ICE

The Guardian -   s Mark was getting ready for his high school graduation, he thought about how his dad would have probably insisted on adjusting his slacks – they were a bit tight – and fixed up his tie. “He would want me to look my best,” he said. But his dad and namesake, Marco, was 2,000 miles away. He had been arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Maryland just before Christmas and deported to El Salvador in March.

When he walked up to the podium and got his diploma last week, he felt a sense of relief – like he had walked out of a nightmare. His mother, Rosie, told him afterwards: “Congratulations – we finally made it though.”

Mark used to love school – he took advanced placement classes, he had a girlfriend and a tight-knit group of friends that his mom calls “wholesome”. But everything began to unravel after Marco was arrested, and then deported. “For a lot of this semester, I just didn’t want to go to school,” he said. “Even after I came to terms with what happened to my dad, I never, never ever wanted to be there."

Mark is one of tens of thousands of US citizen children separated from their parents by the US immigration system. A Guardian investigation found that during the first seven months of Donald Trump’s presidency, his administration arrested the parents of at least 27,000 children – including 12,000 US citizen children. During that period, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was deporting about twice as many parents each month compared with 2024.