Last month, a young woman stepped off a plane and set foot in her native Honduras for the first time in at least 15 years. But this wasn’t a happy homecoming – it was heartbreaking for the newly-deported mother, who was forced to leave her 2-month-old baby in the U.S.
After arriving in Honduras in late November, the anguished mother could speak of little more than her frantic desperation to have her newborn infant back in her arms, according to Dr. Michele Heisler, medical director for the nonprofit organization Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) and a professor of internal medicine and public health at the University of Michigan.
Heisler was part of a team representing PHR and the Women’s Refugee Commission, who spoke with nearly two dozen deported parents, primarily mothers, shortly after their arrival in Honduras during the last week of November. Most of the deportees had lived in the U.S. for 15 to 20 years.
The group had originally planned to speak with pregnant and postpartum women about their experiences during the detention and deportation process to determine if they had received adequate medical care and treatment. However, they shifted gears when they discovered that some U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents were not following government protocol aimed at preserving family unity: many never asked the detainees if they had children, and didn’t inform them that they had the option and the right to be deported with their kids.
“We were shocked. … We were not anticipating that there were so many people not being given the option to bring their children. That was actually not something we realized was happening,” recounted Heisler. “People [often talk] about the excruciating decision many parents are forced to make to leave their U.S. citizen children or other kids in the U.S., but we [were surprised] when we spoke with a mother who told us, ‘I wasn’t even given the opportunity [to choose].’”
“They never asked me anything. … They shut you up; they don’t even let you talk,” reported one 22-year-old pregnant woman, who was forced to leave her 2-year-old daughter. “They treat you as if you are … a criminal. They never told me, ‘You have a daughter, you can [take] her,’ because I would have brought her to [Honduras with me] – she [was always] glued to me.”
Heisler said they don’t know how widespread family separations have been since the current administration took office in January. She noted that during President Donald Trump’s first term, over 5,000 children were separated from their parents as they crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. Tragically, more than 1,000 kids who were separated from their parents all those years ago remain unaccounted for “to this day because the government lost track of the children.”
In 2025, ICE has placed about 600 immigrant kids (mostly teens) in federal shelters, according to government data, a new record surpassing the previous four years combined. Most were picked up after immigration court hearings, or because they were somewhere ICE showed up to arrest someone else. It is taking nearly six months for kids to be released to relatives or adult sponsors.
Ignoring Parental Interest Policy
Since 2013, the U.S. government has maintained a “parental interest policy,” which is a set of guidelines to help protect parents and their children during immigration enforcement. However, last July, ICE issued an updated policy – the Detained Parents Directive (2025) – which rescinds Biden-era guidelines, reducing ICE’s obligations concerning detained parents and family unity.
Regardless, ICE authorities are still expected to follow two primary related requirements: asking any person they detain if they have children; and allowing parents who are facing deportation to decide if they want to bring their children with them or if they want them to remain in the U.S.
Among the nearly two dozen parents they spoke with, over half said ICE never asked them if they had children when they were arrested, nor at any point before they were deported, she said.
“We interviewed 21 mothers who left children in the U.S. Of those 21, 13 had not been asked if they had children, and eight were asked but made the difficult choice to leave their kids in the U.S. with their father or their grandparents,” said Heisler.
Furthermore, many of the parents who were not asked whether or not they had kids said they tried to inform authorities that they had children, either in Spanish or broken English, desperately telling them, “Wait! I have children!” but they said nobody listened to them.
Looking Back at Zero Tolerance
Heisler likened the “cruelty” of the current deportations to the “zero-tolerance” immigration enforcement policy during Trump’s first term, which permanently severed many families.
“The parents were deported and [more than 1,000] kids disappeared into some bureaucratic nightmare,” said Heisler regarding the long-term effects of Trump’s zero-tolerance policy.
Following the zero-tolerance separations and eventual reunions between most of the parents and their children, Heisler said her organization conducted evaluations of numerous affected families.
“More than a year after the parents and children had been reunited, we still found really severe post-traumatic stress disorder, severe anxiety [and] children’s developmental issues,” she said.
Parents currently being deported without being allowed to take their kids are facing possible long-term separations – because most can’t afford to bring their children to their native countries, explained Heisler – and the families are likely to experience similar psychological trauma.
According to the United Nations Convention Against Torture, the severity of the psychological trauma caused by forced family separations meets the legal definition of torture, noted Heisler.
“Deliberately Cruel and Inhumane”
Many of the parents interviewed reported asking ICE officers for information about their children, but received none. Several even signed written statements expressing their desire to be deported with their children, yet they were deported alone, according to the team’s reporting.
“That is in defiance of their own directives and it is just heartbreaking – these mothers talked about being deported without their babies, one without her 2 month old and another without her 3-month-old infant, and the mothers were sobbing,” said Heisler. “In one case, a mother said, ‘We can’t bear to tell my children that I’ve been deported. They think I’m still at work.’”
All of the parents they spoke with were picked up by ICE agents without their children present – some of the parents were at work, others were driving and several were picked up at courthouses.
“We talked to people who were still undergoing their [open] asylum case,” explained Heisler. “Then they’re being picked up and deported, sometimes by the next day or two days later. So it’s just happening really quickly, and often they’re not even being allowed to contact their lawyers. … It’s just so slapdash and horrifying, and it is clearly deliberately cruel and inhumane.”
Because most of the deportees they spoke with in November were predominantly from Florida and Louisiana, Heisler acknowledged they don’t have enough nationwide data yet to know how “pervasive or prevalent” family separations have been under the current administration. She suspects that separations might be happening more in certain jurisdictions within Florida, Louisiana and other states where local law enforcement agencies collaborate with ICE.
But prevalent or not, ignoring the parental interest policy “should never happen,” she said.
“It’s so important,” continued Heisler, “to get the truth out about what is happening.”