ICE Enforcement and Childhood Trauma

America’s crackdown on immigrants is waging psychological war on kids.

Nov 12, 2025

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Zip-tying children and loading them into vans isn’t hyperbole—it’s happening.
And even for the kids not physically torn from the people they love, the damage is profound. Living under the constant threat that their parents, teachers, or caregivers might be detained is its own form of terror. We are robbing thousands of children in this country of their sense of safety—psychological and physical alike.

selective focus photography of girl crying — Photo by Arwan Sutanto on Unsplash

Children are no longer safe—and they know it

Last week, children arriving at Rayito de Sol, an early learning center in Chicago just two miles from my house, watched masked ICE agents storm their daycare. They saw their teacher, Ms. Diana—incidentally, the same name as my son’s preschool teacher years ago—aggressively pulled outside by “federal agents” in tactical gear who pushed her against a car while she shouted.

Diana Santillana Galeano is a legally authorized asylum seeker with a valid work permit. But even if she weren’t, no human being—let alone a teacher in front of preschoolers—should be treated this way.

“Our community has been shattered,” one parent said. “The children were crying, the parents were crying. It’s a scene that I don’t think any of us will ever forget.”

Until January 2025, such a scene would have been unthinkable. Schools and daycares were protected under a “sensitive locations” directive. Donald Trump eliminated that protection on his first day back in office.

The message to children—well brown children anyway—is unmistakable: the places you thought were safe—your school, your daycare, the arms of your teachers—are not sanctuaries. They are battlegrounds.

They aren’t safe at home either. In one high profile Chicago raid on a five-story building, children were dragged from their beds in the middle of the night, zip-tied, separated from their parents, and held in trucks for hours. It should go without saying but Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker had to say it: “military-style tactics should never be used on children in a functioning democracy.”

There is a relentless stream of videos showing children screaming as parents are detained. A four year old lying over his mother sobbing “No! No please” as an ICE agent explains he has “no choice.” A toddler alone still strapped in a car seat as masked men drive him away in his father’s car. A family at a car wash, the seven year old screeching and the 15-year-old bravely calling out, “I’ll see you soon Dad.” A father having a seizure as agents try to pry his screaming child from his arms.

A CNN investigation found more than 100 U.S. citizen children have been stranded by ICE enforcement, some placed in foster care. In 2011, over 5,100 citizen children were in foster care because they’d been prevented from uniting with their detained or deported parents.

Recently, two US-born children were left on the roadside with their 19-year old sister when their parents and older brother were taken away during an ICE stop—on their way to celebrate the ten-year-old’s birthday. The older brother was eventually released and he and his sister are caring for their young siblings—keeping them out of foster care—while awaiting DACA approval. They haven’t seen their parents, who have lived and worked here for two decades, in nearly two months—an eternity for young children.

Meanwhile, ICE is deporting undocumented children from foster homes. Foster homes! Children who have already endured profound loss are being subjected to yet another traumatic rupture. The same is true for unaccompanied minors who, after finally forming new attachments with relatives in the U.S., are being torn away again.

We know that detention compounds the harm. Overcrowded facilities, inadequate medical care, and prolonged confinement—averaging 170 days this spring, up from 67 days last year—create conditions that all but guarantee trauma.

And it bears repeating: these atrocities are being carried out by politicians banning abortion in the name of “protecting children” even as they destroy the lives of the living ones.

What this does to a child’s brain

When a child lives in constant fear—afraid their parent won’t come home, their teacher might disappear, or that ICE might show up at school—their developing brain exists in a state of perpetual threat.

This isn’t abstract. This is toxic stress that:

Disrupts brain architecture during critical developmental periods
Impairs learning and memory
Increases risk for anxiety, depression, and PTSD
Damages the ability to form secure attachments
Creates lifelong health consequences

As one advocate put it: “It’s stunning that we’re putting so much emphasis on hitting deportation numbers, and not thinking about all the collateral damage we’re doing. We’re traumatizing everybody involved in these situations and completely destabilizing their lives and causing long-term trauma.”

The long shadow

So when it really happens—when their teacher is dragged away in handcuffs or they come home to find their father gone or they spend months or years in detention or foster care—what happens?

Decades of research on adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) confirms what I see daily as a psychologist who works with people with childhood trauma, many of whom experienced the death or separation of a parent: these experiences are carried in the body and brain for life. Children exposed to separation and fear are at far higher risk for:

Depression, anxiety, and PTSD
Substance abuse
Learning difficulties and lower educational attainment
Relationships and attachment problems
Chronic illness and early mortality

We are, quite literally, manufacturing a generation of traumatized children—citizens and immigrants alike—watching their worlds collapse in the name of “enforcement.”

What we owe these children

Regardless of where one stands on immigration policy, we should be able to agree on this:
Children should not be weaponized.
They should not live in terror.
They should not watch the adults they depend on dragged away.
They should not be used as collateral damage.

Every time a child sees a caregiver taken, it rewires their sense of safety and self-worth. Who will protect me? Whom can I rely on?

In the end, the question is simple: Will we treat children as collateral damage—or protect them, unequivocally, as our moral duty demands?

This is not only an immigration issue.
It’s a children’s-rights issue.
Trauma knows no legal status.

This Could Happen

Now seems like a great time to recommend This Could Happen, a substack of short fiction by my friend and writer Debi Lewis, author of the beautiful memoir Kitchen Medicine: How I Fed My Daughter out of Failure to Thrive.

If you loved The Handmaid’s Tale, you’ll love Debi’s Substack. One friend perfectly described her speculative tales as “half-Margaret Atwood, half-Black-Mirror.”

Debi asks, “If we game it out to the very end, what’s waiting for us?” and answers with short stories for our dark and bewildering times. They’re often unsettling, but even more so, they expose the absurdity of a country rushing headlong into fascism—and still sometimes manage to make me laugh in that #funnynotfunny way that makes you both wince and nod in recognition.

Have Women Ruined the Workplace?

I wanted to write about the drivel the New York Times calls a podcast1—offensively headlined “Have Women Ruined the Workplace?” (later softened to “Did Liberal Feminism Ruin the Workplace?” and then again, probably as they lost subscribers, to “Have Feminine Vices Taken Over the Workplace”). But today’s post about felt more pressing so I’m making a couple of recommendations instead.

I did force myself to sit through all 61 minutes of it though. (Full disclosure: I listened at 1.5x speed so I wouldn’t claw myself to death.)

In a nutshell, the so-called “conservative feminists” (an oxymoron if ever there was one—a convenient costume for wolves in sheep’s clothing) conflate both women and feminism with “wokeness.” One guest, Helen Andrews, seemed particularly aggrieved that male supremacy had been disrupted in the workplace. And when asked what virtues women might possess, she couldn’t name a single one—nor offer any solution, other than wishing we’d all just go back to our separate spheres.

The rest was largely unintelligible: a word salad of misogyny dressed up as academic inquiry. Sort of like AI—sounds good but if you listen closely, isn’t really saying anything substantive.

If you want to read more about it, I really enjoyed Liz Plank’s take on it and Minna Lee Jamison’s TikTok nails it: