Transparency Project Provides New Insights into First Trump Administration’s Family Separation Practices
WASHINGTON, DC, October 30, 2025 — Today, the American Immigration Council launched a platform to analyze new documentation of the U.S. government’s chaotic practice of family separation and its aftermath during the Zero Tolerance period.
The Transparency Project details how the first Trump administration implemented one of the most shameful immigration policies in modern history. The project also sheds light on how specific stakeholders responded to the crisis and provides important lessons about how the public resisted one of the most egregious and harmful policies of the first Trump administration.
Explore the data here.
Drawing on thousands of internal government emails, memos, and never-before-seen datasets obtained through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and lawsuits, the project shows that the first Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy was a calculated system designed to deter immigrants from entering the United States by punishing families and obscuring responsibility.
“Thanks to these records, we can see more clearly how this atrocity was carried out and the inner workings of the nation’s struggle to obtain transparency and accountability,” said Raul Pinto, deputy director of legal transparency at the American Immigration Council. “The same oversight and disregard for human consequences that enabled family separation is reappearing in ongoing mass detention and deportation efforts.”
The Family Separation Project features interactive visualizations and declassified documents that reveal how families were literally erased from government databases, how authorities misled the public, and how Congressional oversight and media exposure helped end this policy. The project includes audio recordings of actor Corey Stoll reading important internal government emails, revealing the confusion and insensitivity behind policy implementation. (Listen here).
The main findings from the archive are:
Officials knew that data on separated families was “corrupt.” While publicly denying wrongdoing, ICE leaders acknowledged they were not “very” confident in their own data on children removed from their parents, according to internal emails. Congressional, media, and regulatory oversight played a key role in ending family separation. However, since then, as of 2025, key oversight agencies such as the DHS Inspector General and the Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties have been suspended or defunded. Family separation was built around intentional disruption. The records show how the disruption was weaponized, leading to significant delays in reuniting children with their parents.
“The records not only demonstrate the nefariousness and brutality of government officials; they serve as a warning against the current state of mass detention and deportation that continues to separate families,” Pinto said. “These records show how data manipulation and secrecy enabled systematic human rights abuses during the first Trump administration. Without transparency and oversight, history will repeat itself.”
Explore the data here.
The portal, created after years of FOIA litigation by the American Immigration Council and its partners, allows journalists, researchers, and policymakers to explore critical documents and data that expose the inner workings of family separation and the failures that follow.
Despite public claims that the policy ended in June 2018, hundreds of children have remained separated from their parents for years, and some have yet to be reunited. “The separation of families is a national shame made possible by bureaucratic indifference to human suffering,” Pinto said. “The lesson here is clear: when a coach collapses, brutality fills the void.”
