Welcome! You are invited to join a webinar: Family Separation by Design: Understanding ICE's Systemic Failures and Building Systems for International Reunification. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the webinar.

When parents are deported without their children, who is responsible for bringing families back together? A new report from the Women's Refugee Commission and Physicians for Human Rights, "What About My Children: Family Separation Among Parents Deported to Honduras," documents how ICE is routinely violating its own policies designed to protect parental rights, resulting in family separations that may become long-term or permanent. Join lead author Zain Lakhani and immigration enforcement researcher Austin Kocher for a conversation about the report's findings, the on-the-ground research methodology behind it, and the enormous challenge of building cross-national systems for family reunification at a time when the US government remains uncooperative. We will discuss what it means to navigate the overlapping legal regimes of multiple countries, each with different requirements around child custody, child welfare, and family reunification, and why this work is laying the foundation for a functional international response to a growing crisis. Zain Lakhani is a researcher at the Women's Refugee Commission and former White House staffer whose work focuses on US immigration enforcement, family separation, and the rights of detained and deported parents. Austin Kocher is a Research Professor at Syracuse University's Newhouse School of Public Communications whose work on ICE operations, detention data, and immigration enforcement is widely cited by journalists, advocates, and practitioners. He writes at austinkocher.substack.com.