The image of immigration officers arresting five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos – in a blue bunny hat and Spider-Man backpack – in January sparked outrage across the country.

Celebrities from Ms Rachel to Madonna called for the closure of the Dilley immigration processing center, the Texas immigrant camp that held Ramos and many children like him. Lawyers filed complaints about contaminated food and shoddy healthcare, and hundreds of activists protested outside the detention camp. Within months, the government began sending fewer children to Dilley.

But the arrests of immigrant children did not stop. Instead, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested more than twice as many children this year through July as it did in the same period last year. Thus far in Donald Trump’s second term, ICE has arrested more than 8,500 children. Many of those children have been detained in locations where lawyers and family members couldn’t find them, such as hotels and hold rooms in office buildings.

Immigration lawyers said they believe the government is arresting children because it wants to remove as many immigrants as possible, regardless of their age or vulnerability.

Elora Mukherjee, a lawyer and Columbia Law School professor, has represented more than 100 children and parents in ICE detention in the last year and said many of her clients were arrested while complying with immigration court instructions. “As a nation we shouldn’t be cruel to children. This is the time of year when children should be back in school in their classrooms,” Mukherjee said.

The Marshall Project analyzed data on ICE arrests and detentions obtained by the Deportation Data Project, a research collaboration between the University of California, Berkeley and UCLA. Most immigration violations are civil, not criminal, and the vast majority of children counted in ICE’s arrest data have no criminal conviction or pending charges beyond the immigration violation.

The Department of Homeland Security did not answer specific questions about the data. In a written statement, the agency said the data from the Deportation Data Project, which was supplied by ICE in response to information requests, was inaccurate. The department offered no evidence to support that claim and did not provide alternate figures.

Lawyers for immigrant families said many of the children being arrested have been in the country for years, and are traumatically torn away from their friends, family and homes.

A 16-year-old identified by the initials JAI said in a court declaration that he’d been living in Texas with his family for eight years. One morning earlier this year, at about 5am, he heard yelling and pounding on the door of his home. Suddenly, officers charged in, he said, and went to his 12-year-old brother’s room.

“They pointed a gun at my little brother; threw him against a wall; grabbed him by the hair; and then put handcuffs on him. They did the same thing with me,” he said.

ICE’s increased targeting of children was especially sharp in some states. In Massachusetts and Florida, more than twice as many children were arrested in the first seven months of the year as in all of 2025. In New York and New Jersey, the arrests tripled.

Nuala O’Doherty-Naranjo, an attorney and founder of the Jackson Heights Immigration Center in New York City, said the rise in arrests of families has created a chilling effect in immigrant communities. Outside her door, she sees ICE driving up and down the street, and when she visits high schools she senses a fearful mood. She said she used to tell immigrant families that they were welcome in New York City and should students for school, go to English classes and join community groups. But she’s increasingly found herself shifting her message to: “I was wrong. Hide.”

Many children arrested by ICE wind up being detained, for periods of less than an hour to several months. ICE has detained more than 8,750 kids since Trump retook office, slightly more than the number it arrested, because children can come into detention via various methods, such as being apprehended by the border patrol.

Children detained for long stretches are usually sent to the immigrant camp in Dilley. And throughout the year, hundreds of children continued to face long stints there. But children were also held for shorter stints in a wide range of locations, including hotels and hold rooms, where lawyers said their clients often lacked access to proper food or privacy.

Becky Wolozin, a lawyer with the National Center for Youth Law, described these locations as “black boxes”, where families essentially disappear, with little to no contact with lawyers and relatives.

The ICE data obtained by the Deportation Data Project does not note when the agency detained children in hotels. But court filings in a class action lawsuit known as the Flores settlement document 86 children who were held for more than three days in hotels in February and March.

The Department of Homeland Security and ICE did not respond to questions about children held in hotels. But in court filings, government officials said some hotel stays were necessary because of flight delays or challenges obtaining travel documents.

In February, a woman in Long Island, New York, went with her two children to a scheduled check-in with ICE, planning to go to a favorite restaurant after the appointment. Instead, officers detained them. The mother, who asked to be identified only by her initials, MSP, because she fears retaliation from the government, said the family was taken far from New York, where they’d lived for nine years, and jailed in a hotel in Texas.

For nine days, she said they were not allowed to leave the room, or even look out the windows. MSP said two guards were in the hotel room at all times, including sitting outside the bathroom door, making them uncomfortable using the toilet or sleeping.

Her teenager spent much of the time crying and worrying about failing missed classes. Her other child, age 12, worried about the cat they’d left behind at home.

MSP said in Spanish that the guards told her they were private contractors hired by ICE. She said she was permitted two three-minute phone calls to her mother-in-law in New York. She said the guards warned her that if she told anyone where she was, her children would be taken away from her. Her attorney later wrote in court filings that he could not find them in ICE’s detainee locator and was left in the dark about their location – unable to provide legal advice.

In April, the federal judge overseeing the Flores settlement repeated an order for ICE to stop keeping children in hotels, with “a narrow exception for brief, one- to two-night stays while in transit or prior to flights”. The judge has also appointed an independent monitor, who, among other things, can inspect hotels where children are held.

Children held in hotels are typically detained with family members, but ICE has also separated some children from their relatives and kept the children in hotels alone this year, said Michelle Brané, a former homeland security official under Joe Biden and currently the executive director of Together and Free, an advocacy organization for families affected by immigration enforcement.

Brané described an 11-year-old who was kept in a hotel room for five days, while his father was sent to an immigrant camp for adults. The child was later transferred to the custody of the government’s office of refugee resettlement, while his father pursued an asylum claim from detention. In another case, a baby and two other young children were kept in a hotel, without their mother, for about 10 days, and no one in their family could locate them. The family later learned the children were kept in a hotel room, before they were reunited and placed on a flight to Venezuela.

Brané said the government argues it is removing “the worst of the worst” in an effort to increase public safety. But in reality, many people being arrested are vulnerable children who have viable paths to be in the United States legally.

“The only reason this would benefit the government,” Brané said, “is to instill fear and chaos and cruelty and frighten people into getting their numbers of removed individuals up.”

This article was published in partnership with the Marshall Project, a non-profit news organization covering the US criminal justice system. s, and follow the organization on Instagram, TikTok, Reddit and