U.S. Citizen Teens Left Behind When ICE Deported Their Parents

Two Fort Worth teenagers, suddenly on their own. For nearly a year, 19-year-old Dulce Zepeda has been raising her 13-year-old sister, Maria, in the months since their parents were arrested by ICE and then deported. Immigration advocates said thousands of other US citizen children face time apart from their parents and difficult decisions about the future.

“We are leaving children vulnerable in deeply precarious and uncertain situations,” said Zain Lakhani, director of migrant rights and justice at the Women’s Refugee Commission, a nonprofit that studies immigration issues.

NBC 5 Investigates analyzed government data from the University of Washington, which was obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. It showed that at least 8,889 parents with US citizen children were detained by ICE in just the first seven months of the new Trump Administration. The records make it difficult to determine how many US citizen children those parents had, but they suggest that between 12,000 and 15,000 kids were impacted in seven months.

“Just to put that in context, that means 50 US citizen children a day experienced the arrest, detention and potential deportation of one of their parents. Fifty a day,” Lakhani said, adding that those kids are now more at risk because she said the Trump administration changed some language in what’s called the “ICE detained parents directive.” She said that the directive used to require ICE to help parents facilitate plans for their children before deportation. But the new directive requires ICE to facilitate when “operationally feasible.”