ICE detains 666 California children under Trump’s 2nd term

The rise in child detainments in the state’s interior began soon after Trump took office in January 2025. Trump won office on a promise to carry out mass deportations, vowing to deport “illegal immigrant killers, rapists, and drug dealers from our streets and sending them back where they belong.”

Starting immediately and escalating over the summer of 2025, ICE agents have conducted large-scale operations in neighborhoods with large immigrant populations. Some children have been detained while accompanying parents to routine ICE check-ins. The practices reflect an escalation in enforcement activity that state education officials say has kept some students from attending school.

The children detained, so far, include a 17-year-old honors student from Los Angeles County who was detained in June 2025 and deported to Guatemala; a 9-year-old boy from Torrance who, along with his father, was detained at an immigration hearing that same month and deported to Honduras; and a 6-year-old deaf student who, in March, was detained without his hearing aids and deported to Colombia along with his mother and younger brother.

Medical professionals and advocates contend that no period of time in detention is safe for children. In 2016, a Department of Homeland Security Advisory Committee recommended discontinuing the use of family detention — the practice of detaining children with their parents as they await the outcome of their case — writing “detention is never in the best interest of children.”

“The kids that are in detention in these facilities, they’re losing their childhoods every single day that they’re in there,” said Wendy Cervantes, who oversees research and advocacy of immigrant families at the Washington-based Center for Law and Social Policy.

A spokesperson from the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement to EdSource that this data is “being cherry-picked” to “peddle a false narrative.” ICE, the spokesperson said, is “not targeting children.”

“ICE does not separate families,” the unidentified DHS spokesperson said. “Parents are asked if they want to be removed with their children or ICE will place the children with a safe person the parent designates.”

What the data shows

EdSource analyzed federal detainment data obtained by the Deportation Data Project at UC Berkeley and UCLA capturing federal detainments between October 2022 and March 2026. The analysis found:

• There were 666 Californian children detained during the Trump administration. Of those, 408 children — or 61% — were deported. Under the Biden administration, 8% were ultimately deported.

• Nationally, children have been held longer in detention under Trump than under Biden. The median length of detention jumped from one day under Biden to eight days under Trump. This does not include 335 children who had not yet been released from detention as of March 11, the last day for which data was available.

• Nationally, the average number of children in detention jumped nearly 10-fold under Trump, due in part to these longer detention stays. Under the last year of the Biden administration, there were, on average, 23 children held in detention each day. During Trump’s first year of his second term, that figure rose to 219.

The Trump administration is going after “the worst of the worst,” including pedophiles and rapists, a DHS spokesperson said.

“Many of the individuals that are counted as ‘non-criminals’ are actually terrorists, human rights abusers, gangsters and more; they just don’t have a rap sheet in the U.S.,” the DHS spokesperson said. “Further, every single one of these individuals committed a crime when they came into this country illegally.”

According to EdSource’s analysis of ICE’s data, none of the 666 detained children in California under Trump had any felonies or previous convictions listed. Twelve minors were listed as having pending criminal charges, including three girls between ages 6 and 9. The nature of those pending charges is not disclosed. The ICE data does not include information about any connected family members or their cases.

During his second term, Trump reopened family detention facilities, including the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley and the Karnes County Immigration Processing Center in Texas. In California, 250 detained children were ultimately sent to these family facilities.

A 12-year-old from Los Angeles, identified by the initials G.S., gave a declaration in federal court describing their experience living inside the South Texas Family Residential Center during a 64-day detainment with their parents and younger sister.

The child said ICE agents detained the family during a routine ICE check-in in Los Angeles. The family lost their apartment and belongings, according to the May 22 declaration. The status of the child and their family is unclear.

“It makes me feel hopeless to be here for so long, because now it’ll take me and my whole family a long time to get back to normal because of how much money and education we have lost,” the child said in their declaration. “If I could change one thing here, it would be to shut down the whole facility.”

Trump vs. Biden

One major difference between the Trump and Biden presidencies has been the number of children who arrived at the border. Of the 5,676 children detained in California between October 2022 and when Trump started his second term, 94% were apprehended at the border.

Biden prioritized placing some of the unaccompanied minors who arrived at the border with sponsors, Cervantes said, and ended the practice of family detention that resumed under Trump. Cervantes said the Biden administration largely followed the Flores Settlement Agreement.

The 1997 agreement provided rights for immigrant children in U.S. custody and prohibited most detentions from lasting more than 20 days. The declaration from the detained Los Angeles minor is one of several included from children and parents in a lawsuit claiming their rights under the Flores agreement have been violated.

Attorneys representing the Trump administration in this case argued in court in June 2025 that conditions at detention centers for children have “drastically improved” since the original agreement. Referencing the high number of immigrants at the border, the administration said the Flores Settlement Agreement “hamstrung the government in addressing this catastrophic illegal migration.”

Apprehension in California

During the first year of Trump’s second term, adults were detained in California’s interior at more than four times the rate they were held during the last year of Biden’s administration, while the rate of child detainments rose by 90%.

California has passed laws and issued guidance with the aim of shielding schools from federal immigration enforcement. For instance, under California law, school officials cannot allow immigration officials on campus without a judicial warrant.

In some California communities, parents, teachers and neighbors have formed rapid-response networks to report sightings of ICE agents for students and their families to avoid while commuting to and from school.

The sites of some immigration enforcement operations, such as job sites, may be more likely to target adults than children. However, Cervantes notes that some teens working at restaurants or as lifeguards at pools have been apprehended in ICE raids while they’re on the job. She also disputes the Trump administration’s claim that children have not been targets of immigration enforcement.

Children may not be detained at the same rates that adults are, but medical experts warn that any time spent in detention is too long for their well-being.

Shortly after Trump began his second term, medical professionals wrote an open letter to the president and then-Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem warning that “detention itself poses a threat to child health.”

“We have endless amounts of research and expert testimony on how harmful detention is to children,” said Michelle Brane, who was the immigration detention ombudsman under the Biden administration, and now leads the nonprofit Together and Free, which supports asylum-seeking families. “You see kids with extreme depression. You see kids really regressing, kids going back to wetting the bed after they’ve been trained for years.”

EdSource Reporter Zaidee Stavely and Data Journalist Daniel J. Willis contributed to this story.