10/21/2026
By denying due process to asylum-seeking families and tearing 205,000+ families apart since 2025, ICE violates international law.
The right to family unity is enshrined in the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which the U.S. adopted in 1948.
In reality, the country has never protected the right to family unity.
The right is also protected under the U.N.’s Convention on the Rights of the Child.
The U.S. is the only country that hasn’t adopted it.
Instead, family separation is one of ICE’s primary weapons in its unlawful, extreme violence against communities.
A Women’s Refugee Commission (WRC) report published in March and in partnership with Physicians for Human Rights partially attributes the horrific rise in family separations to ICE violating its own Detained Parents Directive.
The directive requires that ICE ask adults during intake whether they are primary caregivers, but the agency rarely does.
That, in addition to the erasure of roughly 20,000 people’s records from ICE’s public search database and increase in trafficking flights to concentration camps, makes it even easier for the agency to separate families and get away with it.
At least 205,000 children have had a parent abducted by ICE since January 2025, according to a Brookings Institute report from May.
That number has only increased in the past months.
It also includes at least 22,000 U.S. citizen children separated from both their parents.
These children often end up in the care of extended family, friends, or community faith leaders.
In other scenarios, older siblings end up taking on an extremely stressful parenting role.
When a parent is detained or deported, family members frequently lose between 40% to 90% of their household income.
Many children have become houseless.
Children without U.S. citizenship are often punted to the Office of Refugee Resettlement – which handed ICE almost half a million people’s records this year. A betrayal of its stated purpose.
205,000 kids whose lives have been irreparably harmed and put in danger. Who have been deeply traumatized for life.
In less than two years.
205,000 kids.