By LAUREN WOLFE | During President Donald Trump’s first term in office, a particular hell befell nearly 4,000 children who were separated from their families while trying to enter the U.S. at the southern border, according to a January 2019 report by the Department of Health and Human Services Office of the Inspector General.
After crossing into the country, their parents could be charged with “improper entry” and separated from them to face trial. The U.S. Marshals Service would take the adults to a federal courthouse, while the children were sent to the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement, which placed them in shelters across the country. The parents, often convicted and sentenced to time served, would return to the agency that first detained them, U.S. Customs and Border Protection—only to find that their children were no longer in CBP custody and sometimes were nowhere to be found.
Efrén C. Olivares, director of strategic litigation and advocacy at the Southern Poverty Law Center, told Ms. there were even extreme cases in which parents were seen by a judge and able to return the same day to the center where their child was first held, but border agents “still kept parent and child apart.”
Olivares added, “There was absolutely no justification for this practice, other than, you know, the cruelty was the point.”
At least 1,360 of these children still had not been reunited with their parents as of March 2024, according to a report from the Family Reunification Task Force.
And now Trump is back in office, ordering increased deportations and authorizing officials to “repel, repatriate or remove” anyone deemed to be “engaged in the invasion across the southern border of the U.S.”—while also suspending the United States Refugee Admissions Program and significantly restricting asylum access in the U.S.
Trump told NBC News in December that this approach could mean deporting families with mixed legal statuses, including family members who have citizenship. “The only way you don’t break up the family is you keep them together, and you have to send them all back,” he said.
(This article originally appears in the Spring 2025 issue of Ms. Join the Ms. community today and you’ll get issues delivered straight to your mailbox.)
