What will deportations mean for the child welfare system?

The Trump administration has begun to carry out activities connected to its campaign promise of a nationwide mass deportation program for undocumented immigrants. What will this mean for the estimated 5.62 million U.S. citizen children with an undocumented household member, and for the state and local child welfare systems charged with protecting their safety and well-being?

Changes in immigration enforcement policy

In fiscal years 2021 through 2024, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested around 125,000 immigrants in the nation’s interior each year and deported an average of 38,000. These numbers were lower than during the first Trump administration, which in turn were lower than during Obama’s first term. Under Biden, immigrants most often came to the attention of ICE through the criminal justice system because they were already in custody of local law enforcement. Fewer than half were “at large” arrests in the community, meaning enforcement activity was mainly focused on those in contact with local jails and prisons. In addition to a more aggressive border stance, the Trump administration has signaled its intention to ramp up and broaden interior enforcement.

In his first term, Trump slightly increased enforcement, but the bigger change was making it more chaotic and unpredictable. This pattern appears to be resuming in 2025. The administration has revoked the sensitive locations guidance that previously prevented enforcement activity in hospitals, schools, and churches, with legal challenges underway. It has expanded expedited removal for migrants who recently crossed the border—which bypasses the usual legal process for undocumented residents—to include anyone arriving in the last two years encountered anywhere in the United States. The recently passed Laken Riley bill requires the detention of any undocumented person charged with certain crimes, even if not convicted, including crimes as trivial as shoplifting. The administration has also amplified efforts to involve state and local law enforcement through the 287(g) program, and has shifted priorities across federal agencies such as the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) away from their usual work toward immigration enforcement. And in mid-March Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, which is contested in court but would allow deportations of Venezuelans without the usual due process protections.

It is too early to know how much the numbers of arrests and deportations will increase. Certainly, the administration may fall short of its stated goal of deporting all undocumented immigrants, but between enforcement activities already underway and immigrants faced with no good options electing to leave the country—so-called “self-deportation”—the level of enforcement will be significant from an economic and humanitarian perspective. There will also be chilling effects on activities including free speech, appearing in public, seeking medical care, and going to work as immigrant communities struggle to make sense of the new policy environment.

American children at risk of family separation

To assess the potential scale of the issue for U.S. citizen children and child welfare systems, we use the 2022 American Community Survey (ACS) data¹ to estimate the number of U.S citizen children who could be affected by mass deportation because they reside with an undocumented immigrant. As discussed below, most of these children live with an undocumented parent, with the remainder residing with undocumented siblings, grandparents, aunts/uncles, cousins, or family friends. (Because the legal and policy issues differ for non-citizen children, we discuss them separately below.)

The ACS does not report legal status per se, but the Center for Migration Studies (CMS) uses information on citizenship, country of birth, access to benefits, employment sector, and other socioeconomic characteristics to estimate the legal status of household members of U.S. citizen children.² Figure 1 shows that there are an estimated 5.62 million U.S. citizen children living with an undocumented household member, representing about 8% of the 70.28 million citizen children living in the United States. We refer to them as “at risk” children below. Of these children, 4.71 million (6.7% of all citizen children) have at least one undocumented parent in the household. For 2.66 million, the parents in the household are all undocumented—either because there are two undocumented parents or because it is a single-parent household and that parent is undocumented.³ (The remaining 915,000 at-risk children live with undocumented household members who are not their parents.) In other words, 3.8% of all citizen children in the U.S. are at risk of being left with no parent in their home under a mass deportation scenario.

A large majority (85%) of the 5.62 million citizen children at risk of a household deportation are younger than 15. Figure 1 shows that 1.96 million of the children at risk are under age 6, 2.79 million are in the elementary and middle school years, and 0.87 million are ages 15 and up.

Table 1 breaks down the household living arrangements of at-risk families. About three-quarters (4.26 million) are in two-parent households, and 1.82 million of those live with two undocumented parents. Including children who live with an undocumented solo parent, usually a single mother, brings the total number of children at risk of losing all parents in the household to 2.66 million. Millions more live with a parent or other household member without legal status.

We can also investigate the time since arrival in the United States of the undocumented members of at-risk households. About 60% of the undocumented members of the at-risk households have lived in the U.S. ten years or more, and only 20% have lived in the U.S. less than five years (Figure 2).

Figures 3 through 8 examine where the at-risk citizen children live. California and Texas are home to the largest numbers, with over a million citizen children at risk of a household member being deported in each state (Figure 3). In those states and Nevada, children at risk are at least 14% of all citizen children in the state (Figure 4). The numbers are a bit smaller when considering children with any undocumented parent (Figures 5-6) or children for whom all the parents in their home are undocumented (Figures 7-8). Still, 7.5% of all citizen children in Texas could be left without any parents in the home due to deportation.

What happens to citizen children when their parents are detained or deported?

Immigration enforcement in the nation’s interior is mainly carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Commonly, immigrants encounter local law enforcement when they are pulled over for a minor traffic violation or are arrested for a crime. Local law enforcement contacts the Department of Homeland Security, which may ask that the person be held and transferred to ICE custody. Worksite or community raids are another way undocumented immigrants come into ICE custody. ICE also may seek out individuals who have failed to come to a required check-in or who have been issued a final order of removal but have not yet been deported.

When an undocumented immigrant is detained, they are allowed at least one phone call to make arrangements for their children’s care. This is especially vital for the 2.66 million children for whom the only in-household parents are undocumented. They may call a relative, friend, or the child’s school, for example, often following a predetermined family preparedness plan. A 2022 ICE directive requires that ICE accommodate the parent’s wishes absent a safety concern, and record the parent’s decision.⁴ The child welfare system is contacted if the parent cannot make care arrangements, or if ICE has a concern about the safety of the child. However, ICE does not take custody of citizen children.

Some undocumented parents, such as those with a final order of removal on their record, have few legal protections and may be removed soon after arrest. Most immigrants are entitled to a hearing in immigration court, however. Given long immigration court backlogs, adjudication may be years away. In the meantime, immigrants may be held in detention indefinitely or allowed to return home under court supervision until their court date. The ICE directive requires that parents be kept geographically close to their children whenever possible, that visitation be allowed, and that they be allowed to participate in guardianship or child welfare proceedings.

When facing deportation, parents must decide whether to take their citizen children with them. Immigration authorities will help facilitate parents’ efforts to make travel arrangements for their children, and “border czar” Thomas Homan has suggested that “families can be deported together” to avoid separation, though legally speaking citizen children are not deportable. Comprehensive statistics on the number of U.S. citizen children who leave the country when their undocumented parents are deported are not available; one study estimated that in the 2014-2018 period there were 80,000-100,000 U.S. citizen children in Mexico as the result of parental deportation.

In the parents’ home country, children may lack legal status, may not speak the language, and may face violence or extreme poverty, leading some parents to believe it is in their children’s best interest to stay in the United States. Parents may hope to reunify with their children later, but given the increased border enforcement over the past twenty years, it is far more difficult for undocumented immigrants to re-enter the country to rejoin their families than in the past. Alternatively, parents may plan to settle in their country of origin and send for their children later, or to leave their children to be raised by relatives or friends in the United States. Deportation does not lead to termination of parental rights directly, but it may make it harder for a parent to successfully advocate for maintaining those rights, especially if parents are deported to unsafe places.

Families are encouraged to write directives that spell out their wishes in the event they are separated from their children, and non-profit organizations such as the Immigrant Legal Resource Center offer assistance and guidance. The 2022 ICE directive establishes procedures and requirements concerning the placement of children with sponsors, who are usually relatives, and to avoid unnecessary disruptions to children’s wellbeing. Some states have recently allowed for “standby guardianship” so that immigrants preserve their parental rights when transferring guardianship to a friend or family member. These safety plans allow parents to select caregivers and keep children out of foster care. In the current regime, enforcement fears may encourage families to make plans, though the network of potential caregivers may be limited by concerns of friends and relatives that they are putting themselves at risk.

Despite their upsides, family preparedness plans usually mean that no family court or other state entity is involved in assessing the best interests of the children. In the worst-case scenario, parents with limited options leave children in the care of someone who does not have their interests at heart, potentially leading to trafficking or abuse. There is currently no reliable system to prevent this and, unless the child welfare system gets involved, no entity responsible for vetting the safety of children’s living arrangements.

The Role of the Child Welfare System

The child welfare systems run by states and local governments are charged with ensuring child safety. Child welfare is not necessarily involved when a family is separated due to immigration enforcement. Children experiencing family separation will end up under the jurisdiction of the child welfare system only if there is not a clear plan in place for the care of the child, or if there is a concern about child maltreatment. The child welfare system is not well designed for separations due to immigrant enforcement, particularly since the legal structures regarding parental rights are different than in a maltreatment case.

In general, Child Protective Services (CPS) is the front end of the child welfare system that interacts with a child when there is an allegation of abuse or neglect. CPS investigates the claim, sometimes leading to children being removed from the parents’ care on a temporary or permanent basis. Involvement with CPS can also be a way for families to secure broader supports for child welfare that are otherwise unavailable such as economic resources and mental health services. The child welfare system is called in to support families in a range of circumstances and faces the challenge of allocating limited resources while being the metaphorical “emergency room” for family crises. About 350,000-400,000 children are in foster care at any point in time, with many more having some involvement with the child welfare system in a typical year.

When children need to be separated from their parents, best practice is for children to remain with kin when possible. Child welfare systems vet kin caregivers and, in an effort to facilitate kin placement, often have less demanding licensing requirements than they do for non-kin foster parents. Relatives working through the child welfare system often have access to monthly cash support for the care of the child; this support would typically not be available in an informal kin care arrangement made outside the child welfare system.

In the case of immigration enforcement, there are some barriers to kin placements for the foster care system. First, most states have legal status requirements for formal kin caregivers. Undocumented relatives are typically ineligible to be licensed as kin caregivers and to receive foster payments. Even if eligible, they may be reluctant to engage with a system that requests a Social Security number or exposes them to risk of enforcement.

Alternatively, children separated from their parents could end up in a non-kin foster placement. Though there are well-publicized incidents in which harm comes to foster children, such an arrangement may be safer than a non-relative caring for the child outside the child welfare system. Foster placements also offer economic support and ongoing monitoring.

What about non-citizen children? 

When Immigration and Customs Enforcement encounters non-citizen children without status who are separated from their parents, they are typically transferred to the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), the same entity responsible for unaccompanied minor children crossing the border. The ORR houses and cares for the apprehended child until the child is placed with a relative or other vetted sponsor, while the immigration adjudication is underway. There are certain pathways to immigration relief like Special Immigrant Juvenile status that are particular to children separated from their parents.

When both non-citizen parents and non-citizen children are apprehended and detained, the Flores Settlement Agreement of 1997 entitles welfare protections—though not public legal counsel—to children in immigration custody. The agreement also requires that children, without unnecessary delay, be released from detention to a vetted and adequate sponsor. However, the Court ruled that this agreement does not require the simultaneous release of both the detained children and parents. This latter provision provided the legal framework for the family separation policy seen during the first Trump administration, and by 2024 an estimated 1,400 of around 5,000 children that were separated under this policy had yet to be reunited with their parents.

Emotional impacts of separation

The psychological effects of parental separation on children are severe and range from an immediate increase in the levels of stress to long-run developmental conditions that could affect health and cognitive and behavioral skills. An attachment to a parent and their continued support and presence is vital for the psychological, physical, and emotional development of a child. Even separations as short as one week may be associated with the development of behavioral problems among children. While some changes in eating, fear, and anxiety are reduced over time, developmental difficulties and academic decline tend to persist over the long-term. Parental separation is also associated with extreme stress which can later develop into mental conditions, such as depression and PTSD. Adverse childhood experiences have further been related to the development of severe physical health risks in adulthood, including heart disease and cancer, as well as a heightened risk of death by suicide.

Parental separation also has severe behavioral implications on young children: Children separated from their parent below the age of two are more likely to develop a negative association towards their mother by age three, and demonstrate more aggressive behaviors by age five, compared to non-separated children. The continued release of cortisol may also impair children’s abilities to assess and evaluate risk, which could lead to more erratic behavioral decisions, and heighten the risk of injury, crime, and violence.

Household economic impacts of one parent being deported

Beyond the emotional hardship of family separation, deportations have severe economic impacts on families. Household income in mixed-status families is expected to drop by as much as 48% if undocumented members are no longer earning income. The deportation of one parent places a significant strain on the remaining parent or provider as they try to recoup the income loss. This may lead to increased work time for parents—and thus a smaller investment in parenting time—and residential changes, factors which could negatively impact children’s emotional and behavioral wellbeing. Though immigrant involvement in the child welfare system is typically lower than that of the U.S.-born population, added household stress could raise the risk of child maltreatment.

Most major safety net programs exclude undocumented immigrants, which may provide an additional challenge to mixed-status households facing an economic shock following the deportation of a parent. Though citizen children are sometimes eligible for safety net support, there are barriers to families accessing the safety net in a time of heightened enforcement. These include fear of information-sharing between safety net programs and immigration agencies, complex application and recertification processes, and language barriers.

There can be adverse effects of heightened risk of immigration enforcement, even in families that aren’t directly impacted. Research shows families are less likely to access safety net supports, may change their labor market behavior, and may keep children away from school and health care if they fear enforcement. These adverse downstream effects may also contribute to child welfare involvement.

Policy levers affecting risk

Ultimately the number of children experiencing the deportation of a parent will depend on the immigration enforcement environment. The lifting of the sensitive locations guidance will make it easier for ICE to arrest family members without criminal justice involvement, for example. The agency has also expanded collaboration with other government agencies, including the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives and the Drug Enforcement Agency. There is also increased risk of deportation of undocumented children; ICE officers have recently been granted access to the Office of Refugee Resettlement’s database on unaccompanied children, and could utilize this information to target or prioritize the detainment of undocumented minors.

Department of Homeland Security guidance suggests that caregiving responsibilities can be considered as one of many factors when considering relief from deportation, and anecdotally some judges are reluctant to deport a primary caretaker of a citizen child. The guidance wording is vague and leaves a lot of room for judicial discretion. If judges increase their willingness to deport parents of citizen children, many of those children will face family separation.

How many children might enter the child welfare system as the result of more aggressive enforcement? Even if only 10% of the children at risk of being separated from all parents faced this reality, and only one quarter of those did not have a relative willing to take them in, we estimate that about 66,000 children would enter the foster care system, at an annual cost to taxpayers exceeding 400 million dollars.⁵ This influx would also add about 18% to the number of children in foster care. The Center for Migration Studies has estimated the total lost child-supporting income of undocumented household members, assuming one-third of U.S.-born children in at-risk households lose the support of those household members for the remainder of their childhoods, at over 116 billion dollars.⁶

Conclusion

Aggressive immigration enforcement, particularly “wide net” enforcement in the nation’s interior, raises the probability the American children will experience family separation. We estimate that 5.62 million U.S. citizen children live with an undocumented family member, 4.71 million have an undocumented parent in the home, and 2.66 million have only undocumented parents in the home. Family separation comes with economic hardship and severe emotional harm.

One under-acknowledged challenge is the care of the many U.S. citizen children who will continue to live in the United States after their parents are deported. Most children will be cared for by relatives or friends in accordance with their parents’ wishes, but some will end up in much worse situations. The child welfare system is involved in cases of abuse and neglect, but is neither required nor well-equipped to handle a large influx of American children who are separated from their parents due to immigration enforcement. State and local systems can help mitigate harm by making it easier for non-citizen relatives to come forward as caregivers. More can be done at the federal level as well, including taking caretaking responsibility into account in removal decisions. The U.S. government is responsible for deportations of parents, and ought to be responsible for ensuring the safety and well-being of the U.S. citizen children left behind.

Suggested Citation:

Lisiecki, Matthew, Kevin Velasco, and Tara Watson. (2025). What Will Deportations Mean for the Child Welfare System? The Brookings Institution and Center for Migration Studies. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/what-will-deport…d-welfare-system/ ‎