650 California students detained by ICE in first year of Trump administration, EdSource analysis find

Oakland, Calif. - Reporters at the education nonprofit news site EdSource analyzed federal data and found that more than 650 California students were detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the first year of the Trump administration.

EdSource reporter Emma Gallegos said the story grew out of a series of high-profile cases involving detained children, including Liam Conejo Ramos in Minnesota and Joseph Londano Rodriguez, a student at the California School for the Deaf, but that it was unclear how widespread the phenomenon was.

"There had been a lot of high-profile stories about children who had been detained by ICE," Gallegos said. "But I really didn't have a sense of how common this was. And so I really wanted to understand just how many children are being affected. And it's also hard to figure out how many are being affected if not everyone wants to come forward and talk about this experience."

Gallegos said the data came from ICE itself, obtained through the Deportation Data Project, a UC Berkeley and UCLA effort that sued the federal government for access to detention records.

"We were able to look at this raw data and then filter it down to see how many of those folks who've been detained by ICE were both children and from California," Gallegos said.

Gallegos said the data, which stretches back to the Biden administration, shows a shift in the age range of detained children. Under President Biden, most detained children were teenagers arriving at the border. Under President Trump, the ages have varied more broadly.

"Under the Trump administration, we were seeing a wide range of ages," Gallegos said. "There were 100 children who were five or under."

An interactive map included in the report tracks where detained students were taken, with many sent to a family detention facility in South Texas. Gallegos said the data does not show who the children were detained with, but the nature of the facility offers a clue.

"This South Texas facility that you see a lot of these children from California going to, it is a family detention center," Gallegos said. "So those children are probably with family members."

Gallegos said the pattern marks a departure from the Biden administration, when children crossing into San Diego were typically released.

"What's happening is that you have children from all across the state in the interior of the state — those who live in California communities, attend California schools — who are being detained, and many of them, as you see, being sent to Texas," she said.

Gallegos said the shift reflects immigration enforcement reaching inland communities far from the border, rather than detentions being initiated by Border Patrol.

She pointed to reporting by EdSource colleague Zaidee Stavely on the case of Wendy Godinez Lopez, a 9-year-old detained and ultimately deported from West Contra Costa Unified School District in San Pablo.

"She talked to Wendy's teacher, and she talked about how the children in the classroom treated her deportation more like a death, in some ways," Gallegos said. "They started using the past tense to talk about her. They would still remember her. It was a very emotional experience for them."

Gallegos said reporting on the topic has been difficult because many people affected, including teachers, are reluctant to speak publicly.

"Even teachers sometimes are a little shy about talking about this," Gallegos said. "They're worried about retaliation or things. So it was important for us to tell the story about the scope of what's going on — over 650 children are being affected — and also just to see what's happening in one community."

Gallegos said the third-grade classmates of the detained 9-year-old wanted to hold a protest.

"You can see just again, this one student out of the over 650, what a ripple effect it had in her community," she said.

Gallegos said she reached out to the Department of Homeland Security for the report. The agency disputed the data and denied that ICE separates families or targets children.

"They said that ICE does not separate families. Parents are asked if they want to be removed with their children, or ICE will place the children with a safe person that the parent designates," Gallegos said. "They also took issue with this data, the deportation data, but I will say again, this is ICE's own data, and I reached out to the Deportation Data Project. They said they were very transparent with the way that they use these numbers and publicize them."

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