President Donald Trump campaigned on the idea of mass deportations — in fact, he promised the biggest mass deportation in U.S history.
The actual numbers of people removed from the country are a bit tricky to come by. NBC News’ Deportation Tracker reports more than 48,000 migrants in ICE detention as of last Friday. The outlet also reports Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported a little more than 12,000 people in March. ICE’s official dashboard is only current as of January.
There have also been a number of legal challenges to the Trump administration’s deportation policies and concerns about what happens to the children of migrants who are kicked out of the country. That’s the space in which Kelly Albinak Kribs works.
Kribs is an attorney at the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights, a national nonprofit. She joined The Show to discuss how her workload has changed over the past several months.
Full conversation
KELLY ALBINAK KRIBS: There’s never been a shortage of work for immigrant advocates defending the rights of kids and families. But the extraordinary increase in need that we’ve seen over the last few months — at the same time that we’ve seen organizations and attorneys doing this work come under attack by the Trump administration — it’s just made the workload for these organizations just incredibly high right now. It’s been an unprecedented era.
MARK BRODIE: Have you noticed a change in the types of cases that you’re getting or any trends about how these cases are unfolding? Or is it still pretty much what you’ve been doing in the past, just more of it?
KRIBS: Well, what’s undeniable is that under this administration, there’s been an incredible uptick in immigration enforcement actions, people being detained and deported, in ways that we hadn’t seen in recent years. So we are seeing a need for legal services, support for immigrant families in situations that hadn’t maybe presented the same type of need before this administration.
So folks who might have otherwise been able to go about their lives in the community with their families, working their jobs while their cases were pending, are now being detained and in some instances deported really quickly.
BRODIE: So what are you seeing? For parents who are detained and perhaps ultimately deported, it seems like they have a few options of maybe what they can do with their kids, depending on maybe arrangements that have been made prior to their detention.
KRIBS: I mean, certainly the kind of best-practice information out there right now for families is it’s wise to be making a plan in advance of any sort of crisis. So you see a lot of legal aid organizations like the Young Center and others advising families to have an action plan if a parent or a caregiver for a child is detained, to ideally have some legal documentation formalizing that plan in place so that if a parent or caregiver is is deported, there’s somebody in the United States who has the legal authority to continue caring for for a child.
But I think that what we are seeing in a lot of these instances is just such extraordinary immigration enforcement action that a lot of families are left without much of an opportunity to actually plan for children’s care and custody. And it results in family separation that in some instances could be permanent.
BRODIE: So what kinds of things are you able to do in those cases if parents haven’t made arrangements for what to do with their U.S. citizen kids? And we should specify these are specifically kids who are born here, who are U.S. citizens. What are you able to do? What are the options for what happens to those kids?
KRIBS: In the ideal scenario, a detained parent — and whether their child is a U.S. citizen or not, frankly — ideally, that parent has an opportunity to consult with other family members to make a plan for the care of their child, to determine whether they want their child to remain here in the United States or to be removed with them, and then to see that plan put into action.
But in reality, that’s just not what we’re seeing. We’re seeing parents who maybe want to take a child with them because they don’t want to be separated, not being allowed to do that. Or in other instances — as we just saw out of Louisiana a few weeks ago — parents of U.S. citizen children that they wanted to remain in the United States, but they didn’t have that opportunity. They were cut off from communicating with family and with their attorneys and were ultimately removed with their U.S. citizen children.
BRODIE: So what happens to kids in the case where a parent is deported but the child stays in the U.S.? Let’s say they maybe don’t have a family member or a designated caregiver that they can go to. What happens to those kids?
KRIBS: Yeah, that’s a great question. When a child remains here after a parent’s deportation and there isn’t another family member to step up and care for that child, what we can see is a child taken into the state child welfare custody or the foster care system in the state that they live in. And that can kick off a very long process of a state court that is really only accustomed to dealing with U.S. citizen children, generally who have U.S. citizen parents, into a state court evaluating whether that child can be reunified with their parent or whether that parent’s rights should be permanently severed and the child should be up for adoption.
BRODIE: What are you hearing from some of these kids? I can only imagine the trauma of having a parent detained and deported and maybe not know if you’re going to see them again — depending on the age of the kid, if they’re old enough to understand that. But then if they’re young enough, to maybe not really have any idea what’s going on.
KRIBS: You know, Mark, in thinking about how to answer that question, I am reminded of what I bore witness to back in 2017 and 2018, when I and many of my colleagues at the Young Center and in the immigrant advocacy community were on the front lines of the family separation crisis, where we saw the first Trump administration very intentionally separating children from parents at the border.
And the trauma that we bore witness to — that the kids experience and that the parents experience as well — it had a profound impact. You know, there’s many of these families I’m still in touch with to this day. They’re still recovering from the harm of the separation that they experienced seven, eight years ago. It continues to ripple through their lives.
And it’s not something that goes away easily. So I look at what is unfolding around us right now in this day and age, and it’s essentially the same thing. It’s family separation on a wide scale. It’s just not getting the same attention that it did back in 2018.
BRODIE: Do you think there’s a better way to do this? If the government’s goal is to remove people from the U.S. who are not citizens of this country, who are here undocumented, is there a better way to make that happen with not causing the kind of trauma to kids that this policy seems to be causing?
KRIBS: Well, the first way it has to happen is in compliance with basic principles of due process, right? That’s one of the biggest concerns that immigrant advocates are raising right now is that folks are being detained and deported without their day in court, without an opportunity to show that they might be eligible for some type of status that means they don’t have to be deported in the first place.
But even after you go through a court process that is grounded in due process, if an individual cannot show that they have the right to remain here and they’re facing deportation, there are absolutely child- and family-friendly policies that could be put in place to help ensure that any deportation that does take place has a minimally traumatic impact on a family.
Now, don’t get me wrong, it’s always going to be traumatic for a family to lose somebody as they’re deported. But there are things that we can do to help the family prepare for that and to mitigate the harm of that act of family separation.
BRODIE: What kinds of things do you think, in a perfect world — again, if this kind of policy is the policy the government is going to pursue — what kinds of things do you think should be happening to help these kids?
KRIBS: Ample opportunity for parents and legal guardians to be able to communicate with other family members when they’re detained to make a plan for the care in custody for their children. If they want to take their children with them, ICE should be facilitating that when they make that request.
If they want their kids to remain here in the United States, there might be legal documentation that they need to put in place before to help ensure that their child has a legal guardian. They shouldn’t be deported before that paperwork is completed.
They should have ongoing communication and visitation with their children the entire time that they are detained without impediment there. So there are a lot of different steps that we could take to try to make this less harmful than it inevitably is.
