Nearly 14,000 children have been deported by the Trump administration

Read this article in Spanish: Casi 14,000 niños y adolescentes han sido deportados por el gobierno de Trump

At least 13,816 children and adolescents between the ages of 0 and 17 were deported by the Donald Trump administration during its first 14 months in office, according to a Factchequeado analysis of publicly available data. These figures do not include voluntary departures.

The data analyzed come from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and were obtained by the Deportation Data Project through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. For this article, we reviewed deportations carried out between January 20, 2025, when Trump took office, through March 10, 2026, the latest date for which statistics are available.

In the following paragraphs and charts, we break down who these children and adolescents are, and at the end of the article we explain in detail how we conducted our research.

Which countries were the deported children from?  

The main recorded countries of citizenship among the deported children and adolescents are Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, Colombia and Brazil. Together, these five countries account for 9,079 cases, or 65.71% of the total.

Which countries were the deported children sent to?

Together, Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, Colombia and El Salvador account for 63.16% of all deportations of minors during the first 14 months of the Trump administration.

The main destination countries recorded by ICE for the 13,816 children and adolescents deported between January 20, 2025, and March 10, 2026, are as follows:

Minors sent to countries other than their own

The country to which a child or adolescent was deported does not always match their recorded citizenship. Nearly one in five children and adolescents were sent to a “third country.”

Factchequeado identified 2,665 deportations of children and adolescents to a country other than the one in which they hold citizenship, representing 19.29% of the 13,816 cases analyzed. Another 45 cases cannot be classified because the destination country is listed as “unknown.”

The five countries to which children and adolescents of different nationalities were deported are:

1. Panama: 601

2. El Salvador: 380

3. Colombia: 331

4. Mexico: 299

5. Canada: 224

This pattern aligns with one of the best‑documented immigration strategies of the second Trump administration: bilateral agreements with third countries to receive deportees of other nationalities. According to the Migration Policy Institute (MPI), since January 2025 the U.S. government has signed at least 27 agreements with countries willing to accept deported migrants who are not their citizens. Between January 20 and December 31, 2025, MPI estimates that approximately 15,000 deportations to third countries took place, about 13,000 of which were to Mexico.

The best-known agreements include:

El Salvador: an agreement—the full text of which has not yet been made public—between the administrations of Donald Trump and Nayib Bukele, under which the United States pays $6 million for El Salvador to receive migrants of other nationalities, including Venezuelans who have been sent to the Center for the Detention of Terrorists (CECOT).

Panama: a memorandum signed in July 2024 and extended in 2025, with an additional commitment of $7 million. Between February 12 and 15, 2025, Human Rights Watch documented the mass expulsion of 299 third-country nationals from the United States to Panama, “denying them their rights to due process and to seek asylum.”

With the available data, it is not possible to determine whether the minors included in this analysis were deported under these specific agreements. However, the records show cases consistent with this pattern: children and adolescents from Venezuela, Colombia, Honduras, Ecuador, Peru, and other countries who were sent to destinations such as Panama, El Salvador, Mexico, or geographically distant third countries.

Among the 2,665 children or adolescents sent to a third country, the most common nationalities are as follows, together accounting for 55.65%:

• Colombia: 388 14.56%

• Venezuela: 348 13.06%

• Honduras: 322 12.08%

• Ecuador: 233 8.74%

• Peru: 192 7.20%

In this table, we break down the nationalities of the children and adolescents who accounted for the highest percentage of deportations to a third country. Haiti, Chile, Russia, Romania, and Venezuela top the list.

In this table, you can see the countries of origin and destination for the children  and adolescents deported to third countries:    

Factchequeado identified five children and adolescents born in Argentina in ICE records. They were approximately 7, 9, 10, 13, and 13 years old at the time of deportation. Only one is listed as having Argentina as the destination country; the others are listed as having been sent to Canada, Panama, Peru, and Bolivia.

How old were the children and adolescents when they were deported?

More than half of the children and adolescents included in the database were ages 6 to 12, according to the approximate age calculated based on their year of birth and the departure date recorded by ICE. Another 3,102 were between ages 0 to 5 and 3,733 were ages 13 to 17.

Since the exact date of birth is not available, age is estimated by subtracting the year of birth from the year of deportation.

Deportations by Country of Origin and Age Group

The data show that Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, and Colombia are among the top countries of recorded citizenship in all age groups. Ecuador ranks among the top 5 only in the 0–5 age group, while Brazil ranks among the top countries starting at age 6.

Children ages 0 to 5

Mexico tops the list of registered nationalities with 585 deported children (19% of the total), followed by Colombia (430), Honduras (408), Guatemala (334), and Ecuador (271).

Children ages 6 to 10

Honduras takes first place in terms of registered citizenship with 887 deported minors (17%), followed by Mexico (832), Guatemala (683), Colombia (627), and Brazil (453).

Children ages 11 to 17

Mexico once again tops the list of registered nationalities with 1,010 deported children (18%), followed by Honduras (805), Guatemala (714), Colombia (641), and Brazil (434).

Gender breakdown of deported minors

Of the 13,816 records analyzed by Factchequeado, 7,282 are listed as male (52.71%) and 6,532 as female (47.28%). Another 2 are listed as unknown gender.

Number of deportations by air, land, and sea

Texas has been the primary point of departure for deportations during Trump’s second term so far, followed at a distance by Florida, California, New York, and Louisiana. This data does not necessarily indicate that they lived in or were detained in these states, but rather that ICE recorded their deportation there.

Among the 13,816 children and adolescents in the data, more than half (7,290 minors, or 52.76%) were deported by plane from international airports.

Major airports from which deported minors departed the U.S.:

• Miami International Airport, Florida: 1,261 minors

• John F. Kennedy Airport, New York: 978

• Alexandria International Airport, Louisiana: 855

• Logan Airport, Boston, Massachusetts: 615

• O’Hare Airport, Chicago, Illinois: 578

Another 1,766 minors (12.78%) were deported primarily through border crossings with Mexico:

• El Paso, Texas (418)

• Eagle Pass, Texas (352)

• San Ysidro, California (246)

• Hidalgo, Texas (189)

• Brownsville, Texas (121).

A smaller number—141 minors (1.02%)—departed from seaports, primarily from the terminal in Baltimore, Maryland (127).

One-third of the cases cannot be classified with certainty: the issue is that 4,495 cases (32.53%) are recorded with city names—such as “Harlingen, TX,” “Houston, TX,” “Dallas, TX,” “Los Angeles, CA,” or “San Francisco, CA”—without specifying whether the person departed by plane, via a land crossing, or through a seaport. This occurs because these cities contain various types of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and the data does not specify which one was used in each case.

For this reason, we present the figures by type of departure here as a minimum.

Average deportations per day

From the start of his administration on January 20, 2025, through April 30, 2025, the daily average of children and adolescents appearing in ICE records was 76.1 per day, for a total of 7,690 children and adolescents.

From May 1, 2025, through March 10, 2026, the figures dropped to an average of 19.5 deportations per day, for a total of 6,126 children and adolescents.

Although deportations decreased after that point, the deportation of minors has continued.

Children and adolescents with no criminal convictions or pending charges

Almost all of the deported children and adolescents had no criminal convictions or pending charges. Of the 13,816 cases, 13,742 (99.46%) are listed as “other immigration violation,” a category that does not equate to a felony or a criminal conviction.

Only 17 cases are listed as “recorded criminal conviction” and 57 as “pending criminal charges.” ICE’s administrative records do not specify the nature of these charges, but they do not correspond to court records.

How did we arrive at this figure for deported children and adolescents?

ICE records show that 16,854 children and adolescents left the country from the day Trump began his second term through March 10, 2026, the last day for which data is available. But not all of these departures are deportations in the strict sense. Some are recorded as voluntary departures, voluntary returns, or withdrawals of applications for admission.

For greater accuracy, at Factchequeado we have separated only those cases classified by ICE as removal, deportation, or forced exclusion. This resulted in 13,944 records.

However, those 13,944 records do not necessarily represent distinct individuals: the same child or adolescent may appear more than once in the database if they were deported on more than one occasion (for example, if they were removed, re-entered the country, and were removed again).

To arrive at an actual number of distinct minors, we examined the “anonymous identifier” that ICE assigns to each case. This identifier does not reveal the minor’s name or personal information, but it allows us to detect when the same case appears repeatedly in the records.

Using this cross-check, we identified at least 13,816 distinct children and adolescents.

Another 54 records did not have an anonymous identifier, so we could not determine whether they corresponded to unique or duplicate individuals. Those cases were not included in the final count.

Methodology

Analysis based on ICE data obtained by the Deportation Data Project through FOIA requests. The records were filtered using 4 criteria:

1- Filtered by “anonymized unique individual identifier,” which is a number based on the Alien Registration Number (A number). A numbers are assigned to non-citizens by ICE or USCIS. Undocumented non-citizens who have had no contact with the U.S. government, as well as individuals with non-immigrant visas, generally do not have an A number. We did this to avoid duplicating cases of children or adolescents who appear more than once in the database.

2- Age: Records were included where the difference between the year of departure and the year of birth is 17 or less, a criterion that identifies individuals under 18 years of age at the time of deportation. There is no exact date of birth in the analyzed databases because ICE provides the information under exemptions (b)(6) and (b)(7)(C) of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which protect personal information and data compiled for law enforcement purposes. These exemptions appear literally as “b(6), b(7)(C)” in the “Birth Date” column of all records.

3- Dates: “Departed Date” between January 20, 2025, and March 10, 2026, the latter being the most recent date available in the dataset published by the Deportation Data Project in March 2026.

4- Case Status: In the “case status” column of the databases, we focus only on 3 categories of deportation:

1- Excluded or removed for inadmissibility (13,419 cases): the agency determined that the individual was not admissible to enter or remain in the U.S. and removed them. (See USCIS definition).

2- Excluded, deported, or removed (286 cases): a formal category combining exclusion and deportation carried out by order of the authorities.

3- Deported or removed due to deportability (111 cases): the authorities determined that the individual, although already within the country, was removable or deportable (due to a crime, visa violation, etc.) and deported them.

We did not include in our analysis the voluntary departures corresponding to the following 3 categories, which account for an additional 2,910 minors who left the country:

1- “Confirmed voluntary departures” (2,297 cases): legal agreements in which the individual signs a document agreeing to leave the country on their own within a specified timeframe (30–120 days) to avoid a formal deportation order on their record.

2- “Witnessed voluntary returns” (527 cases): Cases in which a person agrees to return to their country without going through a formal deportation process. ICE or CBP supervises the departure. This generally occurs in border areas.

3- “Permitted Withdrawals of Application for Admission” (86 cases): Individuals who applied to enter the United States at a port of entry and, before the process was completed, signed Form I-275 to withdraw that application. This is not a formal order of removal (deportation), but it indicates that the individual was deemed inadmissible and has been recorded in DHS systems, which may affect future visa applications.

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