Deportation Policy Impacts Human Rights and Child Welfare Concerns

In Brief

NASW is deeply concerned by the path the Trump Administration’s deportation policy has taken since its inception in January 2025. The association is shocked by the emerging human rights and child welfare crisis in the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) expansion of immigrant detention facilities—driven primarily by its plan to apprehend and deport as many as a million immigrants in a year, NASW Senior Policy Adviser Mel Wilson says in an NASW blog post. To achieve such an ambitious goal, DHS will have to expand its current detention capacity by 92,000 beds—for single adults and families—nationwide. The potential human toll of such a plan is both daunting and an affront to American civil and human rights values, Wilson said.