First Focus Campaign for Children and the Coalition on Human Needs led 123 other national and local organizations in an email to lawmakers urging them to prioritize the safety and well-being of children as they vote on fiscal year 2026 funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
“The decisions before you will have profound impacts on children’s health, safety, stability, access to services, and lifelong opportunity, and they demand principled action grounded in evidence and compassion,” the advocates wrote to all 435 members of the House of Representatives. “We urge you to reject status quo funding for the Homeland Security FY26 annual spending bill, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and include meaningful, enforceable safeguards that protect children and families and treat them with dignity.”
The 125 signatories noted that any legislation should:
- End broad scale ICE and CBP operations in neighborhoods and community spaces where families live and gather
- Restore sensitive location protections for schools, child care centers, hospitals, houses of worship, and community sites to keep these places safe and fear-free
- Ensure legal representation for children in immigration proceedings and preventing unnecessary detention or deportation of parents
- Preserve and strengthen the Flores Settlement and other minimum child welfare standards for children and youth in custody
- End child and family detention beyond the shortest feasible timeframe, as outlined under the Flores Settlement
- Prohibit the opening of new family detention centers
- Embed a “best interests of the child” standard across all relevant policy frameworks
- Protect pregnant and postpartum women by enforcing ICE Directive 11032.4, which prevents ICE from detaining, arresting, or taking into custody people who are pregnant, postpartum, or nursing for administrative violations of immigration laws
- Require child and adult mental health services as well as observers during monitoring visits in family detention facilities, including infant and early childhood mental health, as well as mental health services in communities when children and their families return to them
- Demand congressional oversight and accountability over ICE and the Department of Homeland Security for actions that harm children
- Reject any additional ICE or CBP funding that enables family separation, expands detention, or weakens child safeguards