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By Maria Cancian and Tara Watson
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The image of ICE detaining five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos last month focused attention on an underappreciated fact: many of the adults caught up in recent immigration enforcement are parents.
As of January, more than 68,000 individuals were detained in ICE custody, and the Trump administration has removed more than 350,000 immigrants—many from long-established homes and communities. Given that about 80 percent of children of undocumented immigrants are U.S. citizens, these enforcement actions frequently separate American children from their parents—our estimates suggest more than 100,000 American children experienced a parent’s detention in the first ten months of 2025.
For an estimated 10,000 of those citizen children, the only parent in their household was detained. Yet there is no system in place to identify children left behind, assess their circumstances or ensure their safety. The major players—ICE, parents, family advocates and child welfare agencies—all have reasons to avoid the issue. But wishing away the problem will not protect a child left without parents because of immigration enforcement. The government must have policies in place to ensure the well-being of children left behind.
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What happens to children when their parents are deported? Some follow their parents to a new country, at least initially. (There are already reports of efforts underway to return American-born children to the United States after they left with deported parents.) Or a parent might be forced to make the painful choice to leave their child behind rather than subject them to violence and abject poverty in another country.
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Immigrant advocates and community-based organizations have done critical work helping undocumented parents develop “family preparedness plans,” designating caretakers in case the parents are detained or deported. Such plans serve to keep many children in a network of family members and loved ones—usually the best option, if it exists. But some parents don’t have good options for alternative caregivers, especially if their family and friends also face deportation risk. What will happen to children if their parents couldn’t find a good substitute, or if that substitute caregiver is—or at a later point becomes—unavailable or overwhelmed?
The obvious option, for all its imperfection, is the child welfare system. Parents generally want to avoid the system, and occasional headlines of child welfare agencies reporting immigrants to ICE add to concerns. But child welfare is the only public system designed to care for children when their parents are unable to do so.
Child welfare administrators are already managing an overburdened system with insufficient resources. So far, the child welfare agencies we have asked do not report being overwhelmed by children of immigrants. They may be tempted to avoid worrying about issues that are not yet on their doorstep.
Official statistics show a near-doubling of parents of citizens booked into ICE detention, from 9,977 in fiscal year 2024 to 18,277 in fiscal 2025. Our analysis of ICE detention stay data from the Deportation Data Project suggests this count is incomplete. We use information on age, sex, marital status and birth region for each person detained from January 1 to October 16 of 2025 to impute their probability of being a parent. We estimate that about 22 percent of detainees are likely parents of citizen children, suggesting over 59,000 detention stays among parents of citizens over that 288-day period. This translates to over 108,000 citizen children affected.
With massive expansions of detention capacity underway, the number of citizen children facing the trauma of separation could easily double or triple next year and exceed one million over the course of the administration. The number of children left without any parent at home could reach six-figure territory. For comparison, there are about 400,000 children nationwide in foster care. As one former state child welfare leader told us, even managing a fraction of the children at risk would “break the system.”
In criminal proceedings, when a parent is incarcerated, a plan is developed for the care of the child. A similar approach is needed here. Family caregiving obligations should be considered in deportation decisions, and the Department of Homeland Security must be held responsible for ensuring deported parents can make plans for their children’s care. In addition, the child welfare system needs preparation and resources to meet the moment, and cannot become an arm of immigration enforcement if they are to succeed in their mandate to protect children.
As we know from family separations during the first Trump administration, failing to account for children doesn’t make the problem go away. There must be planning and accountability to ensure their safety and care.
Maria Cancian is a professor at the Georgetown McCourt School of Public Policy. Tara Watson is the director of the Brookings Center for Economic Security and Opportunity and author of “The Border Within: The Economics of Immigration in an Age of Fear.”
The views expressed in this article are the writers' own.
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