A Look Back at the Family Separation Policy. The Struggle to Uncover the Truth Behind the Trump Administration's Wrongdoings

By The American Immigration Council


In the spring and summer of 2018, the first Trump administration sought to deter migrants from coming to the United States through the cruel practice of separating children from their parents. To do this, they implemented the zero-tolerance policy, which aimed to prosecute all adults who crossed the southern border without inspection. If a family was apprehended, the parents were taken into custody by the Department of Homeland Security, while their children were taken into custody by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

In many cases, these kids were sent to shelters thousands of miles away from their parents, without a way to contact them. Later, the government struggled to reunite families, in part because there was no centralized database of where the children had been sent or who their parents were. Years later, some of the nearly 3,000 children taken by the government during the zero-tolerance period had still not been reunited with their parents.

The American Immigration Council and partners filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act for records to better understand how the government implemented these separations. After the Council sued to obtain these records, the government began producing them on a monthly basis. In 2020, the Council published a tranche of documents highlighting the harms and trauma to children caused by the separations. After years of continuing litigation, the Council received tens of thousands of additional pages from government documents about this policy.

This site showcases a new subset of the records obtained. It reveals how journalists, attorneys and members of Congress fought to expose this horrific policy and hold the government accountable for the pain and havoc it created. Visitors to this site can review never-before-published government records, read analysis by the Council, and hear celebrated actors read first-person accounts by the journalists, attorneys and Congressmen who fought family separations on the front lines.