U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is a federal law enforcement agency under the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. ICE's stated mission is to protect the United States from the cross-border crime and illegal immigration that threaten national security and public safety.
Phan Thị Kim Phúc, referred to informally as the girl in the picture and the napalm girl, is a South Vietnamese-born Canadian woman best known as the nine-year-old child depicted in the Pulitzer Prize–winning photograph, titled "The Terror of War", taken at Trảng Bàng during the Vietnam War on June 8, 1972.
Jose Antonio Vargas is a journalist, filmmaker, and immigration rights activist. Born in the Philippines and raised in the United States from the age of twelve, he was part of The Washington Post team that won the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting in 2008 for coverage of the Virginia Tech shooting online and in print. Vargas has also worked for the San Francisco Chronicle, the Philadelphia Daily News, and The Huffington Post. He wrote, produced, and directed the autobiographical 2013 film Documented, which CNN Films broadcast in June 2014.
Reno v. Flores, 507 U.S. 292 (1993), was a Supreme Court of the United States case that addressed the detention and release of unaccompanied minors.
The 2014 American immigration crisis was a surge in unaccompanied children and women from the Northern Triangle of Central America (NTCA) seeking entrance to the United States in 2014. According to U.S. law, an unaccompanied alien child refers to a person under 18 years of age, who has no lawful immigration status in the U.S., and who does not have a legal guardian to provide physical custody and care.
Kirstjen Michele Nielsen is an American attorney who served as United States Secretary of Homeland Security from 2017 to 2019. She is a former principal White House deputy chief of staff to President Donald Trump, and was chief of staff to John F. Kelly during his tenure as Secretary of Homeland Security.
Central American migrant caravans, also known as the Viacrucis del migrante, are migrant caravans that travel from Central America to the Mexico–United States border. The largest and best known of these were organized by Pueblo Sin Fronteras that set off during Holy Week in early 2017 and 2018 from the Northern Triangle of Central America (NTCA), but such caravans of migrants began arriving several years earlier, and other unrelated caravans continued to arrive into late 2018.
The United States family separation policy under the Trump administration was presented to the public as a "zero tolerance" approach intended to deter illegal immigration and to encourage tougher legislation. In some cases, families following the legal procedure to apply for asylum at official border crossings were also separated. It was officially adopted across the entire US–Mexico border from April 2018 until June 2018. Under the policy, federal authorities separated children and infants from parents or guardians with whom they had entered the US. The adults were prosecuted and held in federal jails or deported, and the children were placed under the supervision of the US Department of Health and Human Services. More than 5,500 children, including infants, were removed and hundreds have still not been reunited as of August 2022.
Protests against the Trump administration family separation policy are a reaction to the Trump administration policy of separating children from their parents or guardians who crossed the U.S. border either illegally or to request asylum, jailing the adults and locating the minors at separate facilities under the care of the Department of Health and Human Services.
Family detention is the detention of multiple family members together in an immigration detention context. In the U.S. they are referred to as family detention camps,family detention centers, or family detention facilities.
The Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES) is a nonprofit organization based in Texas that aims to provide legal services for immigrants. As of 2018, it was the largest legal aid group of its kind in Texas. RAICES also runs Casa RAICES, which provides housing for thousands of undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers per year.
Unaccompanied Alien Children is a United States government classification for children in immigration custody and the name of a program operated by the Office of Refugee Resettlement to house and care for them. The term designates unaccompanied minors who are aliens, typically those who have been apprehended outside of a legal port of entry or judged inadmissible upon their entry.
Families Belong Together refers both to an advocacy campaign devoted to reuniting immigrant families that were separated at the US-Mexico border by a Trump administration policy introduced in spring 2018, and also specifically to a series of protests on June 30, 2018 in Washington, D.C., New York City, and 700 other cities and towns in the United States. Very large crowds turned out to those events despite heat waves in many areas, including in Washington, D.C.
Abolish ICE is a political movement that seeks the abolition of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The movement gained mainstream traction in June 2018 following controversy of the Trump administration family separation policy. The movement proposes that ICE's responsibilities be subsumed by other existing immigration agencies, as was the case before its creation. Discussions are particularly focused on the enforcement wing of ICE.
Distracted boyfriend is an Internet meme based on a 2015 stock photograph by Spanish photographer Antonio Guillem. Social media users started using the image as a meme at the start of 2017, and it went viral in August 2017 as a way to depict different forms of disloyalty. The meme has inspired various spin-offs and received critical acclaim.
Ilana Panich-Linsman is a visual journalist based in Austin, Texas.
Jakelin Amei Rosmery Caal Maquin and Felipe Gómez Alonzo were Guatemalan immigrant children who died, in separate incidents, while in the custody of the United States Border Patrol in December 2018, after having entered the country, by crossing the border between Mexico and the United States.
The Hart family murders was a murder–suicide which took place on March 26, 2018, in Mendocino County, California, United States. Jennifer Hart and her wife, Sarah Hart, murdered their six adopted children: Ciera, Abigail (14), Jeremiah (14), Devonte (15), Hannah (16), and Markis (19) when Jennifer intentionally drove the family's sport utility vehicle off a cliff. Jennifer was in the driver’s seat, and Sarah was in the front passenger seat.
The Trump administration has detained migrants attempting to enter the United States at the United States–Mexico border. Government reports from the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General in May 2019 and July 2019 found that migrants had been detained under conditions that failed federal standards. These conditions have included prolonged detention, overcrowding, and poor hygiene and food standards.
This is a timeline of events related to migrant children's detention centers in the United States.
