The Trump Administration policy of taking children away from their parents if they were suspected of crossing the southern border illegally resulted in children who were American citizens being removed from the custody of their parents, with the parents shipped to their home countries without their children, the New York Times reports.

The Trump policy made separation far more of a burden for the American children of foreign parents.  Non-citizen children separated from their parents were placed in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which registered the children in a database and allowed them to communicate regularly with their parents.  Children that were US citizens were dumped with local foster care groups or child welfare agencies with no tracking or follow-up; many times, the agencies had no idea what happened to a child’s parents.

Officials of a children’s rights organization said at least 226 American children were put into the foster care system in one jurisdiction, California’s San Diego County.  There are no available records for most other jurisdictions, including the states of Texas, Arizona and New Mexico.  This also complicates matters because states not only lack foreign diplomatic contacts to try to reunite the families, but also each state has its own criteria for allowing children to be reunited. 

A state judge could opt to not return a child to the custody of a migrant parent, who was not allowed into the US to get their child back under the Trump administration.  A judge could release the child to a confirmed relative or guardian, if one could be found.  Once the child turns 18, they are released from foster care, frequently without any information on what happened to their family.  When the American child turns 21, they can sponsor their immediate family members’ migration to the United States.

In 2018, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to halt family separations and to reunite families in the ensuing 30 days; at that point, nearly 2,300 children overall had been taken from their families.  Because of lax record keeping, hundreds of children were unable to be reunited. In the early months of the Biden administration, nearly 900 children were reunited with their families, who were provided visas to stay in the US until their cases were adjudicated.  Estimates from earlier this year put the number of migrant children still in custody at around 1,000; it’s unknown how many of those children are American citizens.