Children increasingly bear brunt of Trump's deportation push
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Both U.S. citizen and immigrant children are increasingly being caught up in President Trump's increasingly aggressive deportation efforts.
Driving the news: Three children who are U.S. citizens were removed from the country with their deported mothers, while a recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo shows the agency is specifically targeting unaccompanied immigrant children.
- The Trump administration defended the children's removals, saying they were staying with their family.
The latest An internal ICE document showed that the agency is seeking to locate children who came into the U.S. unaccompanied by an adult.
- According the document, ICE targeted unaccompanied immigrant children who had missed immigration hearings or were deemed threats to public safety.
- The memo said ICE is also looking for adult criminals who may be posing as unaccompanied immigrant children.
Zoom in: Most recently, the National Immigration Project said the New Orleans ICE Field Office "deported at least two families, including two mothers and their minor children — three of whom are U.S. citizen children aged 2, 4, and 7."
- U.S. citizens cannot be deported, and unaccompanied minors are considered vulnerable to human trafficking, exploitation and abuse.
- "The United States has, in many of its darkest periods in history, denied people's basic citizenship and has removed people who either were citizens or should be citizens," Todd Schulte, president of FWD.us, an immigration and criminal justice advocacy organization, told Axios.
- ICE removed 70 potential citizens from the U.S. from 2015 to 2020, according to a 2021 report from the Government Accountability Office.
Zoom out: In his first term, Trump introduced the family separation policy for illegal border crossings.
- Under the policy, adults who illegally crossed the border were charged with misdemeanors and their children were taken into government custody.
- As many as 1,400 children still haven't been reunited with their families, the Washington Post reported.
Flashback: The U.S. has a history of pressuring American citizens of Mexican descent to "return" to Mexico.
- During one push in the 1930s, U.S. officials skirted birthright citizenship protections by arguing they did not want to break up families, Axios' Russell Contreras previously reported.
- Schulte said mixed-status families could be vulnerable to those same pressures today.
- "One place we are worried is the targeting of mixed-status families as a way to compel and leave U.S. citizens with no choice, either because they are children or because families belong together," Schulte said.
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