What are the Trump administration’s policies about detaining immigrant children?

This week, ICE’s detention of a five-year-old boy wearing a Spider Man backpack in the Minneapolis suburb of Columbia Heights quickly became a defining image of the Trump administration’s hardline immigration enforcement. Furious critics, including many local politicians, seized on Liam Ramos’s ordeal as glaring evidence that Trump’s mass deportation campaign has little to do with crime and a lot to do with terrorizing children and their families.

A homeland security spokesperson said ICE officers took the boy into custody only after an attempt to arrest his father led to a foot chase. But Liam Ramos’s detention is not an isolated incident. It’s part of a uniquely aggressive push to detain more unauthorized immigrant families, a turbocharging of a policy discontinued five years ago.

Liam Conejo Ramos, five, being detained by ICE officers after arriving home from preschool on 20 January, in a Minneapolis suburb. Photograph: Ali Daniels/AP

ICE booked some 3,800 minors into immigrant family detention from January to October 2025, including children as young as one or two years old, according to a Guardian analysis of records obtained by the Deportation Data Project. More than 2,600 of those minors were apprehended by ICE officers, which usually means they were apprehended somewhere inside the country rather than at the border.

Those numbers mark a major shift. Previous administrations used family detention mostly to detain parents and children crossing into the United States together by land. Minors in ICE custody have special legal protections dating from a 1997 consent decree called the Flores Settlement.

Under the terms of that settlement, ICE does not detain unaccompanied children. A child immigrant accompanied by a parent may be held in a detention center with somewhat higher standards than other adult facilities, but the settlement generally requires ICE to release them if the government cannot swiftly deport them.

But the Trump administration is increasingly locking up families detained in high-profile immigration sweeps taking place in major cities across the country, according to Becky Wolozin, an attorney with the National Center for Youth Law.

“This is not people showing up at the border at this point,” Wolozin said. “It’s people being arrested who live in the United States, who have permission to live in the United States. Now, they’re starting to re-interview people who have refugee status. There’s no status that protects people anymore. Even US citizens are getting arrested.”

‘It is as horrible as it looks’

Most children detained with a parent eventually end up at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, which is managed by the private prison contractor CoreCivic. Family detention centers are supposed to offer a less-jail-like setting for children, offering access to education and playgrounds. Last year, the Trump administration also detained families at a separate facility in Karnes, Texas, though it’s not clear whether ICE continues to hold families there.

Homeland security did not respond to a request asking how many family detention centers it currently operates.

As a lawyer representing immigrant child detainees in the ongoing litigation over their rights under the Flores Settlement, Wolozin has toured the Dilley family detention center. Constructed during Barack Obama’s second term in response to the high numbers of Central American families who began arriving at the US-Mexico border in 2014, the 2,400-bed Dilley facility is by far the largest family detention center in the country. Ramos and his father are now detained there, according to their lawyer.

Maria García, 42, and her daughter Angela Chumil, 13, keep an altar honoring Emmanuel Gonzalez García, 15, in their north-west Houston apartment. Emmanuel was in a children’s detention center for weeks after Houston police called ICE and delivered him to federal custody, where he was declared an unaccompanied minor. Photograph: Houston Chronicle/Hearst Newspapers/Getty Images

Many of the people who wind up there, Wolozin said, have pending asylum claims and work authorizations that prove they have complied with existing immigration laws, but were arrested anyway. Many were detained at the border patrol checkpoints that dot the highways within 100 miles (160km) of the US-Mexico border, not knowing that their work authorizations or paperwork showing they had applied for asylum or some other form of relief from removal would no longer keep them from getting detained there.

Liam Ramos’s father appears to fit that pattern. His family, Ecuadorian nationals, presented themselves at the US-Mexico border using the CBP One app and then made a claim for asylum, saying they faced persecution in their home country, according to his lawyer, Marc Prokosch.

“They did everything right when they came in,” Prokosch said this week at a press conference.

“ICE didn’t care about the fact that they had those pending claims, and just arrested them.”

The boy’s apprehension typifies the new policy of targeting immigrant families, regardless of their pending immigration claims, Wolozin said.

“It is as horrible as it looks,” Wolozin said. “He’s coming home from school and now he can get abducted and detained for who knows how long and sent to somewhere he might not be safe. It’s making the United States worse than wherever they came from the first place.”

Columbia Heights school officials said that ICE officers had also apprehended three other minors, according to Reuters – two 17-year-olds and a 10-year-old.

‘100% designed to hurt kids’

The modern family detention policy dates to the George W Bush administration, which established two detention centers – one in Pennsylvania, the other in Texas – to house unauthorized immigrant families together while they awaited deportation.

Barack Obama scaled back family detention shortly after taking office, then dramatically increased it after the number of Central American mothers traveling with children began to surge in 2014.

The first Trump administration inherited that capacity and tried unsuccessfully to overturn the provisions of the Flores Settlement in court in order to detain immigrant families until their immigration cases concluded.

The first Trump administration also implemented a short-lived and widely repudiated “family separation” policy of prosecuting unauthorized immigrant parents who crossed into the United States with their children, which routed the parents into jails and their children into shelters run by the office of refugee resettlement.

The Biden administration halted family immigrant detention in 2021.

Now, Trump and Republicans in Congress are once again attempting to scrap the Flores Settlement’s restrictions. Last year’s “One Big, Beautiful” spending bill directs ICE to hold families “until such aliens are removed”, which directly contradicts the settlement. The bill quadrupled ICE’s immigrant detention budget to $45bn and allowed any portion of that appropriation to be used to detain families.

“These are just families,” Wolozin said. “They’re not dangerous. They are really trying, by and large, to follow the ever-changing rules. This is totally, 100% unnecessary and 100% designed to hurt kids.”