Congress Must Investigate ICE’s Arrests of Children

ICE has arrested more than 8,500 children since the start of Trump’s second term. This year, the pace has more than doubled.

As The Marshall Project reports, ICE arrested more than twice as many children through July of this year as it did in the same period last year. In New York and New Jersey, arrests tripled. The vast majority of these children have no criminal conviction or pending charge beyond an immigration violation, which is a civil matter.

Many have been held in places where lawyers and families couldn’t find them, including hotels and office hold rooms. One mother, a New Yorker of nine years, was detained with her two children at a routine ICE check-in and kept in a Texas hotel room for nine days with guards inside the room. She says she was told her children would be taken away if she told anyone where they were. Her attorney couldn’t locate them in ICE’s detainee system.

Some children were separated from their parents. An 11-year-old was held alone in a hotel for five days while his father was sent to an adult detention camp. A baby and two young children were held for about 10 days without their mother, and no one in their family knew where they were. In April, a federal judge repeated an order barring ICE from holding children in hotels beyond brief stays in transit. DHS told The Marshall Project the underlying data is inaccurate but offered no evidence or alternate figures.

Add your name to demand that Congress investigate ICE’s arrest, detention, and separation of children, determine whether the agency is complying with court orders, and require public reporting on where children are held and who has access to them.

A government that arrests thousands of children owes the public a full accounting. Congress has the power to demand one.