Family separations are ‘one of the most painful things you can put a person through,’ said Orlin Lopez Fuentes, who was recently deported.
The separation of immigrant families at the border was barred by the 2023 settlement of a lawsuit brought in 2018 against the first Trump administration. But now, under Trump 2.0, the administration has found a way to brutally reimpose family separations, by simply moving the practice away from the border and doing it through the ongoing ICE raids.
Sui Chung, an attorney and executive director for Americans for Immigrant Justice, told CNN, “Family separation is occurring every single day in the United States — separation from U.S. citizen children, U.S. citizen elderly parents. It’s not a matter of family separation at the border anymore, it’s a daily occurrence.”
In 2018, during the first Trump administration, Trump’s Department of Justice announced a “zero tolerance” policy for people crossing the border “illegally,” meaning such immigrants would be prosecuted simply for crossing, a practice that had been rare in the past. The result of prosecuting adults who crossed the border with their children was that the children were separated from their parents in the process. Trump officials made clear they intended to use family separation as a punishment, to deter people from migrating. It’s been estimated that more than 5,600 immigrant children were separated from their families between 2017 and 2021, and the real number could be even higher because of the lack of adequate record-keeping by the government. Separating children from their families and detaining them provoked a public outcry and a lawsuit, which forced the administration to end the practice. The final settlement in the lawsuit, approved in December 2023, provided that the government was barred from re-enacting the zero tolerance policy through the end of 2031.
But today, as a result of Trump’s ICE raids, family separation is back, and it has been extended throughout the country. As ProPublica reported, the 2023 settlement “limits separations at the border, but it does not address those that occur inside the country after encounters with ICE.”
In some cases, ICE is detaining children and teenagers that they encounter. (The Guardian reported that, since Trump took office this year, “nearly 2,350 kids under the age of 18, including 36 infants, have been booked into immigration detention centers around the country.”) In other cases, it is the parents who are detained.
Maurilio Ambrocio is an immigrant from Guatemala who had lived in the U.S. for 20 years. He was a pastor and the owner of a landscaping service, and a respected community member. Last April he was arrested by federal officers after he went to a regular, mandatory immigration check-in, in Tampa, Florida near where he lived. In July he was deported to Guatemala.
His family felt the pain of the separation the moment he was arrested. Ambrocio and his wife Marleny have five children ages 12 to 19, all U.S. citizens. Marleny told an NPR reporter in May that she was grief-stricken. “For my kids, it’s like the world ended,” she told NPR. Ambrocio’s 19-year-old daughter Ashley is now the family’s sole breadwinner; she has had to take over the family business while also working other jobs.
On Oct. 30, Orlin Lopez Fuentes was at work as a welder in a shipyard in Harvey, Louisiana, when ICE agents swept through the business, rounding people up. He was separated from his wife, Lucia, and two young daughters, held in detention for a month, then deported back to his native Honduras in November. He and his family had been in the country for six years. He and Lucia had crossed the U.S.-Mexico border with their daughter Camila, then 52 days old, in hopes of ensuring Camila’s survival; earlier, they had lost two other young children to illness in Honduras.
“One of the most painful things you can put a person through is separating them from their family,” Orlin told Verite News.
After kids are detained, they may end up in government shelters. ProPublica reported recently that some 600 immigrant children have been placed in government shelters by ICE since the beginning of 2025, and that this figure is higher than the total for the previous four years combined and “the highest number since recordkeeping began a decade ago.”
‘I’ve seen communities organize here in ways that I haven’t seen in all my years of organizing. We’re talking about thousands of people that have been activated. It’s mind blowing to see the community response and the desire to want to protect our neighbors, our friends and loved ones.’ – an LA activist
The resistance to the ICE raids and to family separations continues to grow and is taking a variety of forms, including legal advocacy and litigation; the media and other organizations putting a spotlight on the abuses; direct services and support, such as efforts to care for families and to help locate separated parents; and marches, boycotts, demonstrations outside detention centers and inside Home Depots, and community defense patrols that mobilize people to drive ICE out of the neighborhood. Whether it’s blowing whistles to warn neighbors of the presence of ICE, or organizing fundraisers to support street vendors who are afraid to go to work, people are standing up. As LA activist Matthew Hunter put it, “There’s not a day that goes by where you don’t feel that human suffering in our communities, and at the same time, I’ve seen communities organize here in ways that I haven’t seen in all my years of organizing. We’re talking about thousands of people that have been activated. It’s mind blowing to see the community response and the desire to want to protect our neighbors, our friends and loved ones.”
Bob Lee is a professional journalist, writer and editor, and is co-editor of the People’s Tribune, serving as Managing Editor. He first started writing for and distributing the People’s Tribune in 1980, and joined the editorial board in 1987.
