The Family in the Waiting Room: Why Faith Communities MUST not Look Away From ICE Separations

A mother waits outside a detention facility with a folder of paperwork and a child too young to understand why they can't go home together. That scene is playing out in immigration courts and detention centers across the country right now — not as an aberration, but as the predictable result of a policy shift most Americans haven't been told about.

In July 2025, ICE rescinded guidelines that had limited the detention of parents and required that detained parents be held as close as practicable to their minor children. The effect has been immediate and measurable: nearly 17,900 of the roughly 320,000 people booked into ICE detention so far this fiscal year self-reported being parents of U.S. citizen children — almost double the rate from fiscal year 2024, and researchers believe that's an undercount, since not everyone discloses parental status at intake.

This is not the same as the 2018 border policy that shocked the country, but it comes from the same well. Tom Homan, who first proposed detaining parents as a deterrent in 2014 and became the leading architect of the original family separation policy, now holds a senior role shaping immigration enforcement. What's changed is the setting: separations are increasingly happening in courthouses, workplaces, and neighborhoods rather than at the border, which means the "family unit" doesn't just come apart in the news — it comes apart on a street a congregation might drive down every Sunday.

The human toll is not abstract. A Brookings-based analysis found that detention following a parent's arrest can last anywhere from a matter of hours to more than a year, with deportation proceedings increasingly following even when children are involved. In El Paso, attorneys representing detained parents have argued in court that bureaucratic delay was extending "a family separation that never should have occurred" — a description that fits far more families than any single case file can capture. And for families who already lived through the 2017–2018 separations and received a legal settlement meant to protect them, some are now facing new deportation proceedings under the current enforcement push, raising the question of what a settlement is worth if the underlying practice simply resumes in a new form.

None of this requires a congregation to take a position on every provision of immigration law to recognize what's happening as a moral emergency. Scripture is not quiet on this point. The instruction to welcome the stranger, protect the fatherless, and refuse to exploit the vulnerable for political ends runs through both testaments as a repeated, non-negotiable theme — not a policy preference, but a description of who God is and what God asks of those who claim to follow him. A society can debate border policy in good faith. It cannot claim to love its neighbor while treating a child's separation from their parent as an acceptable enforcement tool.

Faith communities have real leverage here, and real responsibility:

• Know who is affected in your own community. Many congregations already have members, or members' coworkers and neighbors, living with this fear daily. Ask, gently, and listen.

• Support legal aid. Detained parents without access to counsel are far less likely to be reunited with their children in time. Immigration legal aid organizations are chronically underfunded relative to need.

• Speak to elected officials specifically about parental detention. The 2025 policy change was an administrative decision, which means it can be reversed by the same means — but only if lawmakers hear that constituents are watching.

• Accompany, don't just advocate. Court-watch programs, rides to check-ins, and childcare during a parent's detention are unglamorous forms of love that most families in this situation need more than another statement.

A prayer, then, for these families:

Lord God, father to the fatherless, defender of the stranger, we bring before You the families being pulled apart by fear and by policy. Be near to the parent who does not know when they will see their child again, and be near to the child who does not understand why the house is quieter tonight. Give courage to the lawyers, pastors, neighbors, and strangers who show up for families they've never met. Soften the hearts of those who hold the power to reverse this, and give Your people the boldness to speak plainly when silence would be easier. Where we have looked away, forgive us; where we can act, send us. We ask this in the name of the One who was Himself a refugee child. Amen.