An analysis by the Marshall Project concludes that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested more than twice as many children from January this year to July as compared to the same six-month period last year. WAMC’s Maryam Ahmad joined hosts Sam Dingman and Josh Landes to dig into the data.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
Editor's note: this conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Sam Dingman: So, Maryam, you've spent some time looking into this data. What are some of your biggest takeaways?
Maryam Ahmad: This is data compiled by the Marshall Project from a larger pool from the Deportation Data Project, which is an organization that goes through data from ICE through FOIL requests and cleans it up for the public to access. The biggest number I would say is that 8,592 children, including anyone under the age of 18, have been arrested by ICE in the second Trump administration. An equally striking number: 562 of those were babies and toddlers under the age of four.
There is a caveat to this data that there are technically more detentions, about 8,700, since someone could be detained without being arrested. That may happen at the border, but the reason I was curious about this data is because of what we know about New York.
There's no detention center for women or children in the state, so for the most part, they are transferred out of state, specifically to places like the Dilley ICE Processing Center in Texas. But Shannon Heffernan, one of the journalists who reported on the data for the Marshall Project, says there are fewer detentions happening at Dilley now.
Shannon Heffernan: Instead, you see people staying in places like hotels and hold rooms, which are these locations for short-term stays inside ICE office buildings. That's concerning because we know a lot less about those locations. As troubling as everything is that we hear out of Dilley, there is some degree of oversight. You have lawyers going in there regularly. You have communication with people inside. That's less true about these hotels and hold rooms inside office buildings.
Dingman: Maryam, you mentioned the Dilley detention facility. That name may have rung some bells for folks listening. If I'm not mistaken, that is the facility in Texas that Liam Ramos was sent to. That was a pretty famous story from earlier this year. A lot of photographs of him were circulated. He was wearing a knit cap and a backpack and had a very terrified look on his face.
Ahmad: Right, and there was huge pushback to that image. But while detentions at Dilley may have gone down, that doesn't necessarily mean that detentions of children went down overall. Many of them now, as Heffernan and as data analyst Anna Flagg detailed, are taken to hotels first before being taken to ICE facilities or deported.
One particular story that struck me was about a woman from Long Island who told Heffernan that she and her children, a teenager and a 12-year-old, were taken from Long Island while they were doing a routine ICE check-in. That's just them going to the processing center, and going through their documents, for example.
From there, they were taken to a hotel in Texas and held there for nine days. According to Heffernan, two ICE agents remain in the room with them at all times, and their lawyer couldn't locate them either. Here's Heffernan telling part of that story:
Heffernan: They were in that nine-day period allowed two phone calls, each precisely three minutes in length, to call her mother-in-law, the parent, the children's grandparent, and they used that call to make plans for how their bunny at home was going to get fed. The mother was told, "If you say where you're located right now, we will separate you from your children.”
Josh Landes: So, aside from these families being detained in hotels, Maryam, how is this different from the first Trump administration and ICE enforcement and tactics during that time period?
Ahmad: Looking at the numbers — it's a substantial difference. Anna Flagg, who did the data analysis, said there was dramatic growth, making a distinction in particular between the border — where Customs and Border Patrol might deport and detain people — and the interior United States.
Anna Flagg: This is the type of deportation — a deportation from the interior of the country — that has gone up dramatically under Trump's second administration compared to the last many administrations, including his prior administration. We're just seeing a lot more children getting picked up in that way. And these are children who may have been living in the United States with their families for many years.
Dingman: In the first Trump administration we heard about these detention proceedings as a “border issue,” and now as we've been hearing in this conversation, it's happening more in these “interior” environments. Speaking of the rhetoric from the Trump administration, though - the Trump administration often says with regard to ICE proceedings that they are targeting criminals specifically. How is that reflected in this data?
Ahmad: There is really in the data a reflection that a vast majority of the people who are being detained and arrested, particularly children, are people who've committed civil immigration violations. These are not criminal violations, and these detentions are increasing, particularly happening at these routine ICE check-ins, like that story we heard from Heffernan.
Heffernan: So it's making for some really difficult decisions, especially when families are told, "Okay, show up to this ICE hearing and bring your children." Well, if you bring your children, there's the fear that your children will be detained, and there's all the psychological toll that will take on them. But there's the fear that if you don't bring them, what if you're detained and move towards deportation, and you're not with your children? So I hear from lawyers and families that they're making very difficult decisions about what they should do in these extremely confusing circumstances and unpredictable circumstances for them.
Ahmad: Flagg also noted a spike in 2026 as ICE has set quotas for arrests, which she says means that they've been casting a much wider net than before.
Landes: Now, in New York State, the only ICE facility is the Buffalo Processing Center. Put this in context for us nationally. How does this change things for New York State amidst this ongoing aggressive immigration crackdown?
Ahmad: On this list of states that have had the highest number of detentions of children in particular, New York ranks third. Some of that matches up to the population levels. New York has a larger immigrant population, but even accounting for that bigger immigrant population, Flagg says the arrests of children, in particular, have spiked significantly.
Flagg: ICE has arrested 1,336 children in total in New York State since Trump retook office, and there was a big increase in 2026. So, in the first seven months of 2026, the were triple the number of child arrests as there were in the entire year in 2025.
Ahmad: Also, in New York - I worked alongside with our colleague Sajina Shrestha, looking at data on ICE arrests and detentions outside of Long Island and New York City. We were interested in what happens in upstate New York, when someone is arrested and detained by ICE. In 2025, men made up 92% of those deported, and most of them were detained in the Buffalo ICE processing center. But women who were detained were more likely to be transferred multiple times, often detained in hotels or county jails. But that could change as now a ban has been put in place by the state on detentions in county jails.
