Evgeny and Evgeniia faced an excruciating choice.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers told the couple they could leave the United States with their child and return to their native Russia, which they had fled seeking political asylum. Or they could remain in immigration detention in the United States — but their 8-year-old son, Maksim, would be taken away and sent to a shelter for unaccompanied children.

In the end, they chose the agony of limbo in the United States over a return to a place where they saw no prospect for freedom or any future for their family.

“Interior separation is approved,” ICE officials concluded in writing after the couple insisted they could not return to Russia. The last time Evgeny and Evgeniia saw Maksim was on May 15, in a room at Kennedy International Airport in New York City, as ICE agents led them back to detention in New Jersey.

“A few days, right?” Maksim begged his parents that day. “A few days?”

The couple, who asked to be identified only by their first names out of fear for their family back in Russia, said they tried to keep their son calm. Maksim pleaded with his father, who told the boy what he wanted to hear. “I said, ‘Yes, yes, it will be just a few days,’” Evgeny said, recounting the moment in an interview.

Their case is an example of a little-known tactic the Trump administration is using to pressure undocumented immigrants to leave the United States. Officials have begun separating children from their families in small numbers across the country, in what appears to be a more targeted version of one of the most explosive policies of President Trump’s first term.

The New York Times has uncovered at least nine cases in which parents have been separated from their children after they refused to comply with deportation orders, according to internal government documents, case files and interviews.

The practice is not as widespread as the “zero tolerance” policy of Mr. Trump’s first term, when thousands of children were systematically taken from their parents as they crossed the U.S.-Mexico border and sent to shelters and foster homes.

But the new cases suggest that the administration has decided to use family separation as a tool, at least in some instances, to persuade families to leave and to create a powerful deterrent for those who might come to the United States illegally.

Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, insisted that “ICE does not separate families” and placed the onus on the families themselves, saying that the parents have the option of staying with their children by leaving the country together.

“The parents had the right and the ability to depart the country as a family and willfully choose to not comply,” she said.

She denied that there was any new policy on family separations.

Previous administrations separated undocumented families for reasons including national security concerns, public safety and child endangerment. But Claire Trickler-McNulty, a former ICE official who has served in Republican and Democratic administrations, said that previous administrations, to her knowledge, did not use the threat of family separation as leverage to get people to leave the country.

“I’m not aware of ICE previously using family separation as a consequence for failure to comply” with deportation orders, Ms. Trickler-McNulty said.

Instead, she said, past administrations typically would have released such families into the United States with ankle monitors to track them as they awaited court dates, a practice that has contributed to enormous backlogs in the immigration system.

The notion of choice touches on a key difference between the separations from the first Trump administration and now.

During Mr. Trump’s first term, immigration agents would separate families at the southern border as they crossed into the United States. Adults were criminally charged with illegally entering the country and imprisoned, while their children — some of them babies, just months old — were taken away.

The family separation policy was enormously divisive. Wrenching images of children being pried from the arms of their parents stirred global outrage, but administration officials argued privately that was the whole point — the policy was meant to deter people from making a dangerous and illegal journey.

Mr. Trump ultimately relented to pressure and ended the policy in 2018. The Biden administration later agreed to a settlement that blocked family separations at the border, with some exceptions, including if children were in danger.

Now, with illegal crossings notably low, the Trump administration is focusing on immigrants who are in the United States and have been ordered to leave.

For the most part, immigrants under deportation orders are sent home on ICE flights. But in certain cases — including those involving citizens of Russia — the United States will send people on commercial flights instead.

If they do not agree to board, ICE agents present them with a choice.

‘Lawful Orders’

The Trump administration insists that it is simply enforcing the law. Mr. Trump has made aggressive enforcement a key part of his deportation campaign and says the American people elected him in part to get tough on immigration.

“To be clear, refusing a judge’s deportation order is a crime,” Ms. McLaughlin said. “If law enforcement pulled an American citizen over with kids in the back seat and they chose to not comply with lawful orders, the parents would be arrested, and the children would be placed in safe custody.”

Still, deporting families has always been a struggle for presidential administrations, Republican and Democratic alike. Children, for the most part, cannot by law remain in federal custody for more than three weeks. That means officials are under pressure to deport families quickly, or the United States would have to spend money and resources to track them.

At that point, the deportation challenge only grows. ICE agents would have the difficult task of arresting people with established ties to communities, who had been working or going to school and building lives in the United States.

During the Biden administration, officials considered various ideas, including arresting one parent or fining families who refused to comply with deportation orders, although they never put those policies in place, a former U.S. official said.

Evgeniia, speaking through an interpreter from ICE detention, said her family traveled to the Mexican border in hopes of getting an appointment under a Biden-era program that allowed people to enter the United States at a port of entry after registering with a government app. Mr. Trump canceled that program on Jan. 20, so she and her husband decided that driving to a port of entry and asking for asylum was the only way to reach safety.

They were immediately put into detention.

The American Civil Liberties Union is investigating the legality of the separations, said Lee Gelernt, a lawyer for the group.

“That the Trump administration has found a new form of family separation is hardly surprising given they have yet to acknowledge the horrific harm caused by the original policy and are now blatantly breaching provisions of the settlement designed to provide relief to those abused families, many of whom to this day still remain separated,” he said.

The court settlement banning separations specifically referred to the practice at the southern border. Now, however, the separations are not happening at the border — they are happening inside the country, so there may be legal wiggle room.

In at least one of the cases, ICE officials wrote that the separation fell outside the scope of the settlement, saying there were no “implication/requirements” when it comes to the court case.

Ms. McLaughlin, the Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman, said immigrants were taking advantage of the system and in some cases creating a public disturbance.

“We have seen recently illegal alien families have started to use a tactic where they refuse to board a commercial flight, often lashing out and posing a threat to the safety of their own children,” she said. As a result, Ms. McLaughlin added, the authorities “must ensure the children are safe and not in harm’s way until the family can soon be removed from the country.”

Regarding the case of Evgeny and Evgeniia specifically, Ms. McLaughlin said the couple “were acting so disruptive and aggressive they endangered the child’s well-being.”

The couple denied those allegations, and there was no mention of such a disturbance in the internal case file describing the separation, which was obtained by The Times. The file says that “since there is no other option to enforce the removal order in a safe manner as a family unit, interior separation is approved.”

A separate document, a referral of Maksim’s case to the agency that oversees custody of unaccompanied migrant children, said, “Subject was separated from his family on 5/15/2025 due to his parent’s refusal to board an aircraft for removal from the United States in violation of US law.”

Evgeny said he was trying to save his son from a longer separation in Russia because of what he believed to be a sure prison sentence there.

“I was explaining to them, to the officers, that our lives are in danger and our livelihood would be in danger,” he said. “And at some point, I kind of lost my bearings and started to cry.”

“I was explaining that I could not be deported, because I will face grave danger in Russia,” he said.

‘I’m Not Giving My Son Away’

The couple had crossed the border with another Russian family, Pavel Snegir and his 11-year-old son, Aleksandr. They, too, were hoping for political asylum in the United States after Mr. Snegir’s wife was locked up in Russia for her political views, he said.

But after several weeks in border custody together, Mr. Snegir and his son were transferred to ICE custody in May and taken to an airport in San Diego. There, he was told he could take Aleksandr to New York City for a court hearing.

But once they got to the airport, Mr. Snegir refused to board the plane, having become convinced that he would be deported to Russia once he got to New York. Later that day, after the flight had left, an ICE official told him he would be separated from his son because he refused to be deported.

“I’m not giving my son away,” Mr. Snegir said, moving to shield Aleksandr.

The ICE official, Mr. Snegir recalled, told him that he would be taken to the ground, handcuffed and taken away if he did not relent.

“I did not move. I did not agree to do what she was asking, and everything she promised happened,” he said of the ICE official.

Aleksandr, who had witnessed his mother being arrested in Russia, appeared to be in shock, Mr. Snegir recalled: “He was asking why.”

After several weeks of separation, Mr. Snegir was visited by an ICE official who offered him another option: Go with your son, or we will deport you by yourself and you might not see him again.

This time, Mr. Snegir agreed to go back to Russia with his son.

But in a twist, the next day it emerged that Mr. Snegir had passed a protection screening for his claim of fearing torture in Russia. That means he can still be deported — just not to Russia.

For now, ICE is trying to deport him to a third country, but none have agreed to take him yet, according to internal agency documents. Until then, the two are being held separately, the father in ICE detention and the son in a shelter for unaccompanied children.

An Uncertain Future

As it turns out, Evgeny and Evgeniia also passed their protection screening, which means the United States has determined that they, too, cannot be deported to Russia.

But as they wait for the next step, they remain in ICE detention. And Maksim is now in a foster home.

“It’s terrible, that’s what I can say,” Evgeniia said. “I wouldn’t wish it even to an enemy. It’s a constant grief and longing.”

She is allowed to speak on the telephone to her son, but she has no real answers to the first question he asks her: “Mama, when are you going to take me out of here?”

“I try to explain to him that we’re trying to do that,” Evgeniia said. “We’re talking to the officers. We’re trying to convince them. It was very hard for him to hear this information. He is crying all the time.”

Before the family came to the United States, the longest she and her husband had been separated from their little boy was one week. Now it has been months.

When he first arrived at his foster home, Maksim fastidiously counted the days he was apart from his parents. But recently, he told his mother he had stopped counting.

“What’s the point of counting days? We will not be united,” his mother recalled him saying recently.

Trump officials say the goal is not to keep the children separated from their parents indefinitely. ICE will try to reunify children with their parents in their country of origin, or in a third country, an agency official said.

But for some parents, the danger is too great.

An Indian couple who were separated from their three children after they refused to board a commercial flight decided, in the end, to go back to India without the children, according to internal ICE records and their lawyer.

The couple asked not to be identified, but their case records showed that the first attempt to deport the family as a group had failed. The family unit, or FAMU, “refused to board the removal flight (commercial).”

The record went on to state that the family’s failure to comply with deportation orders was “a clear violation of law and hindrance to execute the removal order.”

“This is an interior enforcement separation,” it continued.

After several weeks, the couple were deported to India. In response to a request for comment, an ICE official said the agency was working to send the children back, too.

For the families who are still in the United States — like Evgeny, Evgeniia, Mr. Snegir and their children — the path ahead is uncertain.

But inside her ICE detention facility, Evgeniia tries to think of a hopeful future.

“I’m imagining how I will hug him when we meet again,” she said of Maksim. “I even saved a couple of candies, because that’s what I was planning to give to him when I see him again. That’s what I imagine.”