A New Kind of Family-Separation Crisis - The Atlantic

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Sign up for our newsletter about national security here.<br>Early one morning behind the airport in La Lima, Honduras, before the first planeload of deportees landed, Sister Idalina Bordignon was meeting with her staff about an unsettling situation. Every day, parents were arriving without their children, and they were asking questions like What do I do if I don’t know where my child is? and Do I lose my rights as a parent if I’m deported? An American aid worker suggested a quick analysis of each case to determine which agencies or nonprofits might help the families. We’ll never have time for all this, Idalina thought. The Trump administration was sending too many people to Honduras too quickly, and soon the reception center that she oversees would be packed with more than 100 people who were exhausted, hungry, and in shock. They would need to be processed into the country as quickly as possible to make room for the next planeload.<br>Shackled to a seat on one of those planes was a 39-year-old single mother named Claudia. After she emerged from the reception center in a detainee sweatsuit, looking teary and depleted, she told me her story in the parking lot. She’d fled Honduras in 2023 because her ex-partner’s girlfriend was stalking her and had physically attacked her, and she’d settled in Atlanta with her 11-year-old son. In December she was arrested for driving without a license and spent three and a half months in ICE detention, where she pleaded to be reunited with her son, but was ignored. “I really wanted to bring him with me,” Claudia said. “Being with him is my top priority.” A cousin said he would start saving money to get her son a passport and bring him to Honduras, but it was unclear when that would happen.<br>Sofia Valiente for The Atlantic<br>Outside the deportee reception center in La Lima

Since retaking office, Donald Trump has sent hundreds of thousands of immigrants like Claudia into the deportation pipeline, where many are transferred from facility to facility—losing access to their families, lawyers, and journalists—before being sent abroad. ICE was holding 60,000 people in custody as of early April; 71 percent have no criminal convictions. The agency is detaining people who are in the middle of applying for legal status, and the Justice Department has directed hard-line immigration judges to deny bail and ICE attorneys to pursue deportations as vigorously as possible. “The only process invaders are due is deportation,” Stephen Miller, Trump’s chief immigration adviser, said in November.<br>I went to Honduras in late March to see the consequences of this mass expulsion. For more than 20 years, deportation flights arrived in La Lima five days a week; now they arrive every day, often more than once. Over the three days I was there, five planes delivered 479 people in shackles to a private airstrip. They were loaded into an old school bus and driven to the reception center, at the end of a dirt road.<br>The scene every day is chaotic. New arrivals are handed a cup of coffee, a burrito, and a bag with their personal belongings, then rushed through a series of cubicles where the Honduran government records their return. Volunteer doctors examine those who are visibly ill, injured, or pregnant. In between flights, the staff tries to advise people on common crises: ICE has separated them from their children or spouse, or they have no home to return to in Honduras, or a gang or ex-partner wants them dead. Idalina takes calls from families who are trying to track down lost relatives, and searches for their names on flight manifests.<br>Eight years after Trump backed away from the most controversial project of his first presidency—separating children from their parents at the border—I saw a new kind of separation crisis playing out. This time, the administration is dividing more families by greater distances than before, by expelling parents without their children, en masse. ICE policy requires officers to ask detainees, in each interaction, if they are the parent of a minor child, and to reunite families before deportation, or obtain a sworn statement from parents who choose to leave their child with a designated guardian. But Congress hasn’t codified these rules into law. And the policy is sprinkled with caveats such as “when operationally feasible” and “ICE reserves its right to make case-by-case removal decisions.” DHS officials have told me that the White House’s guidance has been clear: Nothing should slow down deportations.<br>Read: They never thought Trump would have them deported<br>In response to questions about this story, an ICE spokesperson said that the agency doesn’t separate families, that parents are given the option of being deported with their children, and that officers are following policies in a way that is consistent with previous administrations.<br>Of the 40 people I interviewed outside the reception center in La...