Inside Trump’s new tactic to separate immigrant families
- The San Juan Daily Star
- 3 days ago
- 5 min read
By Hamed Aleaziz
Evgeny and Evgeniia faced an excruciating choice.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers told the couple they could leave the United States with their child and return to their native Russia, which they had fled seeking political asylum. Or they could remain in immigration detention in the United States — but their 8-year-old son, Maksim, would be taken away and sent to a shelter for unaccompanied children.
In the end, the couple, who asked to be identified only by their first names out of fear for their family back in Russia, chose the agony of limbo in the United States over a return to a place where they saw no prospect for freedom or any future for their family.
“Interior separation is approved,” ICE officials concluded in writing. The last time Evgeny and Evgeniia saw Maksim was May 15, in a room at Kennedy International Airport in New York City, as ICE agents led them back to detention in New Jersey.
“A few days, right?” Maksim begged his parents that day. “A few days?”
Their case is an example of a little-known tactic the Trump administration is using to pressure immigrants lacking permanent legal status to leave the United States. Officials have begun separating children from their families in small numbers across the country, in what appears to be a more targeted version of one of the most explosive policies of President Donald Trump’s first term.
The New York Times has uncovered at least nine cases in which parents have been separated from their children after they refused to comply with deportation orders, according to internal government documents, case files and interviews.
The practice is not as widespread as the “zero tolerance” policy of Trump’s first term, when thousands of children were systematically taken from their parents as they crossed the U.S.-Mexico border and sent to shelters and foster homes.
But the new cases suggest that the administration has decided to use family separation as a tool, at least in some instances, to persuade families to leave and to create a powerful deterrent for those who might come to the United States illegally.
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, insisted that “ICE does not separate families” and placed the onus on the families themselves, saying the parents have the option of staying with their children by leaving the country together.
“The parents had the right and the ability to depart the country as a family and willfully choose to not comply,” she said.
She denied that there was any new policy on family separations.
Previous administrations separated families living in the country illegally for reasons including national security concerns, public safety and child endangerment. But Claire Trickler-McNulty, a former ICE official who has served in Republican and Democratic administrations, said that previous administrations, to her knowledge, did not use the threat of family separation as leverage to get people to leave the country.
Instead, she said, past administrations typically would have released such families into the United States with ankle monitors to track them as they awaited court dates, a practice that has contributed to enormous backlogs in the immigration system.
The notion of choice touches on a key difference between the separations from the first Trump administration and now.
During Trump’s first term, immigration agents would separate families at the southern border as they crossed into the United States. Adults were criminally charged with illegally entering the country and imprisoned, while their children were taken away.
The family separation policy was enormously divisive. Wrenching images of children being pried from the arms of their parents stirred global outrage, but administration officials argued privately that was the whole point — the policy was meant to deter people.
Trump ultimately relented to pressure and ended the policy in 2018. The Biden administration later agreed to a settlement that blocked family separations at the border, with some exceptions, including if children were in danger.
Now, with illegal crossings notably low, the Trump administration is focusing on immigrants who are in the United States and have been ordered to leave.
The Trump administration insists that it is simply enforcing the law. Trump has made aggressive enforcement a key part of his deportation campaign and says the American people elected him in part to get tough on immigration.
“To be clear, refusing a judge’s deportation order is a crime,” McLaughlin said. “If law enforcement pulled an American citizen over with kids in the back seat and they chose to not comply with lawful orders, the parents would be arrested, and the children would be placed in safe custody.”
Still, deporting families has always been a struggle for presidential administrations. Children, for the most part, cannot by law remain in federal custody for more than three weeks. That means officials are under pressure to deport families quickly, or the United States would have to spend money and resources to track them.
At that point, the deportation challenge only grows. ICE agents would have the difficult task of arresting people with established ties to communities, who had been working or going to school and building lives in the United States.
Evgeniia, speaking through an interpreter from ICE detention, said her family traveled to the Mexican border in hopes of getting an appointment under a Biden-era program that allowed people to enter the United States at a port of entry after registering with a government app. Trump canceled that program Jan. 20, so she and her husband decided that driving to a port of entry and asking for asylum was the only way to reach safety.
They were immediately put into detention.
The American Civil Liberties Union is investigating the legality of the separations, said Lee Gelernt, a lawyer for the group.
McLaughlin said immigrants were taking advantage of the system and in some cases creating a public disturbance.
“We have seen recently illegal alien families have started to use a tactic where they refuse to board a commercial flight, often lashing out and posing a threat to the safety of their own children,” she said. As a result, McLaughlin added, authorities “must ensure the children are safe and not in harm’s way until the family can soon be removed from the country.”
Regarding the case of Evgeny and Evgeniia, McLaughlin said the couple “were acting so disruptive and aggressive they endangered the child’s well-being.”
The couple denied those allegations, and there was no mention of such a disturbance in the internal case file, which was obtained by the Times. The file says that “since there is no other option to enforce the removal order in a safe manner as a family unit, interior separation is approved.”
A separate document, a referral of Maksim’s case to the agency that oversees custody of unaccompanied migrant children, said, “Subject was separated from his family on 5/15/2025 due to his parent’s refusal to board an aircraft for removal from the United States in violation of US law.”
Evgeny said he was trying to save his son from a longer separation in Russia because of what he believed to be a sure prison sentence there.
“I was explaining to them, to the officers, that our lives are in danger and our livelihood would be in danger,” he said. “And at some point, I kind of lost my bearings and started to cry.”
Evgeny and Evgeniia passed their protection screening, which means the United States has determined that they cannot be deported to Russia.
But as they wait for the next step, they remain in ICE detention. And Maksim is now in a foster home.
“It’s terrible; that’s what I can say,” Evgeniia said. “I wouldn’t wish it even to an enemy. It’s a constant grief and longing.”