The Babies Left Behind: Caitlin Dickerson on the New Family-Separation Crisis

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Mina Kim (0:37)

Welcome to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. Hundreds of thousands of children, since President Trump returned to office, have had an immigrant parent detained or deported by ICE. More than 70% of the family separations are affecting American citizen children. As many of the people ICE has targeted live in the interior of the US and were in the process of working toward permanent legal status when they were detained.

This I learned from Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Caitlin Dickerson, who's been covering immigration enforcement in several states, including California, and whose latest piece for The Atlantic looks at what's happening to the children left behind. Caitlin joins me now. Welcome to Forum.

Caitlin Dickerson (1:19)

Hi Mina. Thanks so much for the opportunity to be here.

Mina Kim (1:22)

I really appreciate you being here. I learned from your reporting, Caitlin, that of the more than 200,000 kids who've lost at least one parent to deportation or detainment, which of course is very devastating, that tens of thousands have been left in the US with no parent at all?

Caitlin Dickerson (1:41)

That's right. The numbers are really stunning. I should say that these are estimates that the Brookings Institution came up with, estimates that only go up to April. So we can assume that the numbers are even higher now. They're based on what we know about the size of the immigrant population, the number of arrests that the Trump administration has made, and what we know to be true, and also it should be noted what the Trump administration knows to be true about the number of immigrants living in the United States who have children. It's a very, very high number.

For example, one of the people I spoke to and profiled in the piece, her name is Sharon Balmer Cartagena. She's a family lawyer based in Los Angeles who's helping California families try to navigate these separations. And she said to me she knew as soon as Trump was elected, promising mass deportations that it was going to mean a huge amount of family separation. Because when you live in California, when you work and interact with immigrants, you know that there's a really high percentage of people living in the United States who are either without status or in some kind of marginal status that this administration has gone after and who have young children. So the point is this was the inevitable result of the Trump administration's mass deportation campaign. And yet my reporting found it seems to be something that they really aren't making a concerted effort to try to address or prevent. And there are even some incentives, it seems, to targeting and separating families for this administration.

Mina Kim (3:11)

Well, to help us understand sort of what it means for these children who are being separated from a parent, or in particular, when they have no parent at all. You tell the story of a two-year-old boy named Eber, who ended up in the temporary care of a woman named Estella after his mother was deported. Who is Estella? And how did Eber and his brother Isaac end up with her?

Caitlin Dickerson (3:40)

So Eber and Isaac's story is unfortunately common. As you mentioned, there are tens of thousands of kids in this situation, which was really stunning for me to kind of understand as I got to know them and what happened to them. So first, the children's father was detained and deported to Venezuela in the early months of the Trump administration. And then months later, their mother, Marlene, she was pulled over in a traffic stop by police in Alabama. And she was not accused of any kind of infraction, but she was targeted in a way that we know immigrant communities across the country have been by police who are working with immigration officials. She was asked if she was in the United States legally and explained that essentially she was. She was in the process of requesting asylum. She had a pending case. She'd attended her ICE check-ins and was preparing to present her full case several months in the future before an immigration judge. But there's a difference in opinion here in how the Trump administration is looking at people like Marlene and how previous administrations have. So the Trump administration is saying, you have a pending application even if you've done everything right, followed the rules and you're working toward legal status, you're not protected from deportation. So based on that understanding, the police officer took Marlene, Eber and Isaac's mother to the police station and then transferred her into ICE custody where she spent months detained, trying to get out.