By Michael Phillips

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As thousands march under banners of “No Kings” in support of non-citizens’ rights, one question rings louder than ever: Where are the marches for American children and the parents they’ve lost to the family court system?

It’s estimated there are around 11 million illegal immigrants living in the United States today. That number has long captured the media’s attention, shaped presidential platforms, and become the centerpiece of contentious debate across newsrooms and dinner tables. But here’s a number you probably won’t see plastered across headlines: Over 23 million American children are growing up in homes missing at least one parent.

That’s more than double the illegal immigrant population. Yet, where are the protests? Where are the viral hashtags, celebrity fundraisers, marches, or presidential promises to end this crisis of broken families and silent trauma? They’re not just absent — they’re deliberately ignored.

The Silent Epidemic: Family Court

This isn’t about “deadbeat dads” or runaway moms. This is about a corrupt and largely unaccountable court system that tears families apart as a matter of routine. Family courts operate outside of constitutional law, under the guise of “best interest of the child,” a phrase so subjective it has become meaningless. In these courts, judges operate with virtually unchecked discretion, often relying on unlicensed custody evaluators, profit-driven guardians ad litem, and private psychologists who shuffle between roles like actors in a stage play — a play written, directed, and funded by government contracts and legal loopholes.

Meanwhile, due process is a foreign language in family court. Parents — most of them citizens — are jailed on flimsy protective orders, robbed of visitation without evidence, and made to pay endless fees to see their own children. These courts bleed the innocent dry, psychologically and financially. Many parents are pushed into homelessness, unemployment, or suicide. Others are labeled abusers based on the hearsay of a bitter ex, or the vendetta of a court-appointed stranger.

And all the while, the American public remains blissfully unaware. Or worse, willfully blind.

Why Don’t We March for Parents?

Let’s be brutally honest: most Americans still believe the justice system works. They assume family court must have gotten it right. That parent must have done something. And because these stories don’t fit into the neat binaries of race, class, or political allegiance, there is no convenient narrative for the media to amplify. Instead, we look away.

But when we look away, we allow children to be trafficked through the legal system under color of law. We allow judges to ignore evidence. We allow attorneys to profit from the chaos. And we enable an entire ecosystem — one that survives not on justice but on conflict, confusion, and control.

Family court doesn’t reunite families. It dissolves them. It doesn’t rehabilitate relationships. It weaponizes them. And for all the talk of “saving children,” the system often delivers them into emotional ruin with court-sanctioned abductions, forced estrangements, and years of parental absence that can never be repaired.

This is not hyperbole. It is trafficking — legal, administrative, and fully subsidized by taxpayer dollars.

The Double Standard

It’s become fashionable to speak of “human rights” and “injustice” at the southern border or in overseas conflict zones. But when American parents scream for help, including many military and first responders — when they show up in court with evidence, with constitutional arguments, with nothing left but the desperate hope to hug their child again — the system shrugs.

And the rest of us? We’re silent. We protest for non-citizens who’ve never paid into the system, never sworn allegiance to this country, never once filed taxes or served on a jury — and yet we demand their rights be elevated over our own.

Don’t get me wrong. Compassion matters. Justice for immigrants matters. But justice for American parents matters too, and it is nowhere to be found. Where is the compassion for the mother locked out of her daughter’s life for five years based on a false accusation? Where is the media campaign for the father who hasn’t seen his son in a decade because he couldn’t afford $25,000 in GAL fees?

Where is the movement for the millions of children who will never know both of their parents, and in some cases never know either parent — not because of war, or abandonment, but because a family court judge decided it was “best”?

The Real Crisis

Let’s stop pretending this system is broken. It was built this way.

It was built to extract wealth from chaos, to enable perjury with impunity, to ensure that only those with money, connections, or compliant attitudes maintain custody. It is an ecosystem where attorneys trade roles behind the scenes, judges retire into lucrative mediation firms, and oversight is nonexistent.

You can be jailed without trial. Silenced without hearing. Your rights, your child’s rights — gone, with the stroke of a pen and no jury to ever question it.

And still, no protests. No riots. No presidential candidate promising to reform the courts or investigate the family services industry. No nightly news exposés about the mothers and fathers being erased in broad daylight.

My Plea

I want to be clear: I support human rights. I support dignity for all people. But I cannot, in good conscience, be expected to fight for someone who came here illegally when my own family, friends, and neighbors, or my own government won’t fight for me to be a father.

I am a citizen. A father. A man who loves his child. And I have been denied every basic right this country claims to stand for.

So the next time you march for justice, ask yourself:
Where are the protests for us? For the missing fathers, the erased mothers, the children caught in the crossfire of bureaucracy and betrayal?

How many of you have ignored a parent’s messages and pleas for help, but drop everything to help someone you don’t even know?

We don’t need a king.
But we damn well need a country that protects its parents.