How many kids from illegal immigrants have been deported under trump
Executive summary
There is no single, authoritative tally of “kids from illegal immigrants deported under Trump”; available reporting gives different slices of the problem depending on time period and definition of “kid” (unaccompanied minor, child traveling with a parent, U.S. citizen child removed with a parent, or a child detained in family units), and those slices yield very different numbers [1] [2] [3] [4]. The clearest, best-documented figures in the public record are: roughly 16,000 unaccompanied children expelled under Title 42 beginning in 2020 (documented in a legal FOIA-driven review) and thousands more children booked into family detention or removed during interior enforcement after 2024, but a comprehensive, single-number total for all children deported under the Trump administrations is not available from the sources provided [1] [2] [5].
1. What the most concrete public counts cover — Title 42 expulsions and unaccompanied minors
A FOIA-driven review by the Center for Human Rights of the Child and the American Immigration Council documents that, beginning in 2020, the Trump administration expelled thousands of unaccompanied children under the CDC’s Title 42 public‑health authority — a figure the organizations used to explain approximately 16,000 expelled migrant children tied to that policy [1]. That 16,000 number is the most explicit count in the sources for unaccompanied minors expelled under a named legal mechanism and is tied to a particular policy choice rather than to ongoing interior removals [1].
2. Family separations, children removed with parents, and citizen children
Reporting about children separated at the border during Trump’s first term cites more than 5,000 children taken from families under the zero‑tolerance prosecutions that began in 2018, a separate episode from Title 42 expulsions but part of the broader record of children caught up in enforcement [6]. Public‑facing coverage in 2025–2026 documents individual cases in which U.S. citizen children were reportedly deported with their foreign‑born mothers; PBS’s reporting counts “at least seven” such cases by its accounting — a distinct and politically sensitive subset of removals [3].
3. Interior enforcement, family detention bookings and scaling claims
Interior enforcement after January 2025 dramatically increased the number of minors processed alongside adults: The Guardian’s analysis of Deportation Data Project records found roughly 3,800 minors booked into immigrant family detention from January through October 2025, a new high that reflects expanded interior operations rather than border expulsions alone [2]. At the same time, official DHS/White House releases and departmental briefs offer vastly larger headline tallies of removals (hundreds of thousands to over 600,000 deportations) but those releases do not disaggregate children reliably and are political messaging documents that must be weighed against independent reporting [7] [5] [8].
4. Reporting that claims tens of thousands of child removals — plausible but not independently verified
Some outlets have reported much larger numbers of deported children — for example, The Independent cited figures suggesting tens of thousands of removals of very young children (15,000 under age four; 20,000 aged four to eleven) — but that reporting summarizes administrative outcomes without an easily verifiable public source in the packet provided here, and the methodology and timeframe for those counts are not fully documented in the excerpts [4]. Because different organizations use different definitions (expelled vs. removed vs. detained; unaccompanied vs. traveling with family) these larger counts can be accurate within their own frame but do not translate cleanly into a single, definitive number.
5. Bottom line and reporting gaps
The available evidence supports stating specific, discrete figures for particular policies: about 16,000 unaccompanied children expelled under Title 42 beginning in 2020 [1], more than 5,000 children separated at the border under the 2018 zero‑tolerance era [6], and about 3,800 minors booked into family detention in Jan–Oct 2025 amid ramped‑up interior enforcement [2]; beyond those documented slices, no single, authoritative total for “how many kids from illegal immigrants have been deported under Trump” exists in the materials provided, and politicized DHS/White House totals do not offer child‑specific breakdowns to close that gap [7] [5] [8]. Independent researchers and advocacy groups continue to press for clearer, disaggregated data; until agencies publish consistent, child‑specific removal metrics, any single headline number will remain contested and dependent on how “children” and “deportation” are defined in each report.