Eleven-year-old Ederson Galicia Alva had just stepped off the plane and into the Miami airport’s dim hallways when federal agents pulled his mother aside for questioning.
Again. A familiar panic surged. His excitement at soon being back at recess with his Florida classmates evaporated. Would the government take her away again?
This was not the first time Ederson had faced such trauma.
In 2018, when he was just three years old, Ederson was taken from his mother’s arms at the U.S.-Mexico border under the first Trump administration’s family separation policy and kept apart from her in a government facility for months. They were finally reunited after lawyers intervened.
Then, in June of last year, he and his mother were separated a second time, despite legal protections designed to keep them and families like theirs together.
He later joined his mother in Guatemala. After a destitute, torturous 11 months in the indigenous highlands, Ederson’s family was allowed to return to Florida last week, following a federal judge’s order that the government had acted illegally.
Now, eight years after President Donald Trump’s forcible border separations officially ceased amid global condemnation, an Associated Press investigation has found that the government has re-separated dozens of children from their families, despite a landmark legal settlement intended to keep them together.
Some of their parents have been held in immigration detention facilities for months; others have been deported back to their home countries after being taken from their families once again.
In some cases, immigration officials conducting interior arrests deported individuals despite discovering they were legally off limits for removal, according to emails obtained by AP.
“Not only has the government refused to acknowledge the horror of the initial separations during Trump I, but it is now detaining and deporting these same families,” said Lee Gelernt, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union and lead counsel in the lawsuit that ended the policy.
“These children have suffered enough without re-traumatizing them.”
The current administration successfully campaigned on an anti-immigration platform. Under its second term, the administration has vowed to deport more than one million people per year.
Federal agents have been removing individuals from their communities so swiftly that, according to the Brookings Institution, the parents of tens of thousands of children have now been detained.
This time, family separations often look different from the first Trump administration.
