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Tens of thousands of children in the U.S. have had a parent detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) since the start of Trump’s second term, according to a new report released by the Brookings Institution on Monday.

Brookings estimates that over 145,000 children who are U.S. citizens have had at least one of their parents booked into detention since Trump reentered the White House in January 2025. Over 22,000 of these children have had both of their live-in parents detained, the study estimates.

This number is far greater than previously understood. In March, ProPublica estimated that ICE had detained parents of at least 11,000 U.S. citizen children in the first seven months of Trump’s second term — nearly 50 children a day — and that the number could have reached about 22,000 by March. But this estimate used ICE data, which Brookings states is undercounting the actual numbers.

In September 2025, ICE reported a total of 18,277 parents detained who had U.S. citizen children, which Brookings states is certainly an undercount. While ICE regulations require that the agency ask detainees if they have children, the study says that in practice, this regularly does not happen, and some detainees avoid mentioning their children out of fear of what might happen to them or to others in their network.

Brookings instead matched detainees to individuals surveyed in the American Community Survey (ACS), a national household survey updated each month, and found that about 27 percent of detainees have a minor child at home, and 20 percent have U.S. citizen children at home.

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These numbers are also far........

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