When the Government Becomes the Source of Trauma for Children

Governments are meant to protect people, not to traumatize them. Yet right now in the United States we are witnessing a distressing reality in which even the youngest and most vulnerable are not spared. The image of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, taken into federal custody, last month, by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after returning home from preschool in Minnesota, has become a haunting symbol of this moment. In that photograph, a frightened little boy wearing a tiny backpack and cap stands beside uniformed agents, an image that should unsettle every one of us and spur urgent action.

Just days later, 2-year-old Chloe Renata Tipan Villacis was detained alongside her father while they were coming home from the grocery store, an encounter that sparked widespread outrage and further intensified concern about how our immigration enforcement policies are being carried out.

Liam’s and Chloe’s stories are not outliers, they reflect the lived experiences of children whose lives have been upended at moments when they should feel safe, in the driveway of their home, on the way back from a preschool afternoon, or beside a parent they love. Their stories reflect a broader pattern unfolding across the country.

TIME recently reported that ICE records reviewed by the Deportation Data Project indicate that more than 3,800 children have been held in immigration detention during the current Trump administration, including over 500 children under the age of five. Although there is no readily available figure capturing the number of children who have experienced separation from a caregiver due to ICE arrest or deportation in 2025 and early 2026, the scale of enforcement activity strongly suggests that the toll on families is massive. According to ICE data compiled by The Guardian, the administration has arrested more than 328,000 people and deported nearly 327,000 individuals since January, 2025, an extraordinary level of enforcement not seen in recent history.

If even a fraction of those individuals were caregivers with children, the number of children who have lost contact with a parent or primary caregiver would likely reach into the hundreds of thousands. Most adults do not parent alone, and many U.S.‑based families include multiple dependents, meaning a single arrest or deportation event can affect multiple children in profound ways. However, what lacks in precise numbers, we make up for in clear patterns: every increase in detentions and deportations leads to a parallel increase in family separations. And every separation brings the potential for lasting emotional and physiological harm, particularly when it involves young children, sudden removals, or prolonged uncertainty about reunification.

These realities should stay with us as reminders of what is at stake and demand that we reflect, organize, advocate, and act.

The Psychological Impact of Family Separation on Children

​​From birth, children rely on the presence of a consistent caregiver to help them regulate their bodies and emotions. When they’re cold, scared, overstimulated, or hurt, it’s not just comfort they need—it’s co-regulation. The adult nervous system acts as a scaffolding for the child’s developing stress response system. When a caregiver is removed, that scaffolding collapses.

What replaces it is fear. Not metaphorical fear. Physiological fear. The kind that floods the child’s brain with cortisol and adrenaline. The kind that alters neural wiring, weakens immune functioning, shrinks the parts of the brain involved in memory and learning, and enlarges those involved in threat detection. The result is not just emotional suffering, but neurological disruption.

These children may experience regressions, sleep disturbances or frequent nightmares, and preoccupations. They may become aggressive, withdrawn, dissociated, or clingy. They may show behaviors that are misunderstood as defiance or pathology, when in reality, they are signals of profound distress. A child may look “difficult” but is actually doing everything they can to survive in a world that no longer feels safe.

And the harm doesn’t stop there. Environments where children are detained, bright lights, loud sounds, unfamiliar adults, lack of comforting touch, can compound the trauma. These institutional conditions have been described by researchers as a form of developmental threat, especially in the absence of familiar caregivers. The brain learns: I am not safe anywhere. Tragically, many children may begin to believe they are not worthy of care and protection. This, of course, doesn’t even account for the thousands of reports of abuse and unsafe conditions occurring within detention centers.

This is predictable. It’s not controversial in child development. We have decades of research on attachment and developmental trauma that tells us exactly what happens when we separate children from their caregivers under terrifying and uncertain conditions. It doesn’t just cause distress. It can derail developmental trajectories.

For a child to be torn from the familiar safety of his family or detained and confronted by uniformed federal agents is inherently traumatic. Experiences like this can seed deep and long-lasting psychological wounds, fear, mistrust, anxiety, and a sense of vulnerability that can become embedded in a young child’s DNA. Trauma in childhood doesn’t just cause momentary fear; it reshapes how children see the world and themselves, affecting their emotional regulation, sense of safety, and capacity to form trusting relationships, sometimes well into adulthood.

When a government enacts policies that traumatize children at scale, it is not only a humanitarian crisis, it becomes a generational public health disaster. From a public health perspective, this moment doesn’t end with Liam or Chloe or the thousands of children impacted by detention and deportation. It travels into classrooms, into homes, into the bodies of parents and children who now wonder if today will be the day their family is torn apart. It travels into the collective nervous system of immigrant communities, generating chronic stress, fear of public institutions, and reluctance to seek care or protection. It travels into future generations. Research on intergenerational trauma shows that when young children are exposed to overwhelming fear, loss, and helplessness, especially in the absence of reparative care, those experiences can ripple forward, influencing not only their own well-being but also the health and development of their future children. Epigenetic studies have demonstrated that trauma-related changes in gene expression may be passed down across generations, particularly through stress-response pathways. Children harmed by separation and detention today may grow into adults more vulnerable to anxiety, depression, and chronic illness, and may face challenges in forming secure attachments with their own children, risking a cycle of emotional dysregulation and mistrust.

We continue to witness the long-term effects among children who are now adolescents after being separated under Trump’s Zero Tolerance policy. Nearly seven years later, the effects remain deeply present; it resurfaces as distress at the dinner table, in persistent memories of separation, aggression, and fear of abandonment or losing a loved one. These wounds are further magnified as these youth witness other children being torn from their parents, reigniting the terror that separation could happen again.

A generation of children raised under the shadow of detention and family fragmentation cannot be expected to thrive without deliberate and sustained efforts to repair what has been broken. We are not only shaping individual outcomes, we are shaping the emotional and moral architecture of our future society.

At a societal level, these collective harms can accumulate. When entire communities are subjected to fear and institutional violence, the result is not just increased demand for mental health services or higher healthcare costs. It is a weakening of social trust, civic participation, and overall public health.  Normalizing or justifying this kind of harm, especially by the very government institutions entrusted with citizens’ well-being, corrodes public trust and undermines the social fabric that keeps communities healthy and resilient.

Choosing Action and Care Over Cruelty

We are clinicians and researchers who have dedicated our work to understanding and treating childhood and immigration related trauma. We are also neighbors, community members, and people who believe that dignity and safety should be unconditional. The evidence is clear: the damage is avoidable and the moral stakes are high.

If we understand trauma—and we do—then we have a responsibility to prevent state-sanctioned practices that create it. Family unity should not be conditional. Childhood safety should not depend on legal status. All children are our children. Their pain is not less because they are young, or small, or can’t speak for themselves; it is not less because it is happening behind a fence or under a badge. Their safety and healing is our responsibility. Let us be the adults fighting for care over cruelty. The harm is real, and it’s lasting. But so is our capacity to intervene and to care for one another.

The children cannot afford for us to look away, minimize the harm, or wait for the next viral image of a child in crisis. The soul of our society cannot afford it either. If we are serious about protecting children, then we must stop the policies that predictably harm them. This means calling for real alternatives to family separation and detention. It means investing in systems of care for all of us and repairing our broken immigration system through policy grounded in dignity rather than punishment. It means raising our voices for immigrant families, not just in principle but in practice, by showing up at local meetings, supporting legal and advocacy organizations, offering direct help to families in need, and voting for leaders who value the safety and humanity of every child. It means choosing to stay present, to stay informed, and to speak out. It also might mean having those hard conversations with the family members, friends, and neighbors who do not yet see the lasting impact these policies have on us all.

We cannot relent in holding our elected officials accountable; our democracy depends on it. Now is the time to demand that members of Congress unequivocally condemn policies and enforcement practices that instill fear rather than foster safety and trust in our communities.

We know that Mad in America asks that its bloggers avoid political calls for action that fall along a right/left divide. Yet, the deployment of National Guard troops and ICE agents is not just an “immigrant” issue, but is a threat to the civil liberties and dignity of all of us. If we allow the normalization of state violence against the most vulnerable among us, tomorrow it could be anyone else facing fear instead of protection. We owe it to our neighbors, our families, and our shared humanity to speak out, act with urgency, and shape a political landscape that upholds safety, justice, and belonging for everyone.