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The Trump administration has revived the practice of separating families in order to coerce immigrants and asylum seekers to leave the US, attorneys and former immigration officials allege.

In several cases, officials have retaliated against immigrants who challenged deportation orders by forcibly separating them from their children, a Guardian investigation found. The officials misclassified the children as “unaccompanied minors” before placing them in government-run shelters or foster care.

The new practice has taken effect as the administration has also issued stringent new limits on who can take custody of unaccompanied minors, which advocates say keep thousands of children away from their relatives.

“This is a tactic to punish people for not acquiescing,” said Faisal Al-Juburi, head of external affairs at the legal aid group Raíces. “It’s a tactic to get immigrants to relent, to agree to self-deport.”

The recent separations echo the “zero tolerance” policy of the first Trump administration, when the US systematically separated more than 5,600 migrant children from their parents and caregivers at the US-Mexico border. Images of agents pulling children from their parents’ arms and placing them in overcrowded metal cages sparked domestic and international outrage, and Donald Trump ended the policy.

But seven years later, hundreds of parents have still been unable to reunify with their children; the administration lost track of many of the families it tore apart. Though the new separations so far appear less pervasive than the original policy, experts and attorneys said that it could result in another crisis of prolonged, permanent separations.

“I would say that the main difference is just that the separations are now happening all over the country, as opposed to at the border, concentrated in areas where you could visibly go see it,” said Michelle Brané, a former Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official who served under the Biden administration. “But the rest of it is not that different. The objective is still to be cruel and send a message that people should not come to the US – that they should leave.”

Family separation is one of several ways in which the US government is, increasingly, moving immigrants around the country – shuffling detainees through a vast, chaotic system that advocates say is intentionally cruel.

An analysis of leaked flight records and US government detention data, as well as interviews with immigrants, attorneys, and former officials, revealed that immigrants are increasingly moved without notice away from their families, communities,s and legal counsel – leading to apparent violations of constitutional due-process rights.

The Guardian reviewed leaked flight data from Global Crossing Airlines, the charter company that operates the majority of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) flights, and found that the vast majority of these trips during the first three months of the second Trump administration were between domestic US airports. The airline transported nearly 44,000 immigrants – including 1,000 children – during that time. US detention data revealed that since the inauguration, nearly 2,350 kids under the age of 18, including 36 infants, have been booked into immigration detention centers around the country.

In cases reviewed by the Guardian, parents were moved between detention centers several times after being separated from their children, and in the process were unable to coordinate calls with their kids or their lawyers. Amid the chaos, immigration experts and advocates have the raised alarm that the government could, as it did during the first Trump administration, lose track of where it is sending parents and children, resulting in indefinite or permanent separations.

For LW, a 37-year-old mother who came to the US with her 10-year-old son in April seeking political asylum, returning to China was not an option.

LW told her lawyers and immigration officers that she had been sexually assaulted by multiple high-ranking government officials in China. After reporting an assault to the police, Chinese government operatives threatened her with imprisonment – or death. That’s what was awaiting her in China, she told US immigration agents.

In a sworn declaration in her immigration case that her lawyers shared with the Guardian, LW alleged her pleas to allow her and her son to remain together while they applied for asylum were ignored by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents in San Diego, California, who forced the mother and son into an unmarked vehicle, and began driving them toward the local airport. According to her sworn declaration, agents told her if she refused to get on a flight back home, the government would take her son away from her.

At the airport, the agents tried to drag LW toward the terminals. “I said I needed a lawyer, but they refused, telling me that nobody would want to help me,” she said in her declaration. “Desperate and terrified of what might happen, I dropped to the ground and the officers let me go.”

Later that day, she said they drove her and her son back to a CBP facility in San Diego – and then moved them to an Ice facility in Texas. But a month later, she said, immigration agents followed through on their threat: they took her son away and placed him in foster care.

Her lawyers said that she and her son have now been separated for nearly five months. He turned 11 in the interim.

LW remains detained at an Ice facility in New Mexico, while her son has been placed at a government shelter for unaccompanied minors in New York.

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Family separations were the hallmark of the first Trump administration’s border policy. Now advocates allege migrant families are being split up again as a retaliatory measure

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