In its first year, the second Trump administration implemented stricter detention measures against immigrant families than previous administrations, especially against minors. From January to October 2025, ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) detained approximately 3,800 minors, according to research conducted by The Guardian using data obtained by the Deportation Data Project.

Family detention policies in the U.S. were formulated under the guidelines established in the “Flores Agreement” during the Clinton administration in 1997. Under this agreement, the government is obligated to maintain standards of conduct and ethics when detaining children, such as detention in the least restrictive environment possible, release to parents or other guardians when possible, and transfer to state-licensed facilities when this is not feasible.

Following the signing of this agreement, the establishment of detention centers, such as the “T. Don Hutto Correctional Center” in Texas in 2006, marked the Bush administration's immigration control policy. Under subsequent Democratic administrations, Obama reduced family detentions in 2009 but increased them after the number of women from African countries traveling with minors began to rise in 2014. The Biden administration, in turn, suspended the detention of immigrant families in 2021. Both Trump administrations, meanwhile, attempted to overturn and repeal the "Flores Agreement" measures within the US legislature. The first implemented a short-term "family separation" policy, which sent parents to prisons and children to shelters managed by the Office of Refugee Resettlement. In March 2026, 85 minors remained detained at the Dilley Detention Center in Texas. A smaller number than observed at the beginning of February, according to information from legal advocates for minors who reported about 280 individuals detained. However, concerns about the conditions of these detention centers continued, according to Mishan Wroe, legal director of the National Center for Youth Law, who visited the site in March of this year.

Among the events reported during this period, the case of a suicide attempt by a 13-year-old stands out after the medical staff withheld his prescribed antidepressants, in addition to denying his request to join his mother, according to the Associated Press. Although the government reported that there were "no inpatients under surveillance for suicide prevention," the AP obtained documents from the Dilley Detention Center describing a "suicide attempt by cutting the wrist" and "self-harm".

Still at the beginning of 2026, in January, five-year-old Lian Conejo Ramos was detained by ICE agents on his way home from school in Columbia Heights, Minnesota. He and his father, who had picked him up from school, were taken to the Detention Center in Dilley. The photographic record of his detention became one of the most emblematic symbols of this wave of restrictive measures against immigrants.