How many kids born on us soil but birthed from illegal immigrants have been deported under trump

Checked on January 30, 2026
Disclaimer: Factually can make mistakes. Please verify important information or breaking news. Learn more.

Executive summary

Confirmed, documented instances of U.S.-born children being deported alongside or during the deportation of their foreign-born parents under the Trump administration exist, but the exact total is unknown; reporting by PBS counts at least seven such U.S. citizen children as of April 2025 [1], while federal agencies do not publish a comprehensive, disaggregated tally of citizen deportations [2].

1. What the narrow question actually seeks

The user asks for a numeric count of children born on U.S. soil (and thus U.S. citizens by birth) who have been deported when their parents—described as “illegal immigrants”—were removed; this is a specific subset of all removals that hinges on two verifiable facts (the child’s U.S. birthright citizenship and an actual government-ordered removal of that citizen), and that subset is not systematically tracked in publicly released federal removal data [2].

2. The best documented figure: at least seven cases

Investigative reporting summarized by PBS found and counted at least seven instances in which U.S. citizen children were deported in connection with their parents’ removal under the Trump administration as of April 2025; those cases are the clearest documented examples available in the reporting provided [1].

3. Why official totals are unavailable or unclear

Federal deportation tallies and public DHS/ICE releases focus on totals of “removals,” “returns,” and broader counts of people who left the country—figures that mix deportations, voluntary self-deportations, and border returns—and DHS has not regularly released disaggregated data that would identify removals of U.S. citizens specifically, making it impossible to derive a comprehensive count from agency statistics alone [3] [4] [5].

4. Broader reporting shows many minors detained but not necessarily deported as citizens

Press investigations and non‑profit analyses document thousands of minors booked into family detention or expelled under pandemic-era authorities and more aggressive enforcement policies; for example, The Guardian reported roughly 3,800 minors booked into family detention in early 2025, and other reporting documents tens of thousands of child expulsions under earlier Title 42 processes—these accounts confirm widespread detention of children but do not equate to a definitive count of U.S.-born children removed from the country as citizens [6] [7].

5. Conflicting public narratives and institutional incentives

Administration statements and DHS press releases have touted very large aggregate figures—hundreds of thousands of “deportations” and millions who “left” the U.S.—but those releases aggregate self-deportations and removals and typically omit granular citizen-status breakdowns, an omission that serves political messaging goals while limiting independent verification; demographers and independent analysts have publicly questioned the administration’s math and noted the lack of comparable historical disclosures [4] [3] [8].

6. Bottom line and limits of available evidence

Based on the reporting assembled here, there are at least seven documented instances of U.S.-born children being deported under the Trump administration [1]; however, because federal removal statistics do not publicly identify U.S. citizens separately and because DHS/ICE have changed what data they publish, the true total could be higher but cannot be confirmed from the available sources [2] [3].

Want to dive deeper?
How do DHS and ICE classify and report removals, returns, and voluntary departures in public data releases?
What legal protections exist to prevent the deportation of U.S. citizen children, and how have courts addressed alleged citizen deportations?
How have reporters and immigrant-rights groups documented cases of U.S. citizen children deported with their parents since 2018?