Trump's second term: mass deportations could lead to family separations

President-elect Donald Trump has pledged to launch a program of mass deportations on the first day of his second term. This could have devastating consequences for the millions of people residing in mixed-status households: those in which both undocumented immigrants and people with permanent legal status reside.

Trump said he would rely on an 18th century law to carry out mass deportations and that he intended to first target gang members, drug dealers or cartel members, known or suspected. Vice President-elect JD Vance set an initial goal of one million evictions. A representative for the Trump transition team did not respond to a request for comment on whether exceptions would be made for undocumented immigrants who have lived in the United States for a long time or who have immediate family here, including U.S. citizen spouses and children.

There are many of these people: The United States has about 4.7 million mixed-status households, according to a 2024 report from the Center for Migration Studies. About 500,000 people in those households could have hoped for new protections against deportation through a Biden administration program that would have opened the way for undocumented spouses and stepchildren of U.S. citizens to seek legal status. That program was struck down Thursday by a federal court.

If Trump succeeds, his deportation agenda threatens to tear families apart, which could be another iteration of his first administration's policy of separating immigrant families. However, Tom Homan, Trump's former Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) director and current immigration adviser, has also proposed that families could be deported together, apparently including U.S. citizens. It's unclear whether he was suggesting they would willingly go together.

Implementing a mass deportation program on the scale promised by Trump presents obvious practical challenges. But if it can overcome these obstacles, such a program could cause lasting psychological damage to millions of U.S.-born children from mixed-race families, put economic strain on their communities, and even weaken the U.S. economy .

The familiar damage of family separation

Research on the effects of Trump's previous immigrant family separation policy highlights the potential consequences of dissolving mixed-status families through mass deportations.

During his first term, Trump adopted what is known as the zero-tolerance policy toward undocumented immigrants arriving at the southern border. The parents were sent to immigration detention while awaiting deportation proceedings. Their children, meanwhile, were sent to separate facilities run by the Department of Health and Human Services and, in some cases, released to other family members in the United States or to families of welcome. (Previous administrations, in most cases, would not have detained parents or children, releasing them together in the United States.)

At least 5,000 families were separated before a California federal court ordered the federal government in June 2018 to reunite affected families and end the policy. As of May 2024, some 1,400 people remain unreunited, despite continued efforts by the Biden administration to do so.

Trump officials knew from the start the harm this policy would cause. Commander Jonathan White, who previously oversaw the government's care program for unaccompanied immigrant children during the first Trump administration, told Congress that he repeatedly warned officials who concocted the policy that it would likely significant potential for psychological trauma to the child.

A September 2019 government report confirmed these effects, revealing that immigrant children placed in government custody in 2018 often experienced intense trauma, and those who were unexpectedly separated from a parent even more so. In 2021, a group of pediatricians concluded in a study that the separation of families constitutes cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment which can go as far as torture.

As Vox previously reported, psychologists have found that childhood trauma manifests itself in three main ways: disruptions in social connections, increased emotional vulnerability, and, in some cases, post-stress disorder. traumatic. These symptoms could be short-lived or persist; they also might not manifest until a child enters adolescence or adulthood. Any one of these could significantly hinder a child's later success in school and the workplace.

Family separation caused by mass expulsions would be different from family separation at the border, and whether the psychological effects on separated children are more or less extreme will depend on their circumstances. What is clear, however, is that a mass deportation would result in the separation of families on a scale far greater than anything Trump attempted during his first term.

That's orders of magnitude higher in terms of the families that will be separated, and the life-changing consequences for 5.5 million children born in the United States, said Matthew Lisiecki, senior researcher and policy analyst. at the Center for Migration Studies.

He and co-researcher Gerard Apruzzese conservatively estimate that a third of children born in the United States into mixed-race families, including 1.8 million living in households with two undocumented parents, would remain in the United States even if members of their household were expelled.

This would inflict not only psychological suffering, but also a high financial cost: children who remain in the United States would see their median household income drop by nearly half, from $75,500 to $39,000, if members of their undocumented households were being evicted, Lisiecki and Apruzzese found. Other family members or public social services would have to cover the costs of their education, which researchers estimate at $116.5 billion. Their parents' lost productivity and the $96.7 billion they contribute each year in taxes could also hurt the U.S. economy.

The type of trauma experienced in this context is something these Americans will live with every day of their lives from now on, Lisiecki said. I don't think we have the experience on this scale to say what this means for the lives of these children as they grow up and move forward.

Whether Trump can actually deliver on his promises of mass deportations remains a big question mark. He said the program would be priceless, suggesting the budget is unlimited, but would need support from Congress to make it happen. It's not yet clear what numbers will be needed to increase the immigration enforcement budget, especially since House control is still undecided. But even if it were implemented on a small scale, the consequences for the mixed families affected would be disastrous.

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