One of Trump's Most Hated First-Term Policies Returns in a New Form

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Donald Trump won the presidency in part on promises to deport immigrants who have criminal records and lack legal status. But his earliest executive orders—trying to undo birthright citizenship, suspending critical refugee programs—made clear he wants to attack immigrants with legal status too. In our series Who Gets to Be American This Week? , we'll track the Trump administration's attempts to exclude an ever-growing number of people from the American experiment.

Seven years ago, the world listened in horror to the distracted cries of children in a Customs and Border Protection facility begging to be reunited with their parents. The audio, published by ProPublica, drew widespread attention to the Trump administration's family separation policy, which went on to become one of the darkest stains of Trump's first term. In 2025 family separation is on the rise again, but this time it's happening on a smaller scale, as officials use immigrants' children as leverage to force them out of the country.

The White House is also reviving attacks on immigrants who entered the country without permission as children who qualify for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, eliminating recipients' access to health care, investigating colleges that offered them scholarships, and threatening them with deportation.

Here's the immigration news we're keeping an eye on this week.

Under the “zero tolerance” policy of Trump's first term, immigration agents separated thousands of migrant children from their parents at the southern border in an effort to deter others from immigrating to the US Lawsuits quickly followed, and the policy was rescinded several weeks into its implementation, though the federal government spent years struggling to find and reunify separated parents and children. Now the Trump administration is bringing back family separation in a new, more subtle form that's allowing it to fly under the radar.

In early July, Immigration and Customs Enforcement issued a new directive on how agents should process parents without legal status and their minor children when the family faces a removal order. It supersedes old guidance created by the Biden administration and largely weakens protections for noncitizen parents while reducing the agency's obligation to keep immigrant families together, according to an analysis by the Women's Refugee Commission. The New York Times identified at least nine cases in which the new guidance led to immigrant parents being separated from their children when they refused to follow a deportation order.

In these cases, ICE officials presented two options: If they complied with the order, parents could remain with their children but would be removed to countries they fled. But if families chose to remain in the US to challenge their deportation status, parents would be put in detention while their children would be placed in foster care.

Notably, ICE does not appear to be formally charging parents with a crime; it's presenting them with options before placing the parents in civil detention for failing to comply with a removal order. Scott Shuchart, former assistant director of ICE under Joe Biden, told Slate that the Trump administration has essentially created a loophole by manipulating long-standing immigration law that mandates that unaccompanied minor children be put in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement. If parents without legal status are present with their children in the US but placed into immigration detention, by law they are viewed as no longer able to fulfill their caregiving responsibilities. Shuchart explained that under the logic of the loophole, this automatically changes their children's status to unaccompanied minors and Homeland Security is able to separate the family.

Shuchart thinks the administration is forcing parents without legal status into an impossible position: Do they “surrender their constitutional rights to family unity and to direct the upbringing of their children, or do they surrender their statutory rights to be protected from being sent back to another country where they face persecution or torture?”

Historically, the White House has avoided referring the parents in immigrant families for prosecution—and thus splitting them from their children, as happened during the first Trump term—because it's a more cumbersome and expensive legal procedure, but the administration does technically have the authority to redefine policy as it pleases.

Unlike the president's zero-tolerance policy of 2018, Shuchart believes, family separation is not the goal of the current Trump administration but rather a consequence of its mass deportation agenda. “They want removals in numbers and whatever gets in their way, 'How do we steamroll it? What can we punch people with to get them to comply?' ”

Over the past few months, the administration has quietly been stripping benefits from people who were brought into the US illegally as children—from making them ineligible for the federal health care market to investigating universities that have offered them scholarships. During Trump's first term, he tried to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program but was stopped by the Supreme Court . Then, this year, just days before Trump was sworn into office again, a court order declared that DACA recipients could keep their deportation protections. So far, the White House has not formally made changes to the program, but some recipients are being caught up in the president's mass deportation push.

Erick Hernandez, a DACA recipient living near the southern border in California, was arrested and detained back in June after he missed his exit and accidentally drove into Mexico. DACA recipients must receive prior authorization to leave the US Now Hernandez has lost his DACA status and faces expedited removal. Another DACA recipient who lives in California and is deaf and mute was also detained last month but eventually released.

Evenezer Cortez Martínez is a DACA recipient in Kansas who, despite securing permission to leave the country, was detained at an airport in Texas and sent back to Mexico. After his attorney filed a lawsuit, Cortez Martínez was released and reunited with his family. In Florida, a DACA recipient was arrested and placed in the state's new Everglades detention facility.

“What is clear is that the administration is taking myriad steps to make the lives of many DACA recipients and their families unbearable in the United States,” said Elora Mukherjee, a clinical law professor at Columbia University and director of the school's Immigrants' Rights Clinic. The Department of Homeland Security told NPR that DACA recipients are “illegal aliens” and that they are not automatically protected from deportation. “DACA does not confer any form of legal status in this country,” said Tricia McLaughlin, a press secretary for the agency. Although McLaughlin encouraged recipients of DACA to self-deport, last December Trump told NBC News that he wanted DACA recipients to be able to remain in the US

The DACA program has been in place for over a decade, established by President Barack Obama to allow immigrants who came here as children the chance to live and work in the US legally. Since 2012, over 800,000 people have entered the program, but it has never been codified into law. The program is intended to grant participants “deferred action” from prosecution, meaning that law enforcement will not prioritize the arrest or detention of DACA recipients. According to the DHS website , DACA recipients are considered “lawfully present … for purposes of eligibility for certain public benefits,” including Social Security, but are not considered to have “lawful immigration status.”

“The whole point of DACA is protection from deportation because these are not criminals or some danger to society,” California Sen. Alex Padilla said during a recent speech on the Senate floor. “These are young people who have lived in the United States for as long as they can remember.” The Center for American Progress surveyed over 400 DACA recipients across the country and found that, on average, respondents were brought to the US at about 6 years old. More than 9 in every 10 respondents are currently employed or enrolled in school.