Dozens of Kids Entered Foster Care After Immigration Agents Detained Their Parents

At least 32 children of immigrants entered foster care over the past year after their parents were detained or deported, officials in seven states told NOTUS.

That includes four toddlers ages 1 to 3 in Vermont, all of whom spent at least three months in custody of the state, according to the Vermont Department for Children and Families.

It includes 10 kids in Kansas, at least nine in Maryland and four each in Idaho and Virginia.

With a record-breaking 71,000 immigrants in detention, the Trump administration has reshaped what family separation looks like. But the full scale of children being split from their parents due to immigration enforcement is unknown. The federal government doesn’t have comprehensive data on how many kids wind up in state custody after a parent is detained or deported, and state-level data is patchy, NOTUS found after requesting information from all 50 states.

Officials and advocates for children say there’s a building tension between protecting the minors’ privacy and knowing where they are to connect them with services they need.

“It’s just really hard to understand without even knowing how many parents are being detained and separated from their children to then know what happens to their children afterwards,” said Shaina Simenas, co-director of the technical assistance program at the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights.

Simenas said family separations are less visible than they were during the first Trump administration, when cries of children taken from parents at the Southern border rattled the country. The Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights helps social workers dealing with children whose parents are in detention navigate the complex legal immigration system, in some cases helping the reunification with parents who have been deported.

“It’s definitely a huge problem that’s happening,” she said. “We worked with families who were separated before under the first Trump administration and have experienced now a second family separation due to internal enforcement.”

More than 6 million children — 5.3 million of whom are U.S. citizens — are at risk of separation from at least one parent living in the country without legal status, according to an October analysis from the Migration Policy Institute.

Of the 50 states, officials from Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, Minnesota, Oregon, Vermont and Virginia each cited at least one child who entered foster care due to parents’ detention. Five states didn’t provide a specific number of cases citing privacy concerns, and 11 others said they didn’t track whether immigration enforcement was the reason a child ended up in their care. Alaska, Hawaii, Illinois, South Dakota and Washington didn’t identify any cases at the time of publication.

In Minnesota, children have remained in the care of family and friends in most cases of parental detention, according to the state’s Department of Children, Youth, and Families.

For months, the Democrat-led state has undergone an aggressive deportation surge resulting in two fatal shootings of U.S. citizens at the hands of federal immigration agents. The administration claims “Operation Metro Surge” has led to more than 4,000 arrests.

One Minnesota child entered foster care last year after federal agents detained their parents, according to the state Department of Children, Youth and Families data.

“Arresting or detaining parents or guardians without considering their children is detrimental to children’s mental and physical health,” an agency spokesperson said. “It also fuels fear and erodes trust in institutions working to preserve and strengthen families.”

Federal immigration agents are supposed to accommodate parents in making arrangements for someone else to take their children before they’re separated, according to a 2025 ICE directive. If the parent can’t find someone to take the child or if there are signs of abuse, immigration officers have to contact the local child welfare agency or local law enforcement, the directive states.

Children are also being detained with their parents, with ICE holding around 170 on a given day, according to The Marshall Project.

The Department of Homeland Security and ICE did not answer questions about how many times since the start of Trump’s second term immigration agents had contacted local authorities to take custody of a child.

“ICE does NOT separate families. Parents are asked if they want to be removed with their children or ICE will place the children with a safe person the parent designates,” Tricia McLaughlin, DHS assistant secretary for public affairs, said in a statement. “This is consistent with past administration’s immigration enforcement.”

While the federal Administration for Children and Families began requiring tracking when immigration enforcement actions result in a child entering in 2022, only half of the states included that field in their reporting to the federal agency for the fiscal year 2024.

The latest available data from ACF shows that 162 children entered foster care from October 2023 to September 2024; kids between the ages of 11 and 16 accounted for 38% of the cases.

Getting reliable data under the relatively new reporting category depends on states building their systems to submit the information and training social workers on identifying the cases, said Kurt Heisler, who previously oversaw the data team at ACF and is now the founder of ChildMetrix, a child welfare data analysis company.

Heisler worked at ACF, which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services, for seven years until 2017.

“It takes a few years for the data to start rolling in in any really reliable way, so even if I looked at the counts of kids with that circumstance identified, I wouldn’t trust it,” he told NOTUS. “It would definitely be an undercount.”

The potential to weaponize the tracking of children in foster care worries Heisler.

“I am concerned that it is now hazardous to have data like this because of how the current administration is using data to find families that they want to deport or detain,” he said.

Simenas pointed to cases of child welfare agencies calling ICE on kids in the foster care system as a reason to be concerned about how states manage the data. Florida child welfare authorities turned over a 17-year-old to ICE in June, the Miami Herald reported.

Melissa Adamson, a senior attorney with the National Center for Youth Law, echoed the importance of data privacy. She is part of the legal team working to ensure the federal government enforces a settlement prohibiting authorities from detaining immigrant children for more than 20 days. The Marshall Project’s analysis counted over 1,300 children who have been held in detention longer than 20 days this year.

“There are many reasons why state agencies might be concerned about tracking individuals’ immigration status, which makes this issue particularly hard to untangle,” Adamson said.

Oregon created its own internal tracking system to understand how often children of immigrants enter foster care as a result of their parents’ detention, said Jake Sunderland, press secretary for the Oregon Department of Human Services. In 2025, the state took custody of two children for that reason, he said.

The Department of Children and Family Services in Illinois, another state where violent ICE and Border Patrol arrests have taken place, is constantly monitoring for the impacts of immigration raids in its foster care system, communications director Heather Tarczan said.

Children could also enter foster care after their parents’ detention if the person who was supposed to care for them isn’t able to, which Simenas said is another factor that makes immigration enforcement effects hard to track.

“It’s impossible to help families reunify and exit the child welfare system without knowing where their family is or what happened to lead to their separation,” she said.