{"id":12119,"date":"2026-06-04T15:32:03","date_gmt":"2026-06-04T15:32:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/siliconvalleymovingpost.com\/?p=12119"},"modified":"2026-06-04T15:32:03","modified_gmt":"2026-06-04T15:32:03","slug":"trump-administration-has-separated-dozens-of-children-from-their-parents-for-a-second-time-ap-finds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/siliconvalleymovingpost.com\/?p=12119","title":{"rendered":"Trump administration has separated dozens of children from their parents for a second time, AP finds"},"content":{"rendered":"

By GARANCE BURKE and SONIA P\u00c9REZ D.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Eleven-year-old Ederson Galicia Alva had just stepped off the plane and into the Miami airport\u2019s dim hallways when federal agents pulled his mother aside for questioning. Again.<\/p>

Read more Amtrak Pacific Surfliner adds trains, urges early reservations for LA World Cup<\/a><\/p>\n

Panic welled up. His excitement at soon being back at recess with his Florida classmates fell away. Would the government take her away again?<\/p>\n

This was not his first trauma. In 2018, when he was just 3 years old, Ederson was taken from his mother\u2019s arms at the U.S.-Mexico border under the first Trump administration\u2019s family separation policy and kept apart from her in a government facility for months. They were finally reunited after lawyers intervened. Then, in June of last year, he and his mother were separated a second time, despite legal protections meant to keep them and families like theirs together.<\/p>\n

He later joined his mother in Guatemala. After a destitute, torturous 11 months in the indigenous highlands, Ederson\u2019s family was allowed to return to Florida last week, following a federal judge\u2019s order that the government had acted illegally.<\/p>\n

Now, eight years after President Donald Trump\u2019s forcible border separations came to an official halt following global outrage, an Associated Press investigation has found that the government has re-separated dozens of children from their families, despite a landmark legal settlement meant to keep them together. Some of their parents have been locked in immigration detention facilities for months, others deported back to their home countries after being taken from their families once again. In some cases, immigration officials conducting interior arrests deported people despite discovering they were legally off limits for removal, according to emails obtained by AP.<\/p>\n

\u201cNot only has the government refused to acknowledge the horror of the initial separations during Trump I, but it is now detaining and deporting these same families,\u201d said Lee Gelernt, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union and lead counsel in the lawsuit that ended the policy. \u201cThese children have suffered enough without re-traumatizing them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump successfully ran for reelection on an anti-immigration platform. Under his second term, the administration has vowed to deport more than 1 million people per year. Federal agents have been plucking people from their communities so swiftly that, according to the Brookings Institution, now the parents of tens of thousands of children have been detained.<\/p>

\n<\/div>\n

This time, family separations often look different from Trump\u2019s first term. In 2018, Ederson and other children at the border were taken from their parents, who were detained separately and overwhelmingly charged criminally with illegal entry. Then, the government was unable to reunite them for months because adults and children\u2019s information was kept in different computer systems. A judge barred the government from separating most families at the border and ordered the government to bring the families back together after the ACLU filed a class action lawsuit. Later, a court settlement banned most family separations to deter immigration until December 2031.<\/p>\n

Today, if parents are arrested or deported under the president\u2019s push for mass deportations, they are being made to choose whether to leave their children behind in the United States.<\/p>\n

\u201cDHS complies with all court orders, even as radical NGOs shop for the most favorable forum and activist judges seek to thwart our operations,\u201d acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson, said in response to AP requests for comment about the government\u2019s policies toward separated families.<\/p>\n

Government attorneys have argued in recent court filings that there are no legal restrictions on \u201cthe government\u2019s statutory authority to execute orders of removal.\u201d Bis added that enforcing immigration law was \u201cnot optional,\u201d and that \u201cevery removal of an illegal alien helps restore order and reinforce the rule of law.\u201d<\/p>

\n<\/div>\n

Ederson\u2019s family recently was allowed to return, but their status is still on shaky ground.<\/p>\n

  • \n
    \"Ederson<\/figure>\n
    Ederson Galicia Alva, right, walks with his mother, Mirsy Maricela Alva L\u00f3pez, and sister, Briseidy, through the historic center of Guatemala City, Wednesday, May 27, 2026. (AP Photo\/Moises Castillo)\n<\/div><\/div><\/li>
  • \n
    \"The<\/figure>\n
    The sun shines down onto Todos Santos Cuchumatan, Guatemala, Thursday, April 30, 2026. (AP Photo\/Moises Castillo)\n<\/div><\/div><\/li>
  • \n
    \"Mirsy<\/figure>\n
    Mirsy Maricela Alva Lopez, right, embraces a relative as she and her children return to the home they all shared in West Palm Beach, Fla., nearly one year after being separated by the U.S. government for the second time, Thursday, May 28, 2026. (AP Photo\/Rebecca Blackwell)\n<\/div><\/div><\/li>
  • \n
    \"Mirsy<\/figure>\n
    Mirsy Maricela Alva L\u00f3pez, right, and her children, Ederson, center, and Briseidy pose for photos at their house in San Mart\u00edn Cuchumat\u00e1n, Guatemala, Thursday, April 30, 2026. (AP Photo\/Moises Castillo)\n<\/div><\/div><\/li>
  • \n
    \"Mirsy<\/figure>\n
    Mirsy Maricela Alva Lopez, a Guatemalan migrant who has been separated from her son Ederson twice, cries during an interview at her parents\u2019 house in San Mart\u00edn Cuchumat\u00e1n, Guatemala, Thursday, April 30, 2026. (AP Photo\/Moises Castillo)\n<\/div><\/div><\/li><\/div><\/div><\/ul>
    Ederson Galicia Alva, right, walks with his mother, Mirsy Maricela Alva L\u00f3pez, and sister, Briseidy, through the historic center of Guatemala City, Wednesday, May 27, 2026. (AP Photo\/Moises Castillo)\n<\/div>Expand<\/span><\/div><\/div>\n

    Separated at the border, then again in Florida<\/h4>\n

    After being taken from his mother, Mirsy Maricela Alva L\u00f3pez, and confined to a government shelter in Arizona as a toddler for four and a half months, Ederson barely recognized her once they were reunited, she said. Vivid nightmares haunted him throughout his time in elementary school, where he learned to read in English in classrooms amid lush lawns and palm trees less than 10 miles from Mar-a-Lago, Trump\u2019s Winter White House.<\/p>\n

    Once a federal judge approved a settlement to the class action suit under the Biden administration, Ederson\u2019s family and those like his got legal status to stay in the U.S., with pathways for residency and asylum, and his mother got a work permit. And after months of mental health services to address his ongoing fear that his mother would never return, in early June last year \u2014 about five months after the beginning of Trump\u2019s second administration and the president\u2019s resumed anti-immigration push \u2014 his therapist finally said he had made so much progress he could put his weekly sessions on pause.<\/p>\n

    Two weeks later, Alva L\u00f3pez was stopped by federal agents as she and co-workers were en route to a landscaping job near Mar-a-Lago. The agents, wearing brown uniforms, never gave a reason for the stop or identified themselves before transferring Alva L\u00f3pez to two Florida jails, then to ICE custody in Louisiana, and finally to a plane full of shackled deportees heading to Guatemala City, she said.<\/p>\n

    \u201cI felt the very same thing I went through the first time,\u201d Alva L\u00f3pez said, weeping. \u201cI was living it all over again.\u201d<\/p>\n

    Alva L\u00f3pez was separated from Ederson and his older sister, Briseidy, for a week, and not given the chance to speak with an immigration official about her status or legal protections, said Kelly Kribs, an attorney with the Young Center for Immigrant Children\u2019s Rights, which has supported Alva L\u00f3pez\u2019s family\u2019s return to the U.S.<\/p>\n

    When she finally managed to call Ederson and Briseidy, they couldn\u2019t stop sobbing. Alva L\u00f3pez said she asked her sister to buy airplane tickets to send them to Guatemala City. She met them the next day at the airport and traveled with them nine more hours down highways and rutted roads to reach San Mart\u00edn Cuchumat\u00e1n, a hamlet in the highlands where the children were born.<\/p>\n

    The three of them shared a tiny bedroom with a dusty floor with Alva L\u00f3pez\u2019s parents and brother in an adobe brick home with a sheet metal roof, nothing like the leafy cul-de-sacs of South Florida. The school, where all lessons are in Spanish, was a mile\u2019s walk, and none of the children in town spoke English, Ederson said.<\/p>\n

    Instead of clocking in to trim the gardens of West Palm Beach estates, each day Alva L\u00f3pez fed the chickens and ducks in a small coop behind the house, washed the family\u2019s laundry by hand and cooked meals on an open fire.<\/p>\n

    And Ederson was back to waking up at night fearing his future. At Northmore Elementary School, he had been doing well in fifth grade. In Guatemala, he repeated fourth grade, this time in Spanish, and was quizzed on the history and culture of a country he barely knew. His friendships weren\u2019t as close as in West Palm Beach. Sometimes when he felt sad, he watched the school\u2019s old online videos to see his old friends.<\/p>\n

    \u201cWe used to play and chat. Sometimes they would help me when I didn\u2019t understand the lesson, and I would help them with math,\u201d he said, fighting back tears. \u201cI have very few friends here.\u201d<\/p>\n

    Ederson still doesn\u2019t want to talk about the separations, and he can\u2019t stop asking his mother why she went to work that day. But he is clear on one thing: he never wants to be apart from his mother again.<\/p>\n