ICE child arrests doubled this year, and many children were held out of sight

What happened

Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested more than twice as many children through July of this year as in the same period of 2025, The Marshall Project reported in an analysis by Shannon Heffernan and Anna Flagg. Using ICE data obtained by the Deportation Data Project, the outlet counted more than 8,500 children arrested in President Trump’s second term. The vast majority had no criminal conviction or pending charge beyond the immigration violation. According to the report, the Department of Homeland Security called the data inaccurate but offered no evidence and no other figures.

In January, a 5-year-old was arrested in a blue bunny hat and there was national outrage. The Marshall Project reported that within months the government began sending fewer children to the immigrant camp in Dilley, Texas. The arrests kept climbing, and many children were held in places where lawyers and family members couldn’t find them, like hotels and hold rooms in office buildings. A National Center for Youth Law attorney described those sites to the outlet as black boxes.

The Marshall Project told of a Long Island mother held with her two children for nine days in a Texas hotel room after a scheduled ICE check-in. Her teenager cried about failing missed classes. Her 12-year-old worried about the cat left at home. A New York immigration attorney told the outlet her message to families has shifted to: “I was wrong. Hide.” The outlet also reported that in April a federal judge repeated an order for ICE to stop keeping children in hotels, apart from brief stays in transit, and appointed an independent monitor who can inspect them.

Our reflection

Start with the 12-year-old and the cat. That child was taken from home and kept in a room where the family was not allowed to look out the window. What the child’s heart reached for was an animal left behind. Children do not think in case numbers. They think about the cat, and whether the teacher will fail them. Every one of those 8,500 carries a list like that.

The harder truth in this story is about us. In January one photo moved the country. Then the cameras moved on and the arrests doubled anyway, in hotel rooms nobody could photograph. Our compassion followed the picture, and when the picture left, so did we. That is a sin of attention, and most of us have committed it this year about something. Some of us also carry a quieter fear: that caring about these families means picking a side. It doesn’t. Whatever you believe about immigration enforcement, a child should never be held where her own lawyer cannot find her.

When the disciples argued about who was greatest, Jesus took a child and set him in the middle of them (Mark 9:36). Right in the center, where every grown man had to look at him. The practice in this story runs the other way. It puts children behind hotel doors and off the detainee locator. Jesus knows that road from the inside. Matthew tells us he was carried out of Bethlehem at night by parents running from a ruler’s order, and spent his early years as a foreign child in Egypt. He is not watching these families from far off.

So the church’s word to them cannot be “hide.” Repentance here is simple and costly. Stop scrolling past. Learn names.

I won’t call this hopeless, because the reporting shows things moving. After the outcry, fewer children went to Dilley. A judge ordered the hotel holds stopped and put a monitor in place who can walk into those rooms. A lawyer who knows where a child is can actually do something for that child. I have watched a version of this for years inside juvenile detention: a young person behind a locked door stands differently when somebody outside knows his name and keeps showing up. Being found matters.

This week, do one thing that keeps a child from disappearing. If immigrant families sit in your pews, ask them quietly what they need and connect them with legal help they trust. Ask the people who represent you whether children in your state are being held in hotels. Then pray for those families by name.

And he took a child and put him in the midst of them, and taking him in his arms, he said to them, "Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me."

Mark 9:36-37

Source: The Marshall Project, “ICE Has Arrested Twice As Many Children This Year”