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the Club PUBlication 05/25/2026

5/25/2026

Deportation push brings 100K family separations
Roughly 75% of kids are citizens, analysis finds.
By MIRIAM JORDAN and JEFF ADELSON
The New York Times

Ledy Ordonez was on the job at a San Antonio seafood wholesaler last July when immigration agents entered the facility, taking her and about a dozen others into custody. The single mother remains in detention, separated from her only child, Alonzo, a U.S.-born 2-year-old now in the care of a friend.

"He can walk and talk now," Ordonez said from a detention center in Texas. "I've missed so much."

A new analysis suggests that more than 100,000 children have been separated from their parents during the Trump administration's immigration crackdown. And roughly three-quarters of those children, like Alonzo, are likely U.S. citizens, according to estimates from the Brookings Institution that were shared with the New York Times.

The Brookings estimate of the number of children who are U.S. citizens is more than double what would be expected over the same time period based on official Department of Homeland Security data.
The researchers, whose report is based on a statistical analysis of the detainee population, argue that the official statistics are an undercount because the government collects that information in a way that undercounts certain groups.

The findings point to a scale of family separations that far eclipses that of the first Trump administration's "zero tolerance" policy in 2018, when about 5,500 children were removed from their parents immediately after crossing the southern border.

The DHS did not directly respond to questions about the number of parents who had been detained or the analysis suggesting that the official statistics did not reflect the full number of U.S.-born children whose parents had been arrested.

The DHS said in a statement that parents are given a choice of being removed with their children or placing their U.S.-born children with a designee.

"Any way you cut it, there are tens of thousands of children who have experienced parental detention since this president entered office," said Tara Watson, a senior fellow at Brookings.

"The majority are U.S. citizens," she said.
The researchers estimated that about 205,000 children have had a parent detained — typically a precursor to deportation — including about 145,000 who are citizens. They used data from the Census Bureau and Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests to determine the likely number of child detainees based on their immigration status, sex, age, nationality, and whether they were married.

The United States is home to more than 13 million immigrants who are vulnerable to deportation because they either are in the country illegally or have temporary statuses. Some 5 million children under age 18 live with at least one immigrant parent without permanent legal status, according to estimates by several think tanks, and more than 4 million of them are U.S. citizens.

The Trump administration has arrested about 400,000 immigrants during enforcement operations in the interior of the country. There is no reliable information about how many children the detainees have, or what happened to those children once their parents were taken into custody.

Watson, an economist, and her co-author, Maria Cancian, a public policy professor at Georgetown University, sought to answer those questions, they said.

The estimates assume immigration enforcement is essentially random — that immigrant parents are just as likely to be detained as immigrants without children. But the researchers also created an interactive tool that estimates the likely number of children affected by parental detention under different enforcement scenarios and assumptions. Their most conservative estimate for the number of U.S.-born children with a parent detained is about 117,400.

Their highest estimate is about 175,000.
The researchers said they considered 145,000 to be their most accurate estimate, and they predicted that it will grow, given that Congress allocated $45 billion in the tax and spending measure known as the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" to expand detention capacity.

Their estimate contrasts with figures released by the DHS, which say the parents of about 60,000 U.S.-born children were arrested over the same time period. In their report, the researchers theorized the discrepancy was because the DHS was not consistently asking about children, or detainees were fearful of revealing they had children, worried about putting them or their caregivers at risk.

Based on interviews with child welfare agencies, the researchers estimated only a small fraction of the children end up in foster care or similar arrangements.

"We found that remarkably few end up in foster care — most children stay with friends and family who don't have a legal obligation to care for these children," said Cancian, who studies child welfare and immigration.

Many schools and legal aid organizations have helped immigrants appoint a caregiver for their children in the event they are separated.
However, the children are often left in the care of older siblings or working-class families already grappling with financial hardship and precarious immigration statuses, making these arrangements ultimately unsustainable, experts say.

Public Counsel, a nonprofit legal aid organization in Los Angeles, has educated more than 4,000 immigrants on custody plans since last year, ensuring that someone is empowered to make medical and schoolrelated decisions.

Still, the nonprofit regularly receives calls from schools, churches and others seeking assistance for children whose parents were just detained.

"We are seeing kids in tenuous situations, left with neighbors who don't have the proper paperwork they need; older siblings who have children of their own; and cases where a father cannot handle young children," said Sharon Cartagena, a family law lawyer at the nonprofit.
Casey Revkin, executive director of Each Step Home, which began by assisting immigrant families during the 2018 border separations, now focuses almost exclusively on helping parents in detention who have lived in the United States for many years and were separated from their children.

"Almost every day we are contacted by a mom in detention who was arrested and taken from her kids," said Revkin, whose group raises funds to help parents in detention pay for phone calls to their children. "This time the cruelty is often being inflicted on U.S.-citizen children."
The mother of Samantha Lopez, a 3-year-old U.S. citizen, was turned over to ICE last month by a sheriff's deputy after a traffic stop while she was driving to her restaurant job, according to her husband.

Samantha's father, who asked that his full name not be disclosed out of concern that he could be targeted by ICE, said that his wife had told agents she had a young child, to no avail.

"I am feeling such a void and such anguish," he said. "When our daughter talks to her mom, she listens attentively and then starts to cry."

"This is my American child being harmed," he said.

The Club PUBlication May 11, 2026

5/9/2026

CDC ‘not even a player’ in response to outbreak
It has left handling of hantavirus to WHO.
By MIKE STOBBE The Associated Press

NEW YORK - No quick dispatching of disease investigators.
No televised news conference to inform the public. No timely health alerts to doctors.

In the midst of a hantavirus outbreak that involves Americans and is making headlines around the world, the U.S. government's top public health agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has been uncharacteristically missing in action, according to a number of experts.

To President Donald Trump, "We seem to have things under very good control," as he told reporters Friday evening.

To experts, the situation aboard a cruise ship has not spiraled because, unlike COVID- 19 or measles or the flu, hantavirus does not spread easily.

It has been health experts in other countries, not the United States, who have been dealing primarily with the outbreak in the past week.
"The CDC is not even a player," said Lawrence Gostin, an international public health expert at Georgetown University.

"I've never seen that before."
Not until late Friday did CDC actions accelerate.

Health officials confirmed the deployment of a team to Spain's Canary Islands, where the ship was expected to arrive early Sunday local time, to meet the Americans onboard.

They said a second team will go to Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska as part of a plan to evacuate American passengers from the ship to a quarantine center. Also, the CDC issued its first health alert to U.S. doctors, advising them of the possibility of imported cases.

The CDC's diminished role in this outbreak is an indicator the agency is no longer the force in international health or the protector of domestic health that it once was, some experts said.

The hantavirus outbreak is "a sentinel event" that speaks to "how well the country is prepared for a disease threat. And right now, I'm very sorry to say that we are not prepared," said Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, chief executive offi cer of the Infectious Diseases Society of America.

Early last month, a 70-yearold Dutch man developed a feverish illness on a cruise ship traveling from Argentina to Antarctica and some islands in the South Atlantic. He died less than a week later. More people became sick, including the man's wife and a German woman, who both died.

Hantavirus was first identified as a cause of sickness of one of the cases on May 2.

The World Health Organization swung into action and by Monday was calling it an outbreak. About two dozen Americans were on the ship, including about seven who disembarked last month and 17 who remained on board.

For decades, the CDC partnered with the WHO in such situations. The CDC acted as a mainstay of any international investigation, providing staff and expertise to help unravel any outbreak mystery and communicate to the public.

But this time, the WHO has been center stage. It made the risk assessment that has told people the outbreak is not a pandemic threat.

"I don't think this is a giant threat to the United States," said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of Brown University's Pandemic Center. But how this situation has played out "just shows how empty and vapid the CDC is right now."

The current situation comes after 16 tumultuous months during which the Trump administration withdrew from the WHO and has restricted CDC scientists from talking to international counterparts at times and embarked on a plan to build its own p ublic health network with individual countries.

The administration has laid off thousands of CDC scientists and public health professionals, including members of the agency's ship sanitation program.

The agency on Wednesday issued a short statement that said the risk to the American public is "extremely low," and described the U.S. government as "the world's leader in global health security."

Said Nuzzo: "Not only was that not helpful, it actually does damage because a core principle of public health communications is humility."

The Club PUBlication 05/04/2026

5/4/2026

Push for raw milk intensifies across the U.S., despite illnesses
Backers claim health benefits while scientists warn of risky germs.
By LAURA UNGAR and JONEL ALECCIA The Associated Press

Backers of raw milk are pushing to make the potentially dangerous product more widely available and easier to obtain, even as a new disease outbreak — one of at least five in the past year — sickens U.S. children.

More than three dozen bills supporting raw milk have been introduced in statehouses across the nation, including in Minnesota, the Associated Press found. A growing number of states are making it legal to sell.

Top government officials and internet influencers are helping drive this momentum. U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. downed shots of raw milk at the White House last May and previously promised to halt "aggressive suppression" of the product. On social media, posts about raw milk have surged in recent months, often touting unproven claims about its health benefits.

All of this alarms public health officials, who have long warned that unpasteurized milk can harbor risky germs. The current outbreak — tied to raw milk cheddar cheese from California-based Raw Farm — has sickened 9 people with E. coli, half of them children under 5. One victim developed a serious complication that can impair kidney function for life.

Petra Anne Levin, a biology professor at Washington University in St. Louis, said she doesn't understand the appeal of the products.

"If you wouldn't lick a cow's udder, why would you drink raw milk?" she said. "There's a reason pasteurization is around."

Pasteurization kills germs by heating the milk, commonly to at least 161 degrees Fahrenheit for at least 15 seconds. Experts say it has no significant impact on milk's nutritional quality and has saved millions of people from foodborne illness.

But some consumers would rather drink their milk raw despite the risk. Recognizing this trend, advocates and critics alike are increasingly calling for federal regulation of the product.

Scientists and public health experts warn against drinking raw milk. Websites run by the FDA and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention point to the well-documented risks of serious illness from a host of germs, including Campylobacter, Listeria, Salmonella, and E. coli.
A CDC review counted more than 200 outbreaks tied to raw milk that sickened more than 2,600 people and sent 225 to hospitals between 1998 and 2018.

Children are especially vulnerable because their immune systems are immature and they frequently drink milk, noted Alex O'Brien, food safety and quality coordinator for the Center for Dairy Research in Madison, Wis.

Before milk standards were adopted more than a century ago, about 25% of foodborne illnesses in the U.S. were related to dairy consumption, O'Brien said. Now, dairy products account for about 1% of such illnesses.

In European and American societies of the early and mid-19th century, infant mortality rates were 30-60 times greater than today. In one example, thousands of infants died every year from a condition known as "summer diarrhea," which was primarily caused by bacterial contamination in milk that worsened in the heat.

In Foristell, Mo., Tony Huffstutter said his family tests their milk daily for bacteria in an on-site lab at their Twisted Ash Farm & Dairy, where they keep 15 cows and sell raw milk for $29 a gallon.

"You can't just go out there, throw a bucket under the cow and start milking it," he said. "There are so many steps in doing it right."

Donald Schaffner, a Rutgers University food science professor, has serious reservations about giving raw milk to kids but he calls himself "a raw milk libertarian" when it comes to adults.

"It's kind of like legalization of weed, right?" he said. "If people want it, we should find a way to regulate it and do it safely."

Then again, he said, there's already a dependable way of making raw milk safe. "It's called pasteurization," he said. "And it works really well."