Trump’s renewed family detention policies and attacks on birthright citizenship are expanding a system that subjects immigrant mothers and children to incarceration, medical neglect and lasting harm.
On Aug. 6, just days after the Supreme Court struck down Donald Trump’s Executive Order 14160, which aimed to remove birthright citizenship for children of undocumented parents and temporary visitors, the president signed two new executive orders targeting birthright citizenship and so-called birth tourism.
The first order, “Continuing to Protect the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” aims to exclude babies born to employees working for foreign governments, among others.
The second order, “Ending Birth Tourism,” denies visas to women suspected of misrepresenting their reason for traveling to the U.S. in order to give birth on U.S. soil.
These executive orders are the administration’s latest attempt to police American identity, punish migrant women for entering the U.S. and ultimately regulate their reproduction. Beyond the issue of birthright citizenship, immigrant women and children continue to be targets of a hostile immigration system that seeks to control them through detention, family separation and deportation.
Trump’s efforts to criminalize and punish women, including mothers and pregnant women, have been expanding since his first term, when he signed Executive Order 13768, “Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States in 2017,” removing protections for pregnant women to allow for their frequent detention in immigration facilities. This EO ensured pregnant women could be held in detention centers, despite the fact that they require specialized healthcare, access to medical labs and high-quality ultrasounds that are not readily available in these facilities.
Immediately following this order, more than 2,100 pregnant women were detained, many of whom were detained upwards of weeks or months.
What Is Family Detention?
In 2018, Trump implemented a “zero tolerance” policy that resulted in the separation of more than 5,000 families and the incarceration of children as young as 4 months. These children were housed in abhorrent conditions and without basic amenities, including a blanket, toothbrush and something to eat. Images of children held behind chain-link fencing sparked public outrage on both sides of the political spectrum and the family separations eventually ended, though as of 2024 as many as 1,360 children still had not been reunited with their families.
Family detention differs from the earlier zero tolerance policy that resulted in children being separated from their parents, but it’s no less traumatic. It is a practice designed to detain whole families in immigration facilities while they await hearings.
While halted under Biden, many people don’t know that the Trump administration reinstated family detention in March 2025 and reopened two family detention centers in Texas: the Karnes Family Civil Detention Center in Karnes County, which can house 830 people, and the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, which has space for 2,400 people. Both the Karnes County and South Texas facilities are run by private companies: CoreCivic and GEO Group, respectively.
… Pregnant women … require specialized healthcare, access to medical labs and high-quality ultrasounds that are not readily available in detention facilities.
Family detention allows the administration to get around the optics of separating families while ramping up immigrant detention and undermining the rights of families and children. In fact, since 2025, “the number of families in detention centers has more than tripled,” according to a report by the Children’s Equity Center, “detaining children of all ages, starting in infancy.” These facilities function like civil detention centers or prisons and are unsuitable for stays of any duration.
In addition, minors are being held in residential centers much longer than the 20-day limit set by the Flores Agreement, a 1997 law which outlines basic standards of care for minors in immigration detention.
The Problem With Family Detention
Family detention is not simply another anti-immigrant policy; it is anti-woman, anti-mother and anti-family.
Family residential facilities make it possible to mass criminalize and incarcerate women, mothers and children by creating supposedly, but not actually, appropriate bed space for families to be detained together. Still, the poor conditions of family residential facilities are well-documented by human rights groups and policy centers, including Human Rights First and the Children’s Equity Project at Arizona State University.
Simply being detained presents a medical risk as families experience interrupted medical treatment, inadequate access to health screenings and long-lasting physical and psychological problems. In a recent report, Human Rights First found that “children and their parents have limited access to clean water, nutritious food, sleep, personal hygiene, privacy, or clean or appropriate clothing.”
There is also evidence that migrant women in detention face increased abuse, including sexual assault by officers who have authority over them. Between 2010 and 2016, approximately 33,000 allegations of abuse were received by the DHS Office of Inspector General.
“The sexual abuse of immigration detainees,” according to the ACLU, “is not an isolated problem limited to a few rogue facilities or to a handful of bad-apple government contractors who staff some of the nation’s immigration jails.”
The vulnerability of women is heightened when they are caring for small children, pregnant or postpartum. These instances of neglect and mistreatment are not anomalies; they are integral to a migration management system that seeks to securitize the border by exacerbating the vulnerability of unauthorized migrants through punishments enacted on their bodies.
This pattern of neglect and abuse is not new.
In 2014, the Artesia Family Residential Center in New Mexico was closed down after reports of the center’s inhumane and “prison-like” conditions, inadequate health care and failure to meet child welfare guidelines.
The following year, Berks County Residential Center in Pennsylvania was charged with endangering the health and well-being of children. Despite this pattern of neglect, the center remained open until 2021 when the Biden administration halted the practice of family detention, transitioning all facilities away from long-term family detention.
Families Under Attack
The reinstatement of family residential facilities is part of a broader strategy to punish women for entering the country without authorization, for having children in the U.S. when they lack a legal status, for attempting to raise their children with the same rights and benefits of their peers. This was captured in an interview with Border Czar Tom Homan on CBS’ Face the Nation after three U.S. citizen children, including a 4-year-old with Stage 4 cancer, were deported along with their mothers to Honduras.
Homan justified the deportations by shifting responsibility from the administration to the women who “chose” to have children in the U.S. despite being undocumented, explaining:
“When you enter the country illegally, and you know you are here illegally, and you choose to have a U.S. citizen child, that’s on you. That’s not on this administration. If you choose to put your family in this position, that’s on them. But having a U.S. citizen child after you enter the country illegally, it’s not a get-out-of-jail-free card. It doesn’t make you immune from our laws.”
Even with the reinstatement of family detention, some families are still being separated. Twenty-five-year-old Ingrid Mejia, a farmworker from Guatemala, was detained for four months after driving without a license; her 3-year-old son was put into foster care.
Even after Mejia was released from ICE custody, her child, Eliazar, remained in foster care for several more months. Mejia had to participate in supervised visits and have her home inspected to ensure it was suitable for a child before she could regain custody of her son. Mejia’s case underscores the design of migration management to make the migration process painful, harmful, and incur lasting suffering.
Detaining pregnant mothers and families isn’t just about filling up detention centers to turn a profit or support tough-on-crime statistics. It is a way of penalizing pregnancy in immigrant communities to control and criminalize women’s bodies and their choices.
Though popular rhetoric focuses mainly on male migrants—presenting them as criminals, rapists and terrorists, using fear to stoke hatred of immigrants—the state deliberately mobilizes the resources to criminalize and incarcerate migrant women and children. This approach to border enforcement is inhumane and unjust as it relies on a series of corporeal punishments that deliberately exacerbate the vulnerability of women from the time they leave home until they enter immigration facilities in the U.S.
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A note from Ms. editors: We want to hear from you for The Majority, a new campaign collecting stories about how reproductive freedom has enabled readers to build the lives they want and need. Poll after poll shows a majority of Americans support reproductive healthcare access. Yet public debate overlooks the lives shaped by abortion access, contraception, IVF, miscarriage care, maternal healthcare or comprehensive sex education—countless women who chose to pursue an education, have children, not have children, protect their health and chart their own future. Add your voice and complete the sentence: “Access to reproductive choices gave me the freedom to….” Together, these stories will help show not only why reproductive freedom remains a majority value, but also what it makes possible.
Look to these trusted groups if you or a loved one needs to know more about reliable abortion care:
- A one-stop-shop for abortion seekers: I Need An A
- Other websites to explore all your options for abortion care: Plan C Pills, Abortion Finder
- Safe websites to buy abortion medication: Aid Access, Massachusetts Medication Abortion Access Project, Hey Jane
- If you need help affording abortion care, tell your telemedicine provider or contact an abortion fund near you.
- To protect your digital privacy when planning your abortion, click here.
- For free legal help as a patient or doctor, call If/When/How’s Repro Helpline—844-868-2812—or contact Pregnancy Justice.
- For medical advice, contact the Miscarriage & Abortion Hotline: 833-246-2632.
- If you need to know the abortion law in your state, look to the Center for Reproductive Rights. or Guttmacher Institute.
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