Several students who attended K-12 schools in the United States last year won’t return this fall after ICE deported them to other countries.
An empty seat.
Martir Garcia Lara’s fourth-grade teacher and classmates went on with the school day in Torrance, California without him on May 29.
About 20 miles north of his fourth grade classroom, United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested and detained the boy and his father at their scheduled immigration hearing in Downtown Los Angeles.
The federal immigration enforcement agency, which under President Donald Trump has more aggressively deported undocumented immigrants, separated the young boy and his father for a time and took them to an immigration detention facility in Texas.
Garcia Lara and his father were reunited and deported to Honduras this summer.
Garcia Lara is one of at least five young children and teens who have been rounded up by ICE and deported from the United States with their parents since the start of Trump’s second presidential term. Many won’t return to their school campuses in the fall.
“Martir’s absence rippled beyond the school walls, touching the hearts of neighbors and strangers alike, who united in a shared hope for his safe return,” Sara Myers, a spokesperson for the Torrance Unified School District, told USA TODAY.
Trisha McLaughlin, assistant secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, said his father Martir Garcia-Banegas, 50, illegally entered the United States in 2021 with his son from the Central American country and an immigration judge ordered them to “removed to Honduras” in Sept. 2022.
“They exhausted due process and had no legal remedies left to pursue,” McLaughlin wrote USA TODAY in an email.
The young boy is now in Honduras without his teacher, classmates and a brother who lives in Torrance.
“I was scared to come here,” Lara told a reporter at the California-based news station ABC7 in Spanish. “I want to see my friends again. All of my friends are there. I miss all my friends very much.”
Although no reported ICE deportations have taken place on school grounds, school administrators, teachers and students told USA TODAY that fear lingers for many immigrant students in anticipation of the new school year.
The Trump administration has ramped up immigration enforcement in the United States. A Reuters analysis of ICE and White House data shows the Trump administration has doubled the daily arrest rates compared to the last decade.
Trump recently signed the House and Senate backed “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which increases ICE funding by $75 billion to use to enforce immigration policy and arrest, detain and deport immigrants in the United States.
Although Trump has said he wants to remove immigrants from the country who entered illegally and committed violent crimes, many people without criminal records have also been arrested and deported, including school students who have been picked up along with or in lieu of their parents.
Abigail Jackson, a spokesperson for the White House, says the Trump administration’s immigration agencies are not targeting children in their raids. She called an insinuation that they are “a fake narrative when the truth tells a much different story.”
“In many of these examples, the children’s parents were illegally present in the country – some posing a risk to the communities they were illegally present in – and when they were going to be removed they chose to take their children with them,” Jackson said. “If you have a final deportation order, as many of these illegal immigrant parents did, you have no right to stay in the United States and should immediately self-deport.”
Parents can choose to leave their kids behind if they are arrested, detained and deported from the United States, she said.
Some advocates for immigrants in the United States dispute that claim. National Immigration Project executive director Sirine Shebaya said she’s aware of undocumented immigrant parents were not given the choice to leave their kids behind or opportunity to make arrangement for them to stay in the United States.
In several cases, ICE targeted parents when they attended routine immigration appointments, while traffic stops led to deportations of two high school students. School principals, teachers and classmates say their absence is sharply felt and other students are afraid they could be next.
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