The Marshall Project is tracking how many children have been pulled into the U.S. immigration system during Trump’s second term in office. Visit our dashboard to see the latest totals.

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The image of immigration officers arresting 5-year-old Liam Ramos — in a [blue bunny hat and Spider-Man backpack](https://www.npr.org/2026/01/31/g-s1-108168/5-year-old-liam-ramos-ice-order) — in January sparked outrage across the country. Celebrities from Ms. Rachel to Madonna called for the closure of the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, the Texas immigrant camp that held Ramos and many children like him. Lawyers filed complaints about contaminated food and shoddy healthcare, and hundreds of activists protested outside the detention camp. Within months, the government began sending fewer children to Dilley.

But the arrests of immigrant children did not stop. Instead, Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested more than twice as many children this year through July as it did in the same period last year. Thus far in President Donald Trump’s second term, [ICE has arrested more than 8,500 children](https://www.themarshallproject.org/2026/10/08/children-in-ice-detention-dashboard). Many of those children have been detained in locations where lawyers and family members couldn’t find them, like hotels and hold rooms in office buildings.

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The Marshall Project analyzed data on ICE arrests and detentions obtained by the [Deportation Data Project](https://deportationdata.org/index.html), a research collaboration between UC Berkeley and UCLA. Most immigration violations are civil, not criminal, and the vast majority of children counted in ICE’s arrest data have no criminal conviction or pending charges beyond the immigration violation.

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A 16-year-old identified as J.A.I. said in a court declaration that he’d been living in Texas with his family for eight years. One morning earlier this year, around 5 a.m., he heard yelling and pounding on the door of his home. Suddenly, officers charged in, he said, and went to his 12-year-old brother’s room.

“They pointed a gun at my little brother; threw him against a wall; grabbed him by the hair; and then put handcuffs on him. They did the same thing with me,” he said.

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Many children arrested by ICE wind up being detained, from less than an hour to several months. ICE has [detained more than 8,750](https://www.themarshallproject.org/2026/10/08/children-in-ice-detention-dashboard) kids since Trump retook office, slightly more than the number it arrested, because children can come into detention via various methods, like being apprehended by Border Patrol.

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The ICE data obtained by the Deportation Data Project does not note when the agency detained children in hotels. But court filings in a class action lawsuit known as the Flores settlement, document 86 children who were held for more than three days in hotels in February and March.

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In February, a woman in Long Island, New York went with her two children to a scheduled check-in with ICE, planning to go to a favorite restaurant after the appointment. Instead, officers detained them. The mother, who asked to be identified only by her initials, M.S.P., because she fears retaliation from the government, said the family was taken far from New York, where they’d lived for nine years, and jailed in a hotel in Texas.

For nine days, she said they were not allowed to leave the room, or even look out the windows. M.S.P. said two guards were in the hotel room at all times, including sitting outside the bathroom door, making them uncomfortable using the toilet or sleeping.

Her teenager spent much of the time crying and worrying about failing missed classes. Her other child, age 12, worried about the cat they’d left behind at home.

M.S.P. said in Spanish that the guards told her they were private contractors hired by ICE. She said she was permitted two three-minute phone calls to her mother-in-law in New York. She said the guards warned her that if she told anyone where she was, her children would be taken away from her. Her attorney later wrote in court filings that he could not find them in ICE’s detainee locator and was left in the dark about their location – unable to provide legal advice.