Why the Trump administration is detaining immigrant children – and what happens to them next | ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement)

This week, ICE’s detention of a five-year-old boy wearing a Spider-Man backpack in the Minneapolis suburb of Columbia Heights has quickly become a defining image of the Trump administration’s strict immigration enforcement. Angry critics, including many local politicians, seized on Liam Ramos’ ordeal as striking evidence that Trump’s mass deportation campaign has little to do with crime and much to do with terrorizing children and their families.

A Homeland Security spokesman said ICE officers took the boy into custody only after his father fled during an arrest attempt. The superintendent of the school district in Columbia Heights said another adult living in the home was outside at the time of the encounter and asked to keep an eye on Liam so the child would not be taken into custody, but was rebuffed.

However, the detention of Liam Ramos is not an isolated incident. This is part of a uniquely aggressive effort to detain more unauthorized immigrant families; accelerating a policy that was halted five years ago.

ICE placed nearly 3,800 minors, including children as young as one or two, into immigrant family custody between January and October 2025, according to a Guardian analysis of records obtained by the Deportation Data Project. More than 2,600 of these children were apprehended by ICE officers; This means they are usually caught somewhere within the country rather than across the border.

These figures indicate a big change. Previous administrations used family detention to detain parents and children crossing together into the United States, mostly by land. Minors in ICE custody have special legal protections dating back to a 1997 consent decree called the Flores Agreement.

Under the terms of this agreement, ICE does not detain unaccompanied minors. An immigrant child accompanied by a parent may be held in a detention center with slightly higher standards than other adult facilities, but the agreement requires ICE to release them if the government can’t quickly deport them.

But the Trump administration is increasingly jailing families detained in high-profile immigration sweeps in major cities across the country, according to National Youth Law Center attorney Becky Wolozin.

“It’s not people coming to the border at this point,” Wolozin said. “People who live in the USA and have permission to live in the USA are being arrested. Now they are starting to meet again with people who have refugee status. There is no status that protects people anymore. Even US citizens are being arrested.”

‘It’s as scary as it looks’

Sergio Perez, executive director of the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law, said many young children may be detained for several days in places that are not equipped for child care. The organization representing child migrants within the Flores Settlement received statements from families who were detained for days in improvised locations in airports or office buildings.

In some cases, children were forced to use the restroom under the supervision of guards of the opposite sex, Perez said.

“The places you see are places where there is no medical care, places where the lights never go out, places where children are not allowed outside, places where the food is disgusting, and places where people are not treated with the dignity required by law,” Perez said. “We are seeing families and children incarcerated for longer and longer periods of time and in increasingly deplorable conditions.”

Most children detained with their parents are eventually sent to the South Texas Family Housing Center in Dilley, Texas, run by private prison contractor CoreCivic. Family detention centers need to provide children with a less prison-like environment and access to education and play areas. Last year, the Trump administration detained the families at a separate facility in Karnes, Texas, but it is unclear whether ICE continues to hold the families there.

Homeland Security did not respond to a request for information on how many family detention centers are currently operating.

As an attorney representing immigrant child detainees in ongoing litigation over their rights under the Flores Settlement, Wolozin toured the Dilley family detention center. Built during Barack Obama’s second term in response to the large numbers of Central American families who began arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border in 2014, the 2,400-bed Dilley facility is by far the largest family detention center in the country. Ramos and his father are currently detained there, according to their lawyers.

Many of the people who arrived had pending asylum claims and work permits proving they complied with current immigration laws, but were still detained, Wolozin said. Many were detained at border patrol checkpoints on highways within 100 miles (160 km) of the U.S.-Mexico border, unaware that work permits or paperwork showing they were seeking asylum or other relief from deportation would no longer keep them from being detained there.

Liam Ramos’ father seems to fit this mold, too. His family, who are Ecuadorian citizens, identified themselves at the U.S.-Mexico border using the CBP One app and then sought asylum, saying they were facing persecution in their home country, according to his lawyer, Marc Prokosch.

“They did everything right when they arrived.” Prokosch said this week: at a press conference.

“ICE did not care about the fact that there were pending claims and arrested them.”

Wolozin said the boy’s arrest was typical of the new policy targeting immigrant families regardless of their pending immigration claims.

“It’s as scary as it looks,” Wolozin said. “He comes home from school and now he could be kidnapped and held for who knows how long and sent to a place where he’s not safe. This makes the United States worse than where they first came from.”

Columbia Heights school officials He said ICE officers were also arrested According to Reuters, there are three other minors: two 17-year-olds and a 10-year-old boy.

‘100% designed to harm children’

Modern family custody policy dates to the George W Bush administrationestablished two detention centers, one of which is in the country. Pennsylvaniathe other is in Texas — to house unauthorized immigrant families together while they await deportation.

Barack Obama reduced family surveillance shortly after taking office, then increased it dramatically in 2014 after the number of Central American mothers traveling with their children began to rise.

The first Trump administration inherited this capacity and failed. overturn the provisions He applied to the Flores Settlement court to detain immigrant families until their immigration cases are resolved.

The first Trump administration also implemented a short-lived and widely rejected “family separation” policy to prosecute unauthorized immigrant parents who crossed into the United States with their children; This policy directed parents to prisons and their children to shelters run by refugee resettlement offices.

The Biden administration has halted family immigration detention in 2021.

Now Trump and Republicans in Congress are once again trying to lift the Flores Settlement’s restrictions. Last year’s “Big, Beautiful” spending bill directs ICE to hold families “until such aliens are removed,” which is in direct conflict with the agreement. Invoice quadrupled ICE immigrant Detention budget increased to 45 billion dollars and authorized the use of any portion of this funding to detain families.

“These are just families,” Wolozin said. “They’re not dangerous. They’re really just trying to follow the ever-changing rules. This is completely 100% unnecessary and 100% designed to harm children.”