At the San Antonio Immigration Court, on May 29, 2025, a family’s case was dismissed, meaning no further removal proceedings would occur.
There were children, two boys and a girl, who appeared to be between 9 and 12 years of age. As they left the courtroom, the entire family was arrested, and zip ties were used to secure their hands behind their backs. Including the children. Even experienced immigration attorneys expressed surprise at seeing the children arrested and restrained in this manner.
But there are lots of events going on in our country right now that people can’t remember seeing before. Men with masks covering their faces, with no identifying clothing or badges, who do not provide any information about what they are doing, are grabbing law-abiding citizens off the streets without due process.
Going to farms, restaurants, Home Depot parking lots, making mass arrests of people who may or may not be undocumented. Proof of legal residence apparently doesn’t do much good. Nor does having your case dismissed by the immigration court. We are arresting the people who are trying to obey the law instead of the criminals. Not okay!
Meanwhile, back in Congress, men and women without visible masks are grabbing benefits like healthcare and food stamps from the poorest among us, while promising the billionaires they’ll get to keep the exorbitant tax breaks they’ve grown to love and can’t do without. Even some Republicans are expressing surprise at the recklessness of the Trump administration’s actions.
My soap box today regards the children, however. The photo of those children restrained by zip ties shook me to my core. It made me wonder how people are able to insulate themselves against the cold realities of the harm we are doing to children, who are impacted by daily events in ways we are only beginning to understand.
Think for a moment of your own childhood. Whether idyllic or horrific, or somewhere in between, can you see the effects of changes on your growing mind and heart? A child, or a parent, develops a major illness but the family lacks health insurance. A parent loses a job and becomes depressed.
Unwanted relocation leads to unwanted consequences. Even children with two loving parents and income stability cannot be shielded from the randomness of the world, but can you imagine suddenly losing one or both of those parents?
What if your dad goes to work one day and never comes home? Did you lose a parent when you were growing up, whether to death, divorce, addiction or incarceration? How can you be unconcerned about what we are allowing to be done to our children?
The short-sightedness of the current immigration policy is stunning. A wimpy quota of several hundred deportations per day has now been beefed up to several thousand. To make their quota, the immigration authorities (ICE) have to skip the part where they figure out if someone has a criminal record and just grab as many bodies as they can.
Many, if not most, of those bodies have children. Over 4.4 million US citizen children live with at least one deportable parent. And these days, a parent may not even know for sure if they are deportable, since it doesn’t seem to matter what your residency status is.
This degree of uncertainty creates anxiety in parents but is vastly more powerful in its effect on children, who can feel the fear and tension around them but don’t have the emotional maturity to know how to understand or handle it.
Try to imagine that feeling, if you were fortunate enough that it never happened in your real life. Try to imagine the fear that your parents won’t be able to protect you.
The terrible irony of the Trump administration’s approach to both spending and immigration is that the actions being taken now are likely to worsen the problems they claim to be fixing.
Drastic and unnecessary spending cuts to our society’s safety net, along with unpredictable (and probably unconstitutional) immigration policies, will not improve the health or welfare of the vast majority of our population. Not to mention the fact that these cuts won’t reduce the national debt by even one penny because the tax cuts increase it by over $3 trillion. What??
By traumatizing an entire generation of children who, like their parents, may have been well on their way to breaking out of the cycle of poverty and dysfunction, we almost guarantee there will be many future adults who lack the stability and confidence needed to thrive in our world.
We’re forcing them to fear going to school on the days after an ICE raid; we’re creating food insecurity by cutting the family’s SNAP benefits and stopping free school lunches; we’re abandoning them by taking away their parents’ jobs and even their parents.
Yes, there is much room for overhaul in both immigration policy and government spending. Those who voted for Trump believed that, and I believe it as well. The execution of that overhaul, however, does not have to include the arbitrariness and cruelty that Trump has unleashed.
You can help the situation by making the necessary adjustments in the midterm elections coming up next year, and you can start making adjustments in your own mind immediately. Try taking a broader view of how our values should influence our choices.
Everything that needs to be fixed about our functioning as a nation can be accomplished by simply refusing to forget who we are: Americans who value fairness and equality, and humans who want their children to be healthy and safe in a better world.
Susan Hull is a retired clinical psychologist, a horse trainer and an Independent voter. She urges her readers to spend more time with any children they know, and partake of their joyful exuberance when they feel safe and accepted for who they are.
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