Yesterday I hosted Zain Lakhani from the Women’s Refugee Commission for a conversation about her new jointly-authored report with Physicians for Human Rights, titled "What About My Children: Family Separation Among Parents Deported to Honduras.” It was a wide-ranging conversation that didn’t hold back from getting into the nitty-gritty of current policy or zooming out to big questions about how we improve the international migration system.
One of the things I appreciated most about this conversation was getting to talk with someone who has made the transition from academia to policy work. Zain holds a PhD in history from the University of Pennsylvania and a JD from Yale Law School. She served on the Biden administration’s Gender Policy Council before joining WRC as Director of Migrant Rights and Justice. She is truly unique in her ability to successfully navigate both worlds.
We spent some time at the beginning of our conversation talking about what her journey has looked like, and I think the message matters for graduate students and early-career professors who are increasingly frustrated with how higher education is run. As I often say, universities no longer have a corner on the market on critical thinking, big-picture questions, and rigorous research. (Not that they ever did.) There are places in the policy and advocacy world where a strong academic skill set is deeply valued—even if the work requires a different kind of urgency and a different relationship to the human consequences of the questions you are asking.
As Zain put it, specifically when it comes to doctrinal legal scholarship, the gap between what the law says on paper and what it means in practice can be worlds apart. What the Constitution means is being worked out not at the Supreme Court, but between an ICE officer and the person they are arresting. In short, these two worlds—the policy and advocacy world and the academic world—have so much to learn from each other.
We dove headfirst into WRC and PHR’s report, which, to be frank, opened up an area that I do not have a lot of experience in. Understanding how the immigration enforcement system, including detention and deportation, specifically impacts women and girls and mothers is one of the most important ways to move past seeing the total number of people in detention as some faceless aggregate. Digging into how specific populations are affected, and especially how vulnerable populations of Black and Brown women experience the system, changes the way you understand what enforcement actually does.
Zain made a point during our conversation that captures one of the essential problems of immigrant detention. (As I’m writing this, ICE announced the 14th detained death of the calendar year.) As she said, all of our bodies break down, and when they break down inside a facility that is not equipped to provide, or even intended to provide, the kind of comprehensive care that bodies require, the consequences are so much higher. That observation applies to everyone in detention, but it applies with particular force to pregnant, postpartum, and lactating women, a population the system is detaining at increasing rates despite its own policies directing otherwise.
There is no way to adequately summarize the wealth of knowledge that Zain shared, but here are three key findings from the report that we discussed in the live conversation.
1. ICE is violating its own parental interest policies at every stage. The current Detained Parents Directive requires ICE to ask every person it arrests whether they are a parent, to ensure children are safe at the time of arrest, and to give parents facing deportation the opportunity to decide whether their children come with them or remain in the US. The report documents routine violations of all three. Parents were never asked about their children. Parents who tried to raise the issue were dismissed. One father begged to call the babysitter who was inside with his three-year-old and was refused. Parents who signed official forms requesting to bring their children were deported without them anyway.
2. The scale has changed dramatically. Data obtained through public records requests and reported by the amazing team at ProPublica shows that under the Biden administration, 264 mothers were detained and 30 percent were deported. Under the current administration, that number has jumped to 800 mothers detained, with 60 percent deported. WRC has also been tracking a significant uptick in the detention of pregnant, postpartum, and lactating women since the spring of 2025, using a detention pregnancy tracker built in partnership with Relevant Research. Zain described one case as particularly haunting: a woman who experienced a miscarriage in detention received no medical oversight for ten days, was deported in an acute medical crisis, and had her life saved only because reception center workers in Honduras rushed her to an emergency room. It’s unthinkable that this is happening.
3. There is no system for international family reunification, and one is desperately needed. There is no legal right to reunification under US law and no established DHS procedure for facilitating it. More than 400 parents sought reunification through the Honduran government in 2025 despite no formal program existing. Receiving countries lack the resources, the infrastructure, and the most basic information from the US government to make reunification work at scale. So when we think about the next 10-20-year horizon of how we respond to this massive problem, we really need to construct a cooperative system for information sharing and facilitating reunification.
We did not get enough time to discuss that last point, but I want to double down on it here because I think it is the most important long-term takeaway from the conversation. The consequences of the current administration’s deportation policies (and frankly the United States’ deportation policies for years now across Republican and Democratic administrations) mean that we are creating a long-term family separation crisis that will outlast any single presidency.
This is not only about what happens in a specific deportation, it’s about how families are supposed to reunify going forward. And reunification does not necessarily mean that everyone ends up back in the United States. Even a parent who remains in Central America and wants to reunify with their children, including after those children become adults, whether they are US citizens or not, faces an extraordinarily complicated and fragmented legal landscape. Every state has its own laws and institutions governing child welfare and custody. Multiple federal agencies are involved across several countries. International legal regimes layer on top of all this, complicating it all. And fundamentally, no one is in charge of this process. No one is directing traffic. The fact that Zain sees this big picture even out of a field research project at a single reception center in Honduras really shows the value of her scholarly acumen in the policy space, and it should be something the immigration ecosystem at the international level is taking seriously.
I am grateful for Zain’s time and for the work of the Women’s Refugee Commission and Physicians for Human Rights, two organizations I have profound respect for. I am also grateful for all of the great questions in the chat during the event. I am always impressed and surprised to see not only how many people come to these public conversations but how many people in the room are deeply experienced, people with tremendous government service backgrounds, academic credentials, reporters, lawyers, and also a lot of people who simply want to learn more. I want everyone to know how much I value and appreciate the learning community that we are building together, and I thank everyone for their participation.
Read the full report, listen to the conversation above, and share it with others.
If you find this work valuable, please consider supporting it with a paid subscription. It really does keep the work going and ensures that it is sustainable. Public events like this one are only possible because of your support.
