The 2023 settlement in Ms. L. v. ICE, which resolved the lawsuit over Trump's first-term family separations (see Trump's Zero Tolerance Policy Took Thousands of Children From Their Parents, and Six Years Later 1,360 Had No Confirmed Reunion), bars a similar policy for eight years and requires the government to provide the separated families with legal services, behavioral health care and housing support. On his first day back in office, January 20, 2025, Trump's Executive Order 14148 revoked the Biden order that had created the Family Reunification Task Force.
The government then stopped paying for services the settlement requires. It ended funding for the Acacia Center for Justice, which provided the families' legal advice, and on June 4, 2025, Judge Dana Sabraw ruled that it had breached the settlement, Courthouse News reported. The ACLU's Lee Gelernt warned in court, “If people don't get legal advice, they're going to get reseparated from their children.” The government also let its contract with Seneca Family of Agencies, which provided behavioral health, medical and housing support, lapse on June 9, and asked the court to suspend those obligations. On July 24, 2025, Sabraw found another breach, recalling that he had called the policy “one of the most shameful chapters in the history of our country” and writing that it “forced the separation of thousands of immigrant parents from their children, many of whom have yet to be reunified.”
On June 4, 2026, an Associated Press investigation found that the government had re-separated dozens of children from their families during the second-term enforcement push, despite the settlement; some parents were held for months and others deported, and in some cases officials conducting interior arrests deported people despite discovering they were legally off limits for removal, according to emails AP obtained. One boy, taken from his mother at the border in 2018 at age 3, was separated from her again in 2025 and later allowed back into the country after a judge ruled the government had acted illegally. Gelernt: “Not only has the government refused to acknowledge the horror of the initial separations during Trump I, but it is now detaining and deporting these same families.”