AP finds Trump border separations repeated despite family safeguards

The policy failure was visible in one child’s face. Ederson Galicia Alva, who was taken from his mother at the U.S.-Mexico border when he was 3 years old, was separated from Mirsy Maricela Alva Lopez again years later, after federal agents questioned her at Miami airport and pulled her aside in June 2025.

What followed showed how deeply the trauma had lingered. Ederson feared the government would take his mother away again, the same fear that had shadowed the family after the first separation in 2018, when the first Trump administration’s border crackdown split them apart for months before lawyers helped reunite them. After the second rupture, the family spent 11 months in the indigenous highlands of Guatemala, including San Martín Cuchumatán, before a federal judge ruled that the government had acted illegally and they were finally allowed to return to Florida.

Ederson’s case was not isolated. Dozens of children who had already been separated from their parents under the first Trump administration were separated again, despite a legal settlement meant to keep families together. Some parents were held in immigration detention for months, while others were deported after their children were taken from them a second time. The result was a system that could still tear apart families even after federal courts and advocates had spent years trying to stop it.

The roots of the problem go back to the first Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy at the southwest border, which led to more than 5,000 children being separated from their parents and triggered a national backlash. That outcry produced Ms. L. v. ICE, the class-action case filed in 2018 over due process and other violations tied to family separation. The government reached a settlement in October 2023, and a federal court approved it in December 2023, but the new separations show how weak recordkeeping, fragmented enforcement and unresolved immigration cases can still overwhelm those safeguards.

The American Civil Liberties Union said it had new information about Ms. L. class members who were detained or deported during the second Trump administration. Brookings Institution researchers have estimated that since January 2025, around 400,000 immigrants have been detained after interior arrests, and tens of thousands of children have faced parental detention. That scale helps explain why advocates say family separation is no longer only a border-policy episode, but part of a broader deportation machine that can still ensnare children long after officials say the practice has been condemned.