After ‘zero tolerance’: Once separated, migrant students forge ahead with resilience

Editor's note: by dialing 988. Crisis counselors are available in English and Spanish, as well as for people who are deaf or hard of hearing. Journalist Martiza L. Félix contributed to this story, which first appeared on

By Joshua E. S. Phillips | Edited by Ricardo Sandoval

Confusion. Worry. Skipped meals. Nightmares. Dramatic mood swings. Persistent anxiety. Panic attacks and depression.

The symptoms are all there, experienced by many — too many — of the roughly 5,000 migrant and asylum-seeking children, mostly from Latin America, who were separated from their parents and guardians at the U.S.-Mexico border, starting soon after Donald Trump took the oath of office as president in 2017.

The exact number of minors affected depends on who is counting, but their plight is well-documented. Audio recordings of children crying and screaming inside a border detention center , and accounts of shoddy care at hastily opened facilities around the country defined what the administration of former president Donald Trump had called a "zero-tolerance" policy: a deterrent, showing other migrant families what they faced should they venture thousands of miles to cross the U.S.-Mexico border without authorization.

The policy didn't work. Economic collapse, authoritarian governments, and gang violence continued to push families north. And when they were apprehended at the border, the separations of children from their parents and guardians instead became one of the darkest chapters in the history of U.S. immigration law enforcement.

Symptoms of trauma these children endured came to light when migrant children began attending U.S. public schools after being released by the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) and when some reunited with their families. Today, an agonizingly slow pace of learning among migrant students who experienced family separation remains one of the least studied and understood traumas suffered by this demographic.

'I think the most jarring thing that I've seen in this work is how many children that were separated from their parents exhibited suicidal ideation and thoughts of death and dying.'

During the zero-tolerance policy, which separated migrant families who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border between 2017 — first as a pilot program— and 2020, schools were unprepared to teach these children and help families that settled in their neighborhoods.

Ylenia Aguilar, former board member of the Osborn School District in Phoenix, said her district had to scramble, adding specialized counseling, as formerly separated and detained children entered its classrooms. Aguilar said she understands the plight of the migrant families because she once lived in the U.S. without documents.

The political factor As U.S. schools and childhood mental health counselors work to catch up to, and treat, the lasting trauma among formerly separated migrant children, there is new worry about what can happen after the next president enters the Oval Office.

Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris vows restrictions on asylum seekers and quick action in the case of individuals who attempt to enter the border outside the established legal channels. She assures voters that her approach will be humane and avoid a repeat of the humanitarian tragedy of child separation.Yet she promises a dramatic increase in border law enforcement. The mixed stance leaves unanswered questions about how tough border enforcement can be without committing human rights violations.

Trump's presidential campaign messaging poses concrete threats of trauma for school-age migrants. Like his first campaign in 2016, Trump's presidential bid once again centers on stoking fears about migrants "poisoning the blood of our country ." He and his surrogates routinely demonize immigrants, call for "mass deportation" and vow to reinstate family separation .

Calling for the return of family separations might seem like a surprising pitch since his zero-tolerance stance sparked damning press accounts and public outrage, prompting Trump to end it officially some six weeks after it started. (In practice, family separation continued until it was revoked by the Biden administration.)

Dr. Monica Noriega is a clinical psychologist who has treated immigrant children and families, and evaluated them for asylum applications, for nearly a decade. In 2018, she saw how Trump's "zero tolerance" policy harmed children and their guardians.

"I think the most jarring thing that I've seen in this work is how many children that were separated from their parents exhibited suicidal ideation and thoughts of death and dying," Noriega said. "Like six year-olds, seven year-olds."

In 2020, Physicians for Human Rights published one such report , explaining that "clinicians chronicled that nearly everyone interviewed exhibited symptoms and behaviors consistent with trauma and its effects: being confused and upset; being constantly worried; crying a lot; having sleeping difficulties; not eating well; having nightmares; being preoccupied; having severely depressed moods, overwhelming symptoms of anxiety, or physiological manifestations of panic and despair (racing heart, shortness of breath, and headaches); feeling "pure agony"; despair, and hopelessness; feeling emotional and mental despair; and being "incredibly despondent." Beyond the immediate harm, clinicians and researchers speculated about long-lasting effects of separation-related trauma on children — physically, emotionally, and cognitively.

Tracing a legacy of trauma Latinos are the fastest‐growing segment of the U.S. population, representing one-fourth of students enrolled in public K-12 schools across the country. In Texas alone, Latino enrollment in 2020 accounted for 52% of the public school population.

Access to the resources that can help immigrants overcome childhood trauma — whether marked by experiences in their home countries, caused by "zero tolerance" family separation, menacing immigration enforcement or an anti-immigrant climate — often depends on the community's attitude. For many migrant children, that support begins, or doesn't, at the public school level.

In the 2020 election, then candidate Joe Biden referred to Trump's family separation policies as "criminal" and vowed to help those families impacted by the policies. Two weeks after taking office in 2021, Biden set up the Interagency Task Force on the Reunification of Families to reunite families and address the mental health of children who'd been separated from parents and guardians.

The task force admits that there are gaps in its data on migrant children separated from their families. A report by the Congressional Research Service put the total between 5,300 and 5,500 in 2021. In April 2024, the Department of Homeland Security said it identified 4,656 children who were separated. And today, as many as 1,401 are listed as not having been reunified with families because the government either lost track of their whereabouts or parents or guardians have not come forward to report that children are back under their care.

There are still no comprehensive government-led studies of the mental health of families who were separated by the zero-tolerance policy. Following up with these families has been challenging because of the COVID-19 pandemic, language barriers and lingering cultural shocks. Moreover, some families still face deportations that may lead to more separated families.

'When you look at general trauma research, it talks about how it affects your education; how it affects your ability to concentrate, how it affects your ability to learn.'

Academic researchers and private clinicians who have studied separated children expect the trauma to endure. They note how, from the start of their separation, children exhibited regressive behavior, such as "loss of language, return to thumb sucking, and inability to control bowel movements and urination."

They point to studies on family separations — before "zero tolerance," when guardians voluntarily parted from children or were separated by the state — that show that "parental separation is considered a toxic stressor, an experience that engages strong and prolonged activation of the body's stress-management system...changes how the body responds to stress in the long term, disrupting higher-order cognitive and affective processes as well as negatively altering brain structures and functioning."

Organizations like the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) have also warned that "highly stressful situations... can disrupt a child's brain architecture and affect his or her short- and long-term health," adding that when children are "robbed" of their caregivers' support they "are susceptible to learning deficits and chronic conditions such as depression, post-traumatic stress disorder[,] and even heart disease."

The list of potential long-term effects goes on. Other researchers expect trauma-related symptoms will surface over time, explaining that "children separated from families seeking asylum may be further burdened with difficult-to-treat disorders that emerge years later."

Those who treat and advocate for the rights of immigrant children have been monitoring how they develop within one key institution: U.S. public schools.

In the classroom Belinda Hernandez Arriaga, a professor of education at the University of San Francisco and licensed clinical social worker, has treated migrant children who have experienced family separation under U.S. immigration policies. She cites an array of studies that demonstrate how "trauma affects the brain."

"When you look at general trauma research, it talks about how it affects your education; how it affects your ability to concentrate, how it affects your ability to learn," said Arriaga, who is also the founder and executive director of Ayudando Latinos A Soñar, a Latino cultural arts, education and social justice organization. "I have kids who did really well in school in their home country... (and) they are doing horrible here."

The problem with evaluating migrant children in U.S. schools, Arriaga added, is that educators fail to account for the impact of their separation experience. "... People attribute (the challenges migrant children face) to being English learners, and therefore they're in a lower category of learning."

Monica Oganes, a Florida-based school neuropsychologist who consults for the National Association of School Psychologists, acknowledges the lack of research on the effects of separation-related trauma on migrant children in U.S. schools.

"We know that smoking is bad for your lungs, so if somebody smokes for a period of time... and they end up with lung cancer, we can hypothesize that it was the smoking that caused the lung cancer," Oganes said. "There are certain tenets here. We already know that trauma has effects on neurodevelopment and emotional behavioral issues. The more traumatic the experience, the worse (the) outcomes."

Oganes evaluated roughly a dozen children separated at the border during the Trump administration and who then enrolled in U.S. schools. She said she noticed behavior such as "difficulty socializing and a lot of fights, sometimes with friends at school or classmates not being able to tolerate, so not being able to inhibit acting out behaviors."

Oganes added that trauma can cause "brain-based learning disabilities...not a specific type of learning disability."

"If something happens in your life and you're emotionally challenged, are you going to sit in a classroom, study French and have no problem learning?" she said. "That would be difficult — and that's what has happened."

The legacy of Immigration enforcement in schools Sophia Rodriguez, a New York University sociologist who has conducted research on undocumented and unaccompanied youth in U.S. schools, recognizes the trauma carried by children who suffered through family separation. She argues that "a sense of belonging is really important"for education outcomes.

"If institutions like schools aren't providing safe spaces, or trusting spaces, youth aren't going to feel connected," Rodriguez said. "If kids feel emotionally connected, emotionally safe, whether it's within their peer groups, or with adults in the school, then they're just more likely to be engaged and interested in school. At worst, they're going to feel scared to talk to people about their experience."

She recalled speaking with immigrant children in a middle school in Washington, D.C. who were fearful of their teachers. They told her they didn't talk to teachers, out of fear. "What if they tell people about our immigration status?," she remembers them asking. "What if we get deported?"

That tracks with the findings of Jodi Berger Cardoso, a professor of social work at the University of Houston and co-author of several studies on the experiences of refugee and immigrant youth in U.S. schools.

"It's both the amount of trauma and the kind of trauma," Berger Cardoso said. "Those things will impact different outcomes as children develop across the lifecycle."

'I wasn't paying attention, at that time I wasn't very interested in many things and I didn't pay attention to school, so I did poorly, but around tenth or eleventh grade, well there, I started to improve.'

According to Berger Cardoso's research, migrants who experience economic hardship or "a deprivation-based experience" would be more inclined to experience depression, whereas those who undergo "a threat-based experience" — such as a "zero tolerance" separation — could experience complex post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.

She and her colleagues studied how living under constant threat of apprehension and deportation contributed to "elevated hyperarousal and avoidance among youth who perceive the persistent threat of deportation and/or family separation even if there is no direct experience."

In their writings, Berger Cardoso and her colleagues describe this as a "community trauma event," that stirs fear in immigrant communities and rouses traumatic memories.

"It reverberates... it's additive, it's cumulative," she said. "And what we know about cumulative trauma is (that it) has a much greater impact on child development across the life cycle."

While Berger Cardoso describes zero tolerance as "government-sponsored violence," she points out that immigrant children and their families have been separated under other circumstances, beyond zero tolerance, before, during and after the Trump administration.

"There is a general understanding that separating children in a forcible way is bad for their health. And yet, here we are," she said.

Early in the time of zero tolerance, in 2017, when the program was still a U.S. Department of Homeland Security pilot project, Érick Danilo Zúñiga Gonzales became one of the first children to be separated from his parents when they were detained at the border. And, months later when he was released and began attending U.S. public schools, he was one of the first to exhibit the signs of separation trauma in in the classroom.

It's been a long journey since, but there's now a high school diploma and a royal-blue mortarboard as centerpieces on the wall of his family's home in Philadelphia. His diploma stands as testimony to a resilience he, like many formerly separated children, had to exercise to beat the odds and succeed at school.

Érick is the first of his family to graduate from high school. At first, Érick remembered, it was hard to focus in class not knowing where his mother had ended up after they were apprehended and separated. His grades were below average. "What was most difficult for me was algebra, mathematics," he said, explaining that he found hope in learning English, balancing that against his painful childhood memories. "I don't speak it perfectly, but I understand it and I can manage."

He said he'd done well in school in Honduras. But in Philadelphia,"I wasn't paying attention, at that time I wasn't very interested in many things and I didn't pay attention to school, so I did poorly." Trauma born in his family's difficult migration pushed Érick into the shadows. He kept a low profile at school and didn't talk about his family. Only a few teachers vaguely knew that he had been separated from his mother, but they didn't press for more details, and he wasn't ready to share.

Therapists who've treated children after family separation suspect the trauma will endure, even for those who manage to overcome education and learning challenges.

Dr. Monica Noriega, the psychologist with the Child Trauma Research Program who evaluated children and families with immigration-related separation, said everyone has been marked with separation-related trauma — even those who've excelled at school since the end of the zero tolerance policy.

The imprint on young, migrant children "becomes embedded in your psyche...in how your brain and your body works," she said.

"I see kids that are overachievers, like straight-A students who cannot make a mistake. They have a lot of challenges with anxiety and depression, trying to keep up with this kind of expectation that we have to prove how good we are," Noriega added. "When you've gone through an experience where you weren't just separated from your parents, but you were told, and you receive the message that you were separated from your parents because your parents were bad...because your parents made a decision to put you in harm's way.

"I think that's kind of the insidious part that no one talks about: these policies don't just have an impact on just symptoms — it has an impact on how they view themselves and others in the world."

Still, the researchers and advocates interviewed emphasized another quality emerging among migrant children who were victims of family separation: resilience.

"These children and families are extremely resilient because they have to be," said Noriega. "There's more to them than their trauma, and (it's) that they can still live full and beautiful lives."

Joshua E. S. Philips

Maritza L. Félix

Roxsy Lin