Reporting Highlights More Moms Deported: An exclusive data analysis found Trump has deported moms of U.S. citizens at four times the rate of his predecessor. Left Stranded: Because American-born kids can’t legally join their parents in immigration detention, some end up with friends or strangers when their parents are detained or deported. New Directive: Trump administration officials revised a document advising how ICE officers should interact with parents, removing the word “humane.” These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story. The baby needed somewhere to go. So in the frantic hours before officers took her parents away to immigration detention, her mom turned to their pastor and his wife. As squad cars waited outside the family’s Lakeland, Florida, trailer home, she gave them a crash course in how to care for the 4-month-old. Briany, with her plump cheeks and full head of dark hair, wasn’t normally this fussy. But it was late that January night — around midnight — and she was still hungry. Her mom, Doris Flores, had tried nursing her to calm her down. It didn’t work. When she brought Briany to her breast, the milk wouldn’t come. Flores thought it had to do with the panic that set in after the officers arrested the baby’s father and told her she was next. The baby also drank formula. The pastor and his wife, who’d never had children of their own, should take her bottles and the yellow cans of formula, too, and follow the instructions on the label. They should use distilled water, never from the tap. Briany drank 5 ounces at each feeding. She needed to eat every two to two-and-a-half hours. She was almost due for her next round of vaccinations. She was getting big enough for Size 3 diapers. What made her happiest was to be held in someone’s arms. The Rev. Israel Vázquez, 58, soft-spoken with close-cropped hair, had held Briany before, when he formally presented the baby to God in a ceremony at his Pentecostal church in Lakeland. If he and his wife, a fellow pastor at the church, didn’t take the girls in, they would have to go into foster care. “What else could we do?” he said. The Rev. Israel Vázquez and his wife, the Rev. Raysa Vázquez, assumed care in January for 4-month-old American citizen Briany after her parents were taken into immigration detention. Jennifer Ortiz for ProPublica The baby’s half-sister would be easier for the older couple to take care of. Eight-year-old Briana was quiet and humble. She preferred speaking in English rather than Spanish. Her favorite color was blue. Deputies from the Polk County Sheriff’s Office helped load a baby stroller and bouncy swing into the couple’s car. Then the officers, employed by one of the hundreds of Florida agencies carrying out immigration enforcement for the Trump administration, handcuffed a sobbing Flores. Incidents like this, involving the arrest and detention of immigrant parents with American citizen children, occurred twice as often after President Donald Trump returned to office, according to an analysis of a new nationwide Immigration and Customs Enforcement dataset shared exclusively with ProPublica. In the first seven months of his second term, authorities arrested and detained parents of at least 11,000 U.S. citizen children — a number that, if the pace held up, will have roughly doubled by now. That’s an average of more than 50 U.S. citizen kids a day with a parent pulled into detention. The data underlying this analysis was obtained by the University of Washington Center for Human Rights as part of an ongoing public records lawsuit. It covers the last three years of the Joe Biden administration and the Trump administration until mid-August 2025. Under Trump, Arrests of Immigrant Parents With U.S.-Born Children Surged ICE arrests of parents doubled in the first seven months of Trump’s second term compared with the Biden administration. Note: Arrest figures for both administrations represent an undercount due to data limitations. See our methodology for more details. Source: ProPublica analysis of ICE data obtained by the University of Washington Center for Human Rights. Chris Alcantara/ProPublica The differences between the fates of detained immigrant parents under the two presidents are stark, our analysis shows. The impact on mothers is particularly pronounced. Trump is deporting about four times as many moms of U.S. citizen children per day as Biden did. Immigration authorities are arresting more of these moms in the first place, but that doesn’t account for all of the surge in deportations. If arrested, they are seldom allowed to return home to their families anymore. About 30% of such arrests under Biden resulted in a deportation. Under Trump, almost 60% resulted in a deportation. Compared with the Biden administration, Trump officials are detaining many more parents with only minor criminal histories or none at all. Under Trump, more than half of the detained fathers of American citizen kids, and about three quarters of the mothers, had no criminal convictions in the United States except for traffic- or immigration-related offenses. Immigrant Mothers of U.S. Citizen Children Are Released Less Often During Trump’s Administration ProPublica compared what happened to U.S. citizen children’s mothers arrested during the same seven-month period — Jan. 20 through Aug. 20 — in 2024 (under Biden) and 2025 (under Trump), looking at over 1,000 cases. About a third of the arrests made during the Biden administration led to a deportation. Under Trump, that rate doubled. Note: Outcomes for arrests under Biden were measured as of October 15, 2024. Outcomes for arrests under Trump were measured on the same date in 2025. Arrest and outcome figures for both administrations represent an undercount due to data limitations. See our methodology for more details. Sources: ProPublica analysis of ICE data obtained by the University of Washington Center for Human Rights and the Deportation Data Project. Chris Alcantara/ProPublica Current and former officials from the Department of Homeland Security said such separations are not necessarily a violation of policy. Instead, guidelines on the way officers should exercise discretion have changed. Among the changes: A document once known as the Parental Interests Directive has been given a new name under Trump — the Detained Parents Directive. And its preamble, which once instructed agents to handle immigrant parents in a way that was “humane,” has been stripped of the word. John Sandweg, who oversaw ICE when the original directive was adopted under President Barack Obama, said, “Back then, we were operating from a lens that family unity is everything.” Tom Homan, then a top ICE official and now Trump’s border czar, introduced the directive to field offices around the country. If agents encountered parents, the directive would help them enforce immigration laws without “unnecessarily undermining their parental rights,” according to his August 2013 talking points, which were obtained by ProPublica. Now, Sandweg and the other former officials said, the second Trump administration has put aggressive enforcement goals like arresting 3,000 immigrants a day above concerns about the harms of hastily separating children from their parents. ProPublica sent detailed questions about our findings to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE. DHS Acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis said in an emailed statement that the agency “cannot verify the veracity of the data” that ProPublica analyzed. (We validated the data, which the agency provided via Freedom of Information Act requests, and our approach with outside experts.) Bis also said in the statement, “ICE does not separate families.” Immigrant parents can choose to leave the country with their children or to designate someone to care for them, Bis said, which “is consistent with past administration’s policies.” The revised directive “simply standardizes the required forms.” She added that “under President Trump, ICE will not ignore the rule of law.” A White House spokesperson wrote in a statement that those in the country illegally “who wish to avoid the deportation process should self-deport.” U.S. citizen children board a van in early February before taking a flight from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to Guatemala, to be reunited with parents who were deported. Boyzell Hosey/ProPublica The unraveling of Flores’ family began with another kid’s alleged threat against 8-year-old Briana. According to a Jan. 15 police report, the girl’s school bus driver had contacted the Polk County Sheriff’s Office after Briana claimed a student at her elementary school, a boy with blond hair and blue eyes, had threatened to kill her. The sheriff’s office dispatched a deputy to the family’s mobile home, where she introduced herself to Flores and her fiance, Egdulio Velasquez, and asked to speak with Briana. The 8-year-old was “timid,” according to the police report, and initially denied any trouble with fellow students. The family said that the deputy questioned Briana alone outside the trailer. Eventually, the girl let on that her classmate had indeed been bothering her, poking her in the back and face with his fingers — but did not say the boy had threatened to kill her, according to the police report. The deputy went to the classmate’s house, and the boy told her it was Briana who had made the threats. He said she had pointed a broken pencil at him. The deputy filled out two threat assessment forms, one for the boy, one for the girl, noting that she hadn’t checked the boy’s home for firearms because his “father was uncooperative” but had searched Briana’s trailer. “I was unable to determine probable cause,” the deputy wrote in her report. She would have to drop the case. But her investigation had turned up something else: Flores and Velasquez were both immigrants from Honduras. A second sheriff’s deputy arrived at the trailer not long after and took their passports. According to police records, he then called an ICE hotline, a requirement stemming from Florida’s close cooperation with the agency. An operator told him that both parents had deportation orders: Velasquez from a DUI conviction and Flores from a missed asylum hearing. Flores said she had missed the hearing because of computer issues and was trying to appeal the ruling. She’d crossed the border into the United States and applied for asylum in 2023, after a man in Honduras had threatened to kill her. DHS’ Bis confirmed that Flores entered the country in 2023 and had a deportation order issued in May 2025. Flores had met Velasquez, who is from the same rural Honduran province of Olancho, in the United States. Briana, his daughter from a previous relationship, was born in Honduras. The family built a life together in Lakeland, where he worked in a factory that built shipping pallets, and they became members of Vázquez’s church. A third squad car appeared outside the trailer. The officers arrested Velasquez first, keeping him handcuffed in the back of one of the cars for hours. But before they could arrest Flores, they needed to figure out what to do with the kids. “Don’t be like this,” Flores recalled saying to the officers as she held baby Briany. “My girl needs me.” She said they told her they were just doing their jobs. She said she prayed to God: “Lord, I’m putting everything in your hands.” According to Flores and Velasquez, one of the deputies took a liking to a family kitten and offered to take it home with him. Velasquez said he later saw the kitten clinging to the officer’s pants. The Polk County Sheriff’s Office did not respond to specific questions about the incident, instead sending an emailed statement that outlined its state-mandated cooperation with federal immigration authorities. It was close to 11 p.m. when an investigator from Florida’s child protective services finally arrived, the family said. She informed Flores that if she couldn’t find someone to take the children, the state would place them in the foster care system. So Flores called her pastor. Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd recently began calling for a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who have committed no crimes and have strong community ties. A spokesperson for the sheriff’s office wrote in the statement to ProPublica that deputies do not make any decisions on who to detain — they report suspects to ICE, and ICE makes the decision. But she noted they now make an effort to determine citizenship status. “Nothing has changed in how we deliver day-to-day law enforcement services in our community,” she wrote, “other than asking everyone with whom we interact their place of birth.” ProPublica’s reporting shows that the parents of at least 11,000 U.S. citizen children were arrested and detained in the first seven months of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. First image: Two volunteers place a 2-year-old American child in a car so he can be reunited with his mother, who is from Honduras and awaits deportation at the Dilley, Texas, family detention center. Second image: Two American children, left, talk on the phone with their father, who is detained at “Alligator Alcatraz” in Florida after being arrested on Christmas. First image: Christopher Lee for ProPublica. Second image: Michelle Bruzzese for ProPublica. Federal policy still says ICE officers should ask people they arrest if they are the parents or legal guardians of minors — and if they are, they should be allowed to make arrangements for the children’s care. The Trump administration’s July revision to this directive, the one that removed the word “humane” from the preamble, also added a new line. It specifies that the directive “in no way limits the ability of ICE personnel to make enforcement decisions on a case-by-case basis.” In practice, instances when parents are spared are becoming increasingly rare, said Andrew Lorenzen-Strait, a former ICE official who oversaw implementation of the directive at ICE during the Obama and first Trump administrations. “It may happen on a case-by-case basis because an officer in and of himself has humanity,” he said. ProPublica followed multiple families through their sudden separations — examining the moment itself and its aftermath — and found a wide variety of outcomes for the children. Fernanda, a Florida restaurant worker, made an agonizing decision after the father of her children was arrested and deported: She would send their toddler son and 4-year-old daughter to Guatemala to live with him. She feared it was only a matter of time until immigration agents came knocking on her door. She didn’t want the children, both U.S. citizens, to be stranded. Fernanda asked to be identified by only her middle name because of her immigration status. The Guatemalan-Maya Center, a nonprofit, helped her take the kids to the Fort Lauderdale airport in early February, the little boy dressed in a Spi