By admin 
- Share on Facebook
- Share on Twitter
- Share on Bluesky
- Comments
As her older siblings prepare breakfast, 13-year-old Cynthia Perez waits at the kitchen table, not very hungry. “I’m nervous,” she tells her mom’s friend Mariana Blanco, who gently brushes the girl’s long brown hair.
Read more The UFC’s Despicable Night at the White House
“I know you are, love,” Blanco says. “It’s gonna be okay.”
It’s a March morning in Palm Beach County, Florida, and a big day for the four Perez children: They are missing school and work to testify via video in their mom’s final immigration hearing, where a judge will decide whether she’s coming home or getting deported to Guatemala.
Both their parents have been detained since last fall—their dad at Alligator Alcatraz and then a detention center in Georgia, their mom at a federal facility in Arizona. The kids, all US citizens, have been on their own for months, leaning on Blanco and each other. Fifteen-year-old Romeo Jr. is the stoic one, who dreams of becoming a surgeon. Jessica, 18, the bubbly and creative one, is considering military service after high school. Eliza, 21, is the practical one. After her parents were detained, she dropped out of college, where she’d planned to study computer science, to take over the family landscaping business and pay the rent.
I ask Cynthia about her own personality, and she flashes a grin. The “annoying” one, she tells me. Always joking and teasing her siblings. “I mean, I am the youngest, so I like to play, but now I’m just…I just don’t want to do nothing,” she adds quietly.
“She used to be a lot more talkative,” Eliza tells me. “I feel like we’re all quiet now.”
Cynthia looks uninterestedly at her waffles and strawberries. They’re in the kitchen of the Guatemalan-Maya Center, a nonprofit for immigrants that Blanco helps lead, and soon they’ll be talking with the judge and an attorney from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Blanco quizzes her: “What are you gonna say if they ask you: ‘If your mom gets deported, what are you gonna do?’”
“I’m not sure yet,” Cynthia says, taking a bite of waffle. “Because I’m not ready for a new life in a whole different country.”
Her siblings weigh the question, too—whether they’d choose to stay or go, to finish school here or be with their parents abroad. They lean toward different answers, which is scary to consider. Even this smaller family unit might not last much longer. But at least one good thing will come of this day, Blanco tells them: The unbearable uncertainty will be over. One way or the other, their mom will get out of detention.
They worry about what their parents are experiencing. “Dad says Alcatraz was really cold,” Eliza recalls. “They don’t give you sweaters, blankets. They give you one thin blanket, like a napkin.”
“And he said they were crowded in one room,” adds Jessica.
The talk turns to their mom’s Arizona accommodations. “Whether it’s here with us or over there in Guatemala,” Eliza tells her siblings, “at least she won’t be in that horrible place.”
The Perezes live in Lake Worth Beach, a coastal city about 7 miles from Mar-a-Lago and an hour from Miami. Parents Romeo Sr. and Olga arrived in the United States more than 25 years ago, having immigrated separately as teenagers—her hometown was devastated during the Guatemalan civil war, when the US-backed military massacred the indigenous Maya, including her uncle. She met Romeo, who is also Guatemalan, when she was about 17. He started a landscaping business; she cleaned homes and worked as a Mayan language translator. They raised their four kids in a small lilac-colored house with coconut palms in the front yard.
It was a good life, though the children often worried about their parents’ undocumented status. Several years ago, each family member downloaded an app that let them track one another’s whereabouts. That’s how they knew Romeo Sr. had been detained last September on his way to work—his location icon moved farther than expected, first toward Miami and then, terrifyingly, toward the Everglades. “We didn’t really have a plan,” Jessica, the second oldest, tells me, “but we had one thing: We had to keep my dad’s landscaping company going.”
Weeks later, before sunrise one day during Thanksgiving break, Olga rustled Cynthia awake. She was heading out with Eliza and Romeo Jr. to mow some lawns.
Cynthia, still tired, asked to stay home. Before she knew it, someone else was nudging her back to consciousness. “Come on, you gotta go,” Jessica told her. Cynthia, disoriented, followed her sister outside, where Blanco was waiting. They drove to the nearby house of their aunt, who is sick with cancer. (She asked that her name not be printed.) The girls wondered why they were visiting at such an early hour. When they arrived, Eliza and Romeo Jr. were already there, crying.
Eliza broke the news: The Florida Highway Patrol had pulled over the family truck. Olga was now in federal custody, too. Jessica fell to the floor, stricken by a panic attack—her mom usually calmed her during such episodes. Blanco scooped Cynthia into her arms. “Why is this happening to us?” the girl sobbed.
Later, Cynthia wanted to go home. But Eliza, as the eldest, felt the siblings shouldn’t stay home alone—certainly not that night. They stopped by the house just long enough to fetch clothes, toothbrushes, and other essentials. Cynthia grabbed Pusheen, a cat plushie her dad had given her. “I sprayed my mom’s perfume on it,” she tells me. Romeo Jr., Jessica, and Eliza left the bunkroom they all shared, decorated with Eliza’s manga and K-pop collections, and headed back to their aunt’s. They didn’t know for how long.
A staggering numberof parents have been swept up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. From late January 2025 through early April 2026, more than 146,000 US citizen children had moms or dads detained, the Brookings Institution estimates. That’s about 330 a day. (Based solely on DHS records, the total would be closer to 60,000, according to Brookings researcher Tara Watson, who notes that the agency has done a poor job tracking the data.)
ICE is supposed to ensure that minors aren’t left alone after an arrest. But while reporting this story, I heard about young teens fending for themselves; about a dad who begged in vain for immigration officers to let him call his babysitter; about parents stepping off deportation flights in tears because they didn’t know whether their kids were safe. These are not isolated incidents—similar stories have been documented around the country.
Olga and Romeo, at least, had made a plan. Years earlier, they’d signed legal paperwork that would allow someone else to care for their children if need be, and make decisions about schooling, medical care, and travel. In addition to Olga’s sister, they designated Blanco, a dear friend and the children’s godmother.
Immigrant parents far and wide are doing the same. In Los Angeles, I spoke with an attorney who led “family preparedness” meetings during the massive ICE operation there last year—one such event, hosted by a public school district, drew almost 800 people. At a smaller gathering I attended in San Francisco, organizers encouraged parents to keep their kids’ schools in the loop as to which adults might step in as temporary guardians and cautioned them to maintain good records of key information like their children’s medications and allergies. Last year, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill that makes it easier for immigrant parents to designate alternate caregivers.
In the Chicago area, I spoke with a substitute teacher who’d immediately said yes when an undocumented friend asked her to sign paperwork for her sons. Over the past two decades, Florida activist Nora Sandigo, a US citizen from Nicaragua, has become a temporary guardian to hundreds of children through a nonprofit she runs for this purpose. “Sometimes children are scared and confused, and it’s a daily job to explain what is happening, why their parents had to leave, that they are safe and cared for,” she says. A few kids have lived with her, but most stay with their relatives; it’s her responsibility to keep them in school, schedule their doctors’ appointments, and help them travel abroad to visit their parents—or join them if desired.
Blanco, a naturalized citizen with a toddler of her own, is 33 years old. She was born in Mexico City and came to South Florida when she was 7. After college she did social work in the favelas of Brazil, and then moved to Chicago, where she landed a job with the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement. She eventually made her way back to South Florida. That’s where she met Olga Perez, who translated for the Guatemalan-Maya Center.
Olga’s kids struggled to cope in the days after her arrest. Romeo Jr. became quieter, not wanting to talk with friends about the family crisis. Jessica couldn’t sleep, and when their mom was transferred from Florida to Arizona, she had another panic episode that turned into an asthma attack; she fainted and had to go to the hospital. “It’s really hard to lose a parent,” she tells me.
The kids stayed with their aunt off and on for a while, but they missed their own beds and soon moved back home. Blanco continued to invite them over to her place regularly to spend the night or just to hang out and play with her baby, who helped take their mind off things. She brought them to the movies and the beach, cooked them dinner, and got them ice cream. She’s “a great hugger,” the girls tell me. She’s “always been there for us,” Jessica adds.
“They travel as a family unit,” Blanco says of the kids. “They don’t do anything without the siblings.”
But there were missed milestones: Romeo Jr. was devastated that his mom and dad couldn’t teach him to drive after he got his permit. “I had to tell them over the phone” about the permit, he recalls, “which is hard: It’s a big accomplishment for me, but they’re not there to support me.” They also weren’t around to see Jessica off to the JROTC ball or to take her to tour colleges with marine biology programs, which she wants to pursue if she doesn’t enlist. Eliza especially missed her parents at her “golden” 21st birthday—February 21. She had wanted a big celebration because she’d never gotten a quinceañera.
Their dad would try to call every morning and remind them to eat breakfast, but “it’s not the same as in person,” Romeo Jr. told me. For Eliza’s birthday, he managed a video call, which felt special, and Olga called in from Arizona, where she’d convened a group of detained women to sing “Happy Birthday” over the phone.
Before 1996, undocumented parents with American children could avoid deportation if they had lived in the country at least seven years and hadn’t committed any crimes. Then, amid a surge of immigration, some lawmakers railed about “anchor babies” giving “amnesty” to their “illegal” parents and Congress passed tougher requirements. President Bill Clinton signed the changes into law and ICE began deporting more moms and dads, leaving behind “immigration orphans.”
In subsequent years, the Bush and Obama administrations, too, separated citizen children from immigrant parents. There were millions of mixed-status families, and between 2010 and 2012 the federal government issued more than 200,000 removal orders for parents with US-born children. Research showed, not surprisingly, that these deportations harmed kids’ health and drove thousands into foster care, so Obama’s DHS moved to create some guardrails.
In 2013, Tom Homan, then a top ICE official, introduced the Parental Interests Directive, a set of guidelines that would help agents enforce the law without hampering parents’ rights. The next year, on primetime television, Obama announced Deferred Action for Parents of Americans—a sort of sister policy to Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the one that temporarily protected people from deportation if they were brought to the United States as children. DAPA would similarly shield parents from deportation if they had citizen kids. “Unless for significant public safety or national security concerns, we wanted to ensure that we’re never separating families,” John Sandweg, then the acting ICE director, told me. “We were trying to focus on people with a criminal history.”
Within days, Texas and 25 other states with Republican governors sued to stop the program, arguing that it violated the Constitution and federal statutes. The case made it to the Supreme Court, which split 4–4. (This was soon after Justice Antonin Scalia’s death, when Republicans refused to confirm Obama’s pick for a replacement.) DAPA never went into effect, in any case, and the Trump administration officially rescinded it in 2017.
Homan became acting director of ICE that year. Though he’d introduced the Parental Interests Directive under Obama, he’d long wanted to separate families at the border, a punishment he thought would deter others from coming. Trump adviser Stephen Miller embraced the idea; the resulting “zero tolerance” policy instructed Border Patrol officers to rip kids from their parents’ arms if necessary. It would take years for families to be reunited—some never were. “It was an atrocity,” says Kelly Albinak Kribs, an attorney at the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights. “Parents had no idea where their kids were sent.”
Outrage over the policy was widespread, and a federal court struck it down in 2018. But family separations didn’t end, even under President Joe Biden. The focus and the targets just shifted. More often than not, the Trump administration is now going after families who have lived in the nation’s interior for years, nearly half of whom have kids who are American born and raised. ICE has detained parents of citizen children at twice the rate it did under Biden, and is deporting mothers at four times the rate, according to a ProPublica analysis. The vast majority of the parents being removed have no serious criminal record. “The policy is: Detain everybody,” says Sandweg, the Obama-era ICE director.
Crucially, the Trump administration has created its own version of the Parental Interests Directive. It’s called the Detained Parents Directive, and as the name change implies, it scraps the Biden-era language about incarcerating parents only in “limited circumstances” and treating them humanely.
Some rules remain, but ICE seems to be ignoring them. For instance, parents are meant to be detained close to where their children live, but moms like Olga Perez are regularly transferred across the country— found a twelvefold increase in transfers of noncriminal Latino detainees far from home. It’s all in line with the administration’s eagerness for immigrants to self-deport. “Shuffle flights”—moving a person from one facility to the next in quick succession—are also common and make it harder for detainees to meet with attorneys or make arrangements for their families. “Imagine that you were transferred to four or five different facilities” in as many days, says Zain Lakhani of the Women’s Refugee Commission. “Even if you manage to say, ‘I have children,’ you’re only there for 12 hours before you’re transferred to another facility, and you have to try to find someone who can listen.”
The result: kids left in precarious circumstances. The Guatemalan-Maya Center recently learned of a 13-year-old Florida boy whose parents are in federal custody—he’d been living alone for months. In another case, a middle-school girl moved in with her neighbors after her mom was arrested. Then, after the neighbors’ dad was detained, the girl went to stay with her stepbrother, who had adult male roommates and was gone a week at a time for work. “This kid was by herself,” Blanco says.
“Parents are supposed to have an opportunity to set up an alternate caregiver,” says Rachel Prandini, an attorney at the Immigrant Legal Resource Center in California. But ICE officers “are not following their own policies.”
“There’s such utter lawlessness,” adds Heather Perez Arroyo, an immigration attorney in Massachusetts who defends detained parents.
Yet another big change under Trump: Previously, deported parents could decide whether they wanted their kids to join them abroad, and ICE was supposed to facilitate that choice. Now, ICE says it will do so only if “operationally feasible.” Last fall, when observers from the Women’s Refugee Commission and another nonprofit, Physicians for Human Rights, visited Honduras, they who were inconsolable because they didn’t know where their kids were. “The majority were never asked if they had children at the time they were arrested,” WRC’s Lakhani says. “Even when parents were begging, ‘My children are home alone,’ they were not given opportunities to make arrangements.”
Read more Trump Wants Reporters to Know He’s Very Mad at Netanyahu
Reuniting families post-deportation can be a logistical nightmare. American kids can’t travel abroad without a passport, and getting one requires both parents’ signatures. “If your child is in the care of your undocumented sister, she can’t get your child a passport,” Lakhani says. And “she can’t get on a plane and fly your child to Honduras—she doesn’t have a [US] passport” either.
The federal government doesn’t bother to track the fates of children whose parents were removed by ICE. Four of the deported women the nonprofit groups interviewed in Honduras were mothers of newborns. All of them had their infants taken away.
The sun hasn’t yet risen when I arrive at the Perez family’s home on a spring morning. A rooster crows. It’s a school day and the children are inside getting ready. By now, Romeo Sr. and Olga have been detained for a few months, and although the kids spend the occasional night with their aunt or Blanco, they prefer to be back at home, surrounded by their things and relying on each other.
Around 7:30 a.m., Romeo Jr. comes out to start their black pickup truck, which has a trailer for the landscaping equipment. Then he climbs into the back seat, leaving the front open for Eliza, who will drive him and Jessica to Lake Worth High. (A friend comes for Cynthia later.) As Eliza navigates down A Street toward the school, she multitasks, handing Jessica a pink notebook and asking her to put the address for the day’s first landscaping job into the phone’s GPS.
Eliza turns to me and explains that this is her dad’s truck. There are AC/DC and Metallica stickers on the ceiling, Nirvana on the dash. “He loved rock,” she says. I’m struck by her use of the past tense. She asks Romeo Jr. about one of his after-school clubs and then drops off her siblings before heading out to pick up a female landscaping worker, who hops in the back seat.
Eliza’s life was turned upside down by her parents’ arrests. She’d been doing her prerequisites at Palm Beach State College and hoping to work in tech, but had to drop out to save the business. She taught herself to drive the big truck and trailer and is proud of what she’s accomplished. “Not everyone can do this—step up and do landscaping work in the hot sun, learn how to run these machines. It’s not very common for girls, especially my age,” she tells me. “I really am trying for my family.”
The job is in another city, and traffic is slow. We pass a billboard with Trump’s face on it—Eliza grouses about the road closures whenever he comes to Mar-a-Lago. She coughs; she’s been sick but didn’t want to miss a day of work, especially when her worker already made childcare arrangements. As we drive, the women chat about Olga’s case. DHS is arguing that the Perez kids don’t need their mother, Eliza explains, and that they’re getting by just fine without her. The agency’s attorney tried to stop Eliza from testifying, asserting that because she’s 21, an adult, she isn’t affected by the separation. “Homeland Security was saying that my mom is not important,” she says, and “we can manage by ourselves. No, we can’t! I feel like quitting. I don’t feel like this is my gig, my dream.”
Eliza sighs. “I would rather work in an office or do something else, something for myself,” she says as the truck creeps forward. The one bright spot is how much closer she’s grown to her siblings. Each has adopted a role: “Romeo is like my secretary—he helps me deposit checks, messages the customers. He still doesn’t know how to pay the bills, but he helps me keep money in the accounts.” Jessica takes care of Cynthia, who is still young enough that she shared a bedroom with her parents before they were detained. “I never slept alone. Like, I’m scared of the dark,” she told me. Now Cynthia has the top bunk in the bunkroom, and Romeo Jr. has moved into their parents’ room.
The younger siblings recognize Eliza’s sacrifices. “She’s really trying to work hard so we can buy the stuff we want, like clothes, school supplies, food,” says Jessica. She likens her sister to “a second mother” who “wants us to be happy, even though she isn’t.”
“She has a lot of pressure on top of her,” Olga told me over the phone from her detention facility.
When Eliza was younger, her dad would sometimes bring her along to help with his weekend work, but she mostly stayed in the truck. “He always was like, ‘You guys are gonna go to school or find a better job,’” Eliza recalls.
So much for that. “I’ve gotten a bit of muscles,” she says as we park near the first job site, a home in a quiet neighborhood with big yards with sprinklers. She pulls on her Converses, pops a cough drop, unloads a mower, and gets to work.
On the morning of Olga’s hearing, we’re back in the Guatemalan-Maya Center’s kitchen. Cynthia’s hair is brushed and braided, but she hasn’t eaten much. Today will be her first time testifying before a judge, though not the first time they’ve gathered for a hearing. Her mom’s case started weeks ago, and they’ve taken several days off school to prepare. Jessica testified last week, as did Eliza, who convinced the judge she deserved to speak despite being 21. Romeo Jr., in dress pants with a thick watch, is preparing to give his own statement. “I want to be a doctor; how am I gonna be a doctor in Guatemala?” one of Blanco’s colleagues coaches him.
Father Frank O’Loughlin, an elderly priest who founded the center decades ago, arrives with teacher Maria de la Guardia. She takes Cynthia’s face tenderly in her hands. “Nothing you say or do will doom your mom,” she tells the girl quietly. “If MAGA wins today, MAGA wins. Hopefully she’s released. But Cynthia, if she’s not, nothing you said or did will make the difference.”
Cynthia tries not to cry.
“If your mom gets deported, we will go visit her,” de la Guardia says.
“I’ve never thought of doing this ever in my life,” Cynthia tells me. “But I guess today’s the date. I’m really nervous and scared.”
Soon, Blanco calls on Cynthia to pray. She sits on a couch next to Jessica and Romeo Jr., who holds his head in his hands. They close their eyes and repeat a prayer after Father Frank. “I want to say thank you to all of you guys,” Eliza says afterward, standing with the priest.
“I hope my mom does get out,” Jessica says. They’ve all heard what things are like at her facility: the awful food and filthy water, the neglectful medical care. Olga has diabetes, and at one point she had to be hospitalized—they handcuffed her to her bed. (“Everybody knows you’re a criminal,” she recalled a guard saying.)
“But if she doesn’t, you know, wherever she is, I hope she’s safe,” Jessica continues, her voice shaky with emotion. “And I just want to thank all of you guys for praying for my dad, too. If I can’t have one parent, I hope to have the other.” She rubs a red rosary in her hands, wipes away a tear.
“Let’s hope you have both, baby,” Blanco says.
At 11:30 a.m., when the hearing is due to start, the children go into a room by themselves with a laptop that will let them talk with the judge. They sit in a row. Cynthia squeezes a green stress toy, and after a few minutes, they pray the rosary aloud. Then they sign the cross and lean forward to rest their elbows on the table and wait.
Minutes pass. Then Blanco comes in with bad news. The hearing has been postponed another week. The children drop their heads. It’s been postponed four times already. One time, the kids sat in front of the computer for hours before the judge notified them. “Another day of work wasted,” Eliza says.
“Another day of school wasted,” Romeo Jr. adds. Jessica begins to cry.
“It’s so disrespectful,” Blanco tells me. “The anxiety leading up to one of the biggest days of your life—and having to do that over and over again, it’s torture. The lack of regard for people in the system is shocking.”
They’d transported Olga for the hearing, and then turned right around and brought her back to detention. “It almost seems,” Blanco says, “like they are trying to wear you out, so you say, ‘Screw this, I’m done with it.’”
Eliza blames herself. She was the one driving when her mom was arrested. The state trooper got behind them, ran their plate, and linked it to her dad, who’d already been detained. “If I would have never gone out that day to work, or if I would have taken a different route…” she laments.
The kids gather again in Blanco’s office. The phone rings—it’s Olga. She’s crying. I can’t do this anymore, she says in Spanish. Cynthia and Eliza cry, too. Blanco kneels on the floor next to them, her hands on their knees. Romeo Jr. squeezes the green stress toy. Jessica tries to rally the troops. “One more week, I promise you, Mami!” she says. She turns to Romeo Jr. “We’re strong,” she adds. They fist-bump.
A week later, the kids will take off from school and work again. They will wait in front of the computer, and the hearing will be postponed—again—a bad dream that won’t end. The siblings know that after everything they’ve been through, despite how close they’ve become, when this nightmare is finally over they may have to say goodbye to each other, too.
“I want to be with my mom,” Cynthia tells me, “but I’m not sure I would move over there. I want to be a veterinarian, and I think the education is not like that over there—like, my grandmas live in the mountains. It’s gonna be so different.”
Jessica, too, is unsure. Romeo Jr. says he wants to stay in the United States for med school so he can become a surgeon.
Eliza, ever the practical one, is thinking she’ll move to Guatemala. “I love my siblings a lot, but I love my mom a lot more,” she’d said during our drive. “I told them, ‘You guys need to have a plan; I won’t be here to take care of you.’”
It’s hard to imagine being separated, and with Olga on the phone they try not to. Jessica sees Cynthia crying and goes to hug her, tells her a joke to cheer her up. She puts an arm around Eliza and grabs Romeo Jr., too. The siblings huddle together and Jessica starts singing. They laugh a little through their tears, trying to forget everything that’s wrong and remind each other what they still have.
Within a few months, both their mom and their dad will be ordered back to Guatemala.