Removing a parent who has built a life and raised children in a country does not settle them back home; it strands them on the wrong side of the border from their family. Many risk a dangerous desert crossing again, legal penalties and all, because getting back to their children outweighs every other danger.
When a long-settled parent with no legal papers is seized, the children, who are themselves citizens, can lose their family in a single morning. One mother was handcuffed at home, sent across the border within hours with only the clothes she wore, and her two children were placed in state foster care. Her only offense was living in the country without papers.
When private companies run immigration prisons for profit, every detained person becomes revenue. That gives an industry a stake in harsher detention policy, so its earnings come directly from human suffering. These prisons are often hidden away in rural areas, far from public view.
Immigration detention can hold people for months or even years while their cases wait. They live as prisoners, cut off from their families, without a fixed end date. The waiting itself becomes the punishment.
Expulsion is carried out as quickly and cheaply as possible. People are dropped off without ceremony in violent border towns, or flown back to crime-ridden countries they may barely know. Many end up in soup kitchens and shelters, stranded far from the homes and families they actually had.