steps and to not make arrangements for children who are separated from their parents before deporting those adults.
So what I’m told by my sources within the government is that there’s just so much pressure to carry out deportations as quickly as possible, to hit those numbers that President Trump campaigned on and so desperately wants, that the priority has just become deportation over everything else — including over children.
I want to stop down here because I want to understand strictly how this plays out.
If you’re an undocumented parent, take your kid to daycare, gets detained by ICE while you’re at work, say, who literally is responsible for your kid at the end of the day? The daycare is closing down, what happens?
So what I’m finding is that a lot of kids have no official caregiver. One of the biggest surprises to me in reporting this story was to learn about how family courts — which normally deal with children who are in foster care, they deal with custody when parents are going through a divorce or maybe there’s a domestic violence issue — those courts are one venue that get involved with any kind of a family separation on top of the immigration court. It’s a very complex system.
And so there are lots of parents who have been detained by ICE, whose children have no official guardian when the parents are taken into custody. And that becomes really, really complicated because in order to grant custody, in order to give permission for somebody to transport those children maybe back to a parent’s home country after they’re deported or to just make decisions about the child’s healthcare, about their schooling, normally, you need a parent available to sign paperwork, sometimes to go into court, but when the parent is stuck in ICE detention and they’re languishing, those things become very difficult to do.
It would seem to me that if you couldn’t locate a parent, that pretty soon — just as a practical matter — you’re gonna call the police, you’re gonna contact authorities. I would imagine state child protective services becomes involved and that further complicates things.
You would think so. And I have certainly heard of children whose parents have been deported and who have ended up in foster care, in state custody.
But what I also found was that more often than not, people’s communities tried to rally together and find housing for kids, which is sort of good and bad. Kids were ending up, like in Estela’s case, in the home of a coworker of a parent or maybe a friend, an extended relative. But a lot of times those families aren’t equipped to take on the emotional and the economic responsibility that comes with taking in a new child for a long period of time.
But the reason I found that families and communities are reacting this way is because of the fear. There’s immense fear, you know, lots of families being impacted. Their circles of support also include undocumented immigrants. And so people are really afraid to draw attention to themselves.
And so you have lots of kids in these kind of haphazard housing situations that are very precarious. You know, I interviewed other temporary caregivers of children whose parents were deported. They told me they couldn’t afford diapers, couldn’t affordable food. There was one temporary caregiver mentioned in my story who became homeless because she had one child of her own, had to take in a five-year-old, and she couldn’t pay her bills. And so she made arrangements for the two kids to sleep at a friend’s house and she slept in her car.
That’s the kind of responsibility that people are taking on because ICE is moving so quickly to deport parents without making arrangements for their children.
You write that there’s a “bracing irony” in President Trump’s deportation campaign. What do you mean bracing irony?
The bracing irony is that Trump campaigned on this idea of cracking down on lawbreakers, of forcing people to follow the rules of the American immigration system. But what we’ve seen in many cases is ICE is targeting people who entered the United States legally, who followed all of the government’s rules and requests as they sought legal status, and who have been arrested anyway and separated from their children.
And so I interviewed families who actually were now deciding to do the opposite, people who’d been applying for asylum, spending years developing their cases, and they’re now deciding they’re going to go underground. They’re going to hide from ICE. They’re not going to show up at their ICE check-ins.
They’re gonna give up their cases for legal status and basically accept living undocumented because they would rather do that than show up in a government check-in and be surprised when an ICE officer decides to take them into custody, regardless of their status.
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