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.
In 2018, Ederson and other children at the border were taken from their parents, who were detained separately and overwhelmingly charged criminally with illegal entry.
Then, the government was unable to reunite them for months because adults’ and children’s information was kept in different computer systems.
A judge barred the government from separating most families at the border and ordered the government to bring the families back together after the ACLU filed a class action lawsuit.
Later, a court settlement banned most family separations to deter immigration until December 2031.
Today, if parents are arrested or deported under the president’s push for mass deportations, they are being made to choose whether to leave their children behind in the United States.
“DHS complies with all court orders, even as radical NGOs shop for the most favorable forum and activist judges seek to thwart our operations,” acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson, said in response to AP requests for comment about the government’s policies toward separated families.
Government attorneys have argued in recent court filings that there are no legal restrictions on “the government’s statutory authority to execute orders of removal.”
Bis added that enforcing immigration law was “not optional,” and that “every removal of an illegal alien helps restore order and reinforce the rule of law.”
Ederson’s family was recently allowed to return, but their status remains precarious.
After being taken from his mother, Mirsy Maricela Alva López, and confined to a government shelter in Arizona as a toddler for four and a half months, Ederson barely recognized her once they were reunited, she said.
Vivid nightmares haunted him throughout his time in elementary school, where he learned to read in English in classrooms amid lush lawns and palm trees less than 10 miles from Mar-a-Lago, President Trump’s Winter White House.
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