Introduction
This post offers a position against Trump and his administration policies during his first and second presidential terms of authorizing the separation of children from their families and treating them in abhorrent ways. It’s part of their efforts to deport immigrants and the promises they made to their base to do so. Such policies deserve our criticism and scorn. There is also something new currently, that is, to push for the end of birthright citizenship.
----------
Looking Back to Trump’s first presidential term
Caitlin Dickerson looks Back at the Family Separation Policy of Trump’s first term, writing for the American Immigration Council, Oct 30, 2025
(https://americanimmigrationcouncil.org/report/family-separation-policy). Here are comments and excerpts.
Family separation during the first Trump administration
“In the spring and summer of 2018, the first Trump administration sought to deter migrants from coming to the United States through the cruel practice of separating children from their parents. To do this, they implemented the zero-tolerance policy, which aimed to prosecute all adults who crossed the southern border without inspection. If a family was apprehended, the parents were taken into custody by the Department of Homeland Security, while their children were taken into custody by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.”
Dickerson continue.
The children were often sent to shelters thousands of miles away from their parents, without a way for the children and parents to contact each other.
“In many cases, these kids were sent to shelters thousands of miles away from their parents, without a way to contact them.”
Then government had difficulty in reuniting them and thousands of the children remained without their parents
“Later, the government struggled to reunite families, in part because there was no centralized database of where the children had been sent or who their parents were. Years later, some of the nearly 3,000 children taken by the government during the zero-tolerance period had still not been reunited with their parents.
The harms to the children
The American Immigration Council and partners filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act for records to better understand how the government was doing. “In 2020, the Council published a tranche of documents highlighting the harms and trauma to children caused by the separations. After years of continuing litigation, the Council received tens of thousands of additional pages from government documents about this policy.”
There is new evidence, Dickerson points out.
“This site showcases a new subset of the records obtained.” It reveals how journalists, attorneys and members of Congress fought to expose this horrific policy and hold the government accountable for the pain and havoc it created.
Further evidence from the report on the past
“In trying to deter migrants from coming to the United States, the first Trump administration implemented one of the cruelest tactics of its tenure.” The government implemented a “zero-tolerance policy,” resulting “in thousands of children being torn away from their relatives. To this day, many still have yet to be reunited with their families.”
A New Analysis of the effects of Trump’s zero-tolerance policy
Dickerson continues. “The Trump administration ended the zero-tolerance policy after just six and a half weeks, thanks in part to the actions of journalists, legal advocates, and representatives from other branches of government. The purpose of this new analysis—produced after years of litigating public records requests—is to look at the interventions that contributed to the end, at least officially, of this shameful policy. The documents featured here serve as a stark reminder of the government’s actions during the time, and in the aftermath, of family separation. They also show how entities opposed one of the most egregious anti-migration policies of the first Trump administration.”
Government Records Show that Journalists, Advocates, and other Government Representatives Sought Transparency and Accountability
“This chronicle is based on government documents and correspondence provided in response to the Council and our partners’ Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. As such, the records contain limited information about the personal experiences of those who were affected, such as separated children and parents; attorneys and social workers; journalist witnesses; and impacted communities.
“These key stakeholders—immigration and children’s advocacy organizations and others— sought transparency and accountability. Journalists published photos and stories on the plight of separated families. A wave of public outcry forced Congressional leaders to demand answers from government agencies. On June 20, 2018, President Trump signed an executive order mandating the end to categorical family separation, a little over six weeks after it had begun.”
The “Legal” Framework for Family Separation
“In the early days of the first Trump administration…key officials were fixated on deterring families from crossing the southern border. To carry out this plan, they announced their intent to prosecute everyone who crossed the border without permission…. Family separation was the intended consequence of this so-called zero-tolerance policy.”
“The Trump Administration criminally charged thousands of parents with misdemeanors for entering the United States without proper authorization, requiring prosecution of parents and directly causing family separation by treating parents and their children as unrelated. The goal was to achieve deterrence through en masse family separation.
Dickerson writes: “By designating all adults, including those traveling with minor children, as subject to prosecution, the administration triggered a process by which children were immediately sent to the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), a subagency of HHS. The government took the position that because parents apprehended by Border Patrol were likely to go into criminal custody (even for a short period of time), they would become unavailable to care for the children. The children were then classified as unaccompanied… and sent to ORR custody, often thousands of miles away from where their parents were detained. The children were relocated even if their parents had spent only a few hours in criminal custody or were never actually prosecuted.
Reunification made difficult
“Parents had to follow cumbersome processes to reunify with their children. Under the Trump administration, agencies were adamant that parents who had already been removed from the United States could not re-enter the country to reunite with their children (though a limited number of parents were eventually paroled into the United States for this purpose). Furthermore, U.S. agencies had to coordinate with embassies and consulates in the families’ home countries to secure travel documents and arrange for parents to reunite with their children at an
Efforts of the ACLU
“The Ms. L case, filed in 2018 by the ACLU on behalf of a separated mother, helped establish significant measures to ensure family reunification, including following a 2023 settlement agreement.
“In 2020, two years after the official end of the family separation policy, hundreds of the 4,368 children the U.S. government identified as taken from their parents remained separated.”
----------
A valuable source
Jacob Soboroff wrote a book titled Separated: Inside an American Tragedy (publ 2020) about these years. It covers the time from March 2017 through October 2019, years of the first Trump administration. Here are two examples from the book.
“The Trump administration’s deliberate and systematic separation of thousands of migrant children from their parents was, according to humanitarian groups and child welfare an unparalleled abuse of the human rights of children. The American Academy of Pediatrics says the practice will leave thousands of kids traumatized for life” (xiii)
Soboroff quotes Dr. Colleen Kraft, the head of the American Academy of Pediatrics. “Studies overwhelmingly demonstrate the irreparable harm caused by breaking up families. Prolonged exposure to highly stressful situations – known as toxic stress – can disrupt a child’s brain architecture and affect his or her short- and long-term health” (p. 245)
----------
How the system works presently
Hamed Aleaziz, a reporter for The New York Times delves the issue in the first months of Trump’s second presidential term (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/05/politics/trump-administration-family-separation.html).
He opens his article with an example of a family caught up in the US immigration system and illustrates how the options they have are all bad.
Evgeny and Evgeniia, who fled their native Russia to seek political asylum, have been separated from their 8-year-old son, Maksim, since May. It is now August. They face “an excruciating choice.”
“Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers told the couple they could leave the United States with their child and return to their native Russia, which they had fled seeking political asylum. Or they could remain in immigration detention in the United States — but their 8-year-old son, Maksim, would be taken away and sent to a shelter for unaccompanied children.” They chose to stay in the U.S. in a condition of what ICE officials call “interior separation.”
“Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, insisted [falsely] that ‘ICE does not separate families and placed the onus on the families themselves, saying that the parents have the option of staying with their children by leaving the country together.”
“Previous administrations separated undocumented families for reasons including national security concerns, public safety and child endangerment. But Claire Trickler-McNulty, a former ICE official who has served in Republican and Democratic administrations, said that previous administrations, to her knowledge, did not use the threat of family separation as leverage to get people to leave the country.”
Encouraging deportation
Now, with illegal crossings notably low, the Trump administration is focusing on immigrants who are in the United States and have been ordered to leave.
The American Civil Liberties Union is investigating the legality of the separations, said Lee Gelernt, a lawyer for the group.
“That the Trump administration has found a new form of family separation is hardly surprising given they have yet to acknowledge the horrific harm caused by the original policy and are now blatantly breaching provisions of the settlement designed to provide relief to those abused families, many of whom to this day still remain separated,” he said.
----------
Trump’s administration wants to eliminate Birthright Citizenship Under the U.S. Constitution
The Trump administration wants to do away with the constitutional right of birthright citizenship, that is, the doctrine that says if you are born in the U.S., then you are automatically deemed a citizen. The Supreme Court is presently considering the issue and may well side with Trump.
The right is specified in Section 1 of the 14th amendment of the Constitution and has long been understood to grant American citizenship to anyone born on US soil. Here is how the Constitution states it.
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which will abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
Samuel Breidbart and Maryjane Johnson offer a review of the concept and point out that there is considerable opposition to what the administration wants (https://www.brennancenter.org/research-reports/birthright-citizenship-under-us-constitution). Their analysis was published on July 29, 2025. Here are excerpts.
The original intent
“When Congress debated the language of the Citizenship Clause in 1866, Sen. Jacob Howard explained that the clause was ‘simply declaratory of . . . the law of the land already, that every person born within the limits of the United States, and subject to their jurisdiction, is by virtue of natural law and national law a citizen of the United States.’ Several lawmakers expressed concerns that such a broad guarantee would extend citizenship to the children of immigrants. Sen. John Conness affirmed that the proposed language ‘declare[s] that the children of all parentage . . . should be regarded and treated as citizens of the United States, entitled to equal civil rights with other citizens of the United States.’
In line with Howard and Conness’s understandings, the final text of the Citizenship Clause featured no language barring the children of immigrants from citizenship. The Supreme Court affirmed this understanding in Wong Kim Ark, where it rejected claims that children born in the United States to noncitizen parents were not themselves citizens.”
Breidbart and Johnson continue.
What Trump wants
“On his first day in office, President Trump issued an executive order attempting to end the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship.
The president’s “Executive Order 14160 purports to deny citizenship to any baby born in the United States to a mother who is present ‘unlawfully’ or ‘lawful[ly] but temporar[ily]’ and a father who is ‘not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident.’ In other words, under this order, the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants and the children of parents residing in the country under temporary legal authorization, such as student visas and work visas, would not be considered U.S. citizens.”
Breidbart and Johnson add: “The order directs federal departments and agencies to deny ‘documents recognizing United States citizenship’ to these children. While the order doesn’t specify what this means, its express mention of the secretary of state and the commissioner of social security suggests that it would bar affected children from receiving passports and social security numbers, among other documents. The children would still presumably get birth certificates, which are issued by local governments, but these would no longer necessarily be considered proof of U.S. citizenship.”
Opposition to Trumps Executive Order
“State attorneys general, civil rights organizations, and immigrant rights groups soon filed lawsuits challenging the order in federal courts around the country.” But the administration remains undeterred.
Breidbart and Johnson also consider the problematic consequences of ending birthright citizenship
They write: “Trump’s executive order would cause major problems across the country if it were allowed to go into effect. Lawyers challenging the order believe that hundreds of thousands of children in the United States would be denied citizenship, thereby creating a new subclass of people lacking the full rights and protections long enjoyed by citizens.
“Additionally, without U.S. citizenship, some of these children could be rendered stateless, meaning they would not be recognized as citizens of any country. As the United Nations Refugee Agency has noted, people who are stateless often lack access to basic rights and services, such as health care, education, and the ability to travel freely. Without U.S. citizenship, these children could also end up deported to foreign countries where they have never lived and where their welfare would be endangered.”
----------
Concluding thoughts
Child separation is one disturbing aspect of Trump’s immigration policy, as indicated by the information examined in this post. It is harmful to the thousands of children and families affected by the policy. It is – or has been – unconstitutional. And it overlooks the evidence on how productive immigrants are and how important they are to the American economy, especially as the American population ages.