How many children are affected by parental immigrant detention?

The Trump administration has dramatically increased the scale and scope of immigration enforcement. According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Detention Management reports, around 400,000 people have been booked into ICE detention from an interior arrest since the administration began. Though it is mostly adults who are detained and deported, many children are indirectly impacted by separation from their parents. We estimate there are more than 4.6 million U.S. citizen children living in the U.S. with at least one unauthorized parent lacking firm legal status, and 2.5 million citizen children living with only unauthorized parents. There are no reliable data on how many detainees or deportees have children in the U.S., nor on what happens to the children once their parent is taken into custody.

In the absence of reliable data from the government, this interactive tool offers estimates of the likely numbers of children affected by parental detention under different enforcement scenarios and assumptions. We rely on demographic information on ICE detainees booked into detention between January 1, 2025 and October 15, 2025 from an interior arrest, using data obtained from the Deportation Data Project. We combine this information with data from the American Community Survey to estimate how many children, including citizen children, are likely to be separated from any parent, how many are likely to be separated from all co-resident parents, and how many are likely to end up using services of the child protection system.

Our baseline assumptions, described below, suggest that approximately 205,000 children, including 145,000 U.S. citizen children, have likely experienced a parental detention since the administration began. Even brief stays in detention are likely traumatic for children of detainees, and a ProPublica study finds that around 60% of detained mothers are deported. We estimate that more than 22,000 U.S. citizen children of immigrants have experienced detention of all co-resident parents. Of those, about 1,000 have received services from child welfare systems, which may include anything from financial support for caregiving families to foster care placements. For more information about this and other key findings, read this analysis by the authors.

The interactive may take a moment to load. Once it does, refer to the instructions below for guidance on how to use the tool, and review the data appendix for details on our methodology.

To use this interactive tool:

• Select a hypothetical number of detainees booked into detention after an interior arrest. The default benchmark option is the Trump administration’s total number of detainees through April 9, 2026 (the latest available data), approximately 400,000. The other preset option projects the Trump administration’s total if the current rate of detention continues, estimated at 1.45 million. Alternatively, you may use the slider to choose any number up to 13 million, the estimated total number of unauthorized adults living in the United States (defined here to include those without any legal status or those with partial protection who are nevertheless at risk of removal).
• Select an assumption about how many parents are among the detainees. In the default baseline, detainee characteristics are matched to the likely unauthorized population in the American Community Survey (ACS). The detainees are assumed to have the same probability of being a parent and number of children as likely unauthorized immigrants living in the United States with the same country of origin, age, sex, and marital status. You may alternatively assume that they are 20% less likely (lower bound) or 20% more likely (upper bound) to be parents than the ACS baseline. Or you may use the lower number based on Department of Homeland Security reports on detainees with children in FY 2025. These choices apply to the first 400,000 people detained. As detention levels increase above 400,000, the household characteristics of detainees gradually approach those in the overall unauthorized population.
• Select the risk of both parents being detained. The default assumption is that if one parent in a two-unauthorized-parent family is detained, the probability of the other being detained is random, depending only on the national enforcement environment. You may instead choose to assume this risk is 20% lower than random because the remaining parent takes increased precautions, or that the risk is 20% higher than random because parents may be together when enforcement occurs.
• Finally, select the probability that the child separated from all parents will receive services from the child welfare system. Children separated from all their co-resident parents are likely to stay with friends and family, or to return to their deported parent’s country of origin. But a small fraction may receive services from the child welfare system, either because the system supports their new caregiver or because the care arrangement eventually proves unsustainable. In some cases, children may require foster care placements. Given anecdotal reports of only small numbers of children entering the system so far, the default assumption is that 5% of children left without any co-resident parents will receive services from the child welfare system.

There are information buttons (denoted by “i”) with further explanations. Once you have selected a scenario, you may hover on the blue and orange bars to see the relevant estimates. There are also tabs to explore results by the age of the child and by region of origin of the parent. The “reset to baseline” button will allow you to erase your selections and return to the default assumptions. The data appendix offers details about the data and methodology, and discusses why the estimates differ from some others.