In handwritten cursive, a Russian immigrant named Marina wrote out the story of the day U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents took away her 1-year-old baby while she was being held in a detention facility in southern California. “I cried and begged, kneeling, not to do this, that this was a mistake, not justice and not right,” she wrote. “She was so little that no one knew anything about her. I was very afraid for her and still am!”
This didn’t happen during the Trump administration, which separated more than 4,000 migrant children from their families under its controversial “zero tolerance” policy. Marina was separated from her baby in April of this year. The 40-year-old former restaurant manager came to the U.S.-Mexico border with her husband, mother-in-law and child to seek asylum. More than eight months later, she and her mother-in-law remain in federal immigration custody in Louisiana. Her husband is detained at a different Louisiana immigration facility. And Aleksandra is over a thousand miles away, being cared for by strangers in foster care in California.
Aleksandra is one of around 300 children the Biden administration has separated from their parents or legal guardians this year, according to two government sources who asked not to be identified because they hadn’t been authorized to speak about the separations. Most of the cases involved families crossing the southwestern border, the sources said. These numbers haven’t previously been reported.
Similarly, 298 children were separated from their parents in 2023, according to a government report to Congress published on Tuesday, even as overall migrant crossings have declined. According to the report, the average amount of time children separated between April 2018 and October 2024 have spent in federal custody before being released to a sponsor is 75 days.
The Department of Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the numbers or on Marina’s case.
Those officials who did speak about the separations did so on the condition they not be identified. They said the current separations are not similar — in either character or scale — to what was happening during the Trump administration. Its zero tolerance policy directed authorities to detain and criminally prosecute all immigrants caught illegally crossing the border and to separate them from their children if they were travelling together. Biden administration officials say they have only separated families for reasons according to longstanding immigration practices, including when they have concerns about the parents or the safety of the children. Some of those concerns are related to suspicions about abuse, criminal histories or threats to national security.
The administration reports the numbers of separations to Congress and to lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union who have been charged with providing oversight. However, those reports give few details about the reasons for the separations, especially in cases where parents have been flagged for national security reasons. Around 80 of the children separated between December 2023 and November 2024 were in that category, one of the government sources said, and some 50 of those were Russian, like Aleksandra. The second source said at least 10 of the Russian children who were separated this year are still in government custody.
In cases involving national security, the government can withhold its rationale even from the families themselves, making it hard for them and their lawyers to contest the separations or mount a defense. And some advocates have been reluctant to talk publicly about the current separations, much less call out President Joe Biden’s administration, as they press for the government to resolve their clients’ cases and fear the incoming Trump administration could apply the same standards more broadly to separate more families in the future.
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Family separations at the border did not begin with the zero tolerance policy and didn’t end when it was lifted, said Talia Inlender, deputy director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law, which wrote a report on family separations going back to the Obama years and before. She said that while Trump’s policy was unprecedented because of how expansive it was, the scant information that the government provides about separations at the border has been common practice across administrations.
“I think the lack of transparency creates a lack of accountability,” she said, “and that is by design.”
“Where there is room left for agency discretion,” Inlender said, “that’s really where we need to make sure that there are eyes on what is happening, so that these exceptions, or these grey areas, don’t become the rule.”
During telephone interviews with Marina and her husband, conducted through a translator, the couple said they hoped by breaking the silence on their case, they might get answers about why they were separated from their daughter and get her back. They asked to be identified only by their first names because of their pending deportation cases.
Marina said that she and her husband Maksim, who worked as a supplies manager at a construction company, had met at a restaurant where Marina worked in Moscow. They married in 2021 and tried for years to have a child before Alexsandra was born.
Maksim said he started going to antigovernment protests in support of opposition leader Alexei Navalny and later against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. According to an affidavit Marina gave as part of her asylum case, she said Maksim had been detained, questioned and on one occasion beaten up by police after protests. ProPublica could not independently corroborate the accounts of his political activity. They both said Marina wasn’t involved in the protests and had asked him to stop attending them. Eventually the family decided to leave the country, fearing government reprisals.
After researching the best routes into the U.S. online, they said they bought tickets to Dubai, Mexico City and Tijuana, which sits on the border with California. Once in Tijuana, Marina said they waited for six months for an appointment after using a U.S. government app known as CBP One to apply for permission to approach the border and ask for asylum. They were finally granted a slot and allowed to cross in mid-April.
But instead of being released to pursue their asylum claim, Marina said she and Aleksandra were held in a cold cell at a Border Patrol detention facility. She said she was given only formula and vegetable purees for Aleksandra. She smashed up bread from her own sandwiches to give her daughter extra food. At the time Aleksandra was learning to walk and was always moving around; she had just started to talk.
Then, after several days, Marina said she and her baby were surrounded by border officials who told her the adults would be detained and Aleksandra would be taken away. She said one of the agents handed her a note that read: “CBP has made this decision for the following reason: You are being taken into custody for presenting a public safety or national security risk.”
Recalling the desperation she felt upon seeing the note, Marina wrote: “Why would that be? I didn’t even have an interview!!!”
She said she became catatonic after a Border Patrol agent took her daughter by the hand and led her away.
“I thought I died at that moment.”
Her experience might sound familiar to anyone who followed the news about the thousands of separations carried out by the Trump administration. Its zero tolerance policy first began as a pilot program in 2017, but the administration denied its existence until spring 2018. Even then, authorities refused to make public the details of how the policy was being implemented, including where the children were being held, how many of them were in custody, or even how the separations were conducted.
In June of 2018, ProPublica obtained audio that had been recorded in a Border Patrol facility of wailing children who had been separated from their parents. Among them was a 6-year-old girl, pleading to make a phone call to her aunt. That audio triggered a bipartisan outcry that led the administration to announce the end of the policy 48 hours later. And a federal lawsuit brought by the ACLU forced the administration to reunify the children in its custody with their families.
That reunification effort continued even after Trump left office. Biden, who called zero tolerance a “a moral and national shame,” formed a task force to finish the reunifications shortly after taking office. It found that some parents had been deported without their children and remained separated years later. Biden promised going forward that his administration would not separate children from their parents “except in the most extreme circumstances where a separation is clearly necessary for the safety and well-being of the child or is required by law.”
Biden’s Justice Department negotiated a settlement with the ACLU allowing it to disperse assistance to the families that had been harmed by zero tolerance. Under the terms of the deal, signed last December, future family separations were only allowed in “limited” circumstances, including when parents are deemed a threat to the child, have an outstanding arrest warrant or need to be hospitalized.
The settlement also said separations were allowed when government officials found parents or legal guardians could pose “a public safety or national security risk to the United States,” including people suspected of terrorism or espionage. But in those cases the agreement says that the government is not required to provide documentation of the reason for its decision if it would mean disclosing sensitive information.
Such cases could include instances when migrants’ names come up on an international watch list, said a third government official, who, like the others, spoke on the condition of anonymity. In June of this year, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned two Uzbeks and one Russian national for alleged links to an ISIS-linked human smuggling network that the State Department said facilitated travelers coming to the United States.
“If they are looking into cases more deeply and then people are let go after they found out the information they had was not correct,” the official said, “it’s still pretty difficult to say we shouldn’t go ahead and make those checks if we need to pay extra security attention in these cases.” Sometimes, the official said, authorities are able to quickly resolve any security concerns and reunite the families.
Advocates do not disagree that sometimes separations are warranted, said Lee Gelernt, an ACLU attorney and the lead lawyer in the family separation lawsuit. And they said they understand the sensitivity of sharing information that could put the country at risk.
However, when asked whether the Russian cases highlight the potential pitfalls of the agreement the ACLU made with the administration, Gelernt said that the government “cannot create a loophole and place everything in the black box of national security.”
He added that if the exceptions become “an excuse to circumvent the bar on separations, we will return to court.”
With Biden leaving office soon, it’s the incoming Trump administration that most worries the advocates. Trump made stopping border crossings and mass deportations a centerpiece of his campaign and says they are part of his Day 1 plans for when he takes office, but when asked several times in an interview over the weekend if he would revive the zero tolerance policy, he said: “We’ll send the whole family, very humanely, back to the country where they came. That way the family’s not separated.”
Inlender wasn’t convinced that Trump wouldn’t ramp up family separations. “With any loopholes that exist in policies, any loopholes that exist in the settlement agreements, I think there is always a danger when you have an incoming administration that has already both shown itself willing, and in some cases able, to inflict cruelty to separate families, that they will use any tools at their disposal,” Inlender said.
The children who were separated from their parents for national security reasons in the past year came from a range of countries, including Romania, Turkey, Ukraine, Lebanon, Iran, Kyrgyzstan, Armenia, Colombia and Venezuela, the two government sources said. The majority, however, came from Russia. In fact, only one Russian child separated from their parents this year was listed as being separated for a reason other than national security, they said.
None of the officials interviewed could say whether Russian families had been flagged for special scrutiny. The 50 Russian children separated last year represent a very small share of the overall Russian border crossings. According to CBP data for the 2024 fiscal year, which began last October and ended in September, 7,137 Russian families crossed the southwestern border, almost all of them through legal ports of entry like Marina’s family.
The secrecy surrounding Marina’s case has meant the government has not told her or her lawyer any more specific reason for her detention and prolonged separation from Aleksandra. Marina’s New York-based attorney, Elena Denevich, said in an email that while she has filed a series of parole requests for Marina since May, “the requests were denied based on unspecified ‘national security concerns.’” Denevich said DHS “has provided no evidence or explanation to substantiate this allegation.”
The Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services and oversees migrant children, said it could not comment on individual cases and referred questions about enforcement to DHS. ORR, which earlier this month had only published data on family separations through January 2024 on its website, updated its site with nine new reports from February through October this week.
In addition to interviews, Marina shared her four-page handwritten account of the separation after translating it herself into English using a tablet provided to her in detention. ProPublica reviewed court documents and spoke to Maksim’s stepfather, who crossed the border months earlier but was released to pursue an asylum claim.
Marina’s family has joined a class-action lawsuit brought by more than 150 detained Russian-speaking asylum seekers against the government claiming they are systematically being denied parole by ICE because of their nationalities. Maksim’s stepfather says he has been working nonstop as a long-haul truck driver to pay for legal fees as he fights for the release of his family. ICE said it could not comment on pending litigation.
After their separation, Marina, stuck in detention, said she had to wait three months before she was finally allowed to speak with her daughter on the phone in July. Beginning in August, they were allowed weekly video calls. Because the family Aleksandra is staying with doesn’t speak Russian, Marina has asked them to put on Russian YouTube videos from time to time so her daughter can listen to people speaking her native language. She says Aleksandra looks healthy and like she is being well taken care of, surrounded by toys and wearing new clothes. She is grateful for the foster family, who points to the screen and says “mama” when they talk to remind her who her mother is, but she breaks down crying when talking about how the separation has affected her.
“I’m just trying to take care of myself because my little daughter needs a healthy mom. But because she is so little, I feel really bad. I am starting to fall apart, both mentally and physically,” Marina said from detention. She said she is having trouble sleeping and experiencing a series of worsening health problems.
Not knowing the reason behind their family’s separation is agonizing.
“I don’t have the slightest clue why they did this to us.”
Andrey Babitskiy contributed reporting.