2 hours ago
4
Of the 3,800 children and infants taken into immigration custody between January and October of 2025, a majority – 2,600 – were detained by ICE officers. That means that the children, as young as one or two years old, were not arrested at the border or legal ports of entry, where asylum seekers frequently present themselves to border officers, but from inside the country.
That means that those children were not new arrivals seeking help; they were kids going about their daily lives in the US, often with legal status. They were children like Liam Ramos, aged five, who was snatched from his driveway after school by immigration agents while wearing a blue bunny hat to keep him warm in the Minnesota cold. They are children like one student, a 17-year-old from Liam’s school district in Minnesota, who was taken from their car, or the other child, a 10-year-old girl in the fourth grade, who was taken alongside her mother; or the two other boys, brothers in the second and fifth grades, who were delivered by school officials to an ICE detention center after their mother was arrested and taken there. She had called the school to ask them to bring her boys to her in the prison; there was no one else to take care of them.
Some would count that family lucky to be able to stay together. The truth of the mass deportation agenda pursued by the Trump administration is that family separation is now a matter of course, both in the immigration detention facilities themselves and as a byproduct of the roundups of ordinary people, many with legal status and most with no criminal record, that follows ICE’s arrival in an unlucky city.
Families with mixed immigration status are torn apart as fathers, mothers, brothers, and aunts are swept into a vast network of detention centers, whisked far from their homes and loved ones quickly, moved repeatedly from one detention center to another, or warehoused in dirty, crowded facilities under horrific conditions for weeks or months until they finally relent and sign their own deportation orders. Scared families often have little information about what has become of their loved ones after an ICE or border patrol arrest; they may call in vain, navigating sterile phone trees and ill-staffed hotlines trying to find out where their loved ones are. As the days go by, children are deprived of the presence of their parents or caretakers; husbands are made to languish without their wives; mothers grieve the absence of their children.
Those who are left behind have to muddle along, carrying their fear and grief as they work to make ends meet among strained and worsened circumstances. The capture and imprisonment of parents or spouses often means that families are missing not only the presence of their beloved one, but also that person’s much-needed paycheck. With fewer people in a family, childcare becomes more difficult; so do errands, eldercare, and housework. This is all to say nothing of the reality that many of those immigrants may fear that the same fate that befell their loved ones will fall on them, too. Reports on the ground in Minnesota suggest that many people from targeted communities are afraid to leave their homes, even to go to work; afraid to walk their children to school; afraid to buy groceries. They stay inside as virtual prisoners as the masked, armed men roam the streets.
Amid the tragedy of these broken families and warped lives, there is a distinct irony: the people tearing these loved ones apart are often the very same people who have spent so much of the past several years lecturing the American people, and in particular American women, about the importance of parenthood and family.
It was Vice-President JD Vance who routinely derided American women who did not have children as “childless cat ladies” whose lives were less worthy and less meaningful. When asked if he wanted to apologize to the family of Alex Pretti – including his mother, Susan Pretti, who had a child and has now seen that child ripped away from her by ICE – Vance grinningly asked: “For what?”
It was Donald Trump who courted the pro-natalists, a group of pro-birth advocates who express alarm at their view that American women are not having enough babies, and it is his administration that has stolen babies like Liam Ramos from the arms of their mothers. It was the Trump administration that appointed Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett to the supreme court, all of whom voted to overturn Roe v Wade and compel women to give birth. And now it is the Trump administration that locks up those mothers, snatches away their children, and destroys, over and over again, that circle of belonging that it claims to cherish: the family.
Is it too obvious to say that the brutal separations of wives from husbands, sons from mothers, sisters from brothers that is evidenced in the Trump immigration crackdown gives the lie to the right’s claims to champion love, parenthood, and family?
Is it too obvious to say that of course the right only values family as a system of ownership and property, only values motherhood as a way to push women from public life and into relationships of dependence and subordination, only values babies and births when they are white babies and white births, meant to reproduce the nation as they imagine it?
Is it too obvious to say that this administration’s actions are an insult to love, to marriage, to parenthood, and brotherhood, and family; that they vulgarize the honor and beauty of these connections by appropriating them for projects of violence and exclusion?
Perhaps it is too obvious: perhaps this is all beyond saying. There is a term, after all, for what it is called when two little children are delivered to their mother in jail because that is the only place where they can be with her. It is not “family values”.
