WRC Applauds Senate Bill to Help Keep Families Together 

Washington, DC – The Women’s Refugee Commission issued the following statement upon the introduction of the Humane Enforcement and Legal Protections (HELP) for Separated Children Act. The legislation would codify critical protections for detained parents facing deportation and establish safeguards to support reunification for parents who have already been deported and are seeking to reconnect with their children.   

“Family unity has been the bedrock of our immigration system for decades,” said Zain Lakhani, Director of Migrant Rights and Justice at the Women’s Refugee Commission. “But as WRC has documented, there are systemic violations of ICE policies to prevent family separation and ensure parents can make decisions about what will happen to their children if they are detained or deported. This leaves parents and children in limbo without essential protections, demonstrating the urgency of this legislation and the need to codify protections to keep families together and help parents reunify with their children. WRC thanks Senators Tina Smith and Catherine Cortez Masto for hearing the stories of these families and for their leadership on this issue.” 

Background 

In November 2025, WRC traveled to Honduras and spoke directly with recently deported parents and reception center staff. In a subsequent report, WRC documented clear violations of ICE policies to protect family unity, including a requirement that officers ask individuals they arrest if they have children and ensure parents have an opportunity to decide what happens to their children if the parents are deported.  

Key findings included: 

ICE is violating its own policy to keep parents and children together. 

Under the Trump administration’s Detained Parents Directive, ICE officers are required to ask individuals whether they have minor children at the time of arrest. They are further required to give parents an opportunity to decide what happens to their children if they are deported. Most parents interviewed said that neither occurred. 

Parents are being deported without their children, including a mother separated from her two-month-old. 

All four postpartum women interviewed were separated from their infants. A reception center worker noted that roughly 80 percent of deportees arriving at Honduras’s main reception center had left children behind in the US. This includes parents who had provided written or verbal statements to ICE that they wanted to bring their children with them.  

• One mother, arrested outside a hospital after a medical appointment, had three children with her and three at home; she repeatedly told the arresting officers about the three other children but was ignored. The family is now separated, with reunification profoundly uncertain. 

• One father, whose wife had already been detained, was arrested outside his home and begged to go inside and alert his daughter’s babysitter. Officers refused. He was deported, and his three-year-old child was left alone with the babysitter, who stayed with the child for 11 days before other care arrangements could be made. 

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