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CNN: ‘Are Mom and Dad not coming home?’: American kids left stranded when ICE takes their parents

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All they knew was that their mother, their only parent since their father died five years ago, was being taken from them.

Across the country, US-born children like Febe and Angelo have become collateral damage in the Trump administration’s unprecedented crackdown on undocumented immigrants.

CNN identified more than 100 US citizen children, from newborns to teenagers, who have been left stranded without parents because of immigration actions this year, according to a review of verified crowdfunding campaigns, public records and interviews with families, friends, immigration attorneys and other advocates.

These cases have unfolded as the Trump administration has abandoned the “humane enforcement” of immigration laws when deporting mothers and fathers who entered the country illegally, according to policy documents.

Since President Donald Trump took office in January, American children across the country have ended up in the care of relatives, neighbors, friends, co-workers and even strangers. Their parents were picked up during raids on workplaces ranging from farms to meatpacking plants, coming out of check-ins with Immigration and Customs Enforcement or dropping their kids off at school.

In some cases, ICE appears to have violated protections that still remain in official policies by failing to allow undocumented parents time to find an appropriate caregiver or to make travel plans for their children as they are taken into custody and deported, CNN found. Unlike immigrant children, American children of immigrants do not fall within ICE’s jurisdiction and are not tracked by the agency.

An ICE spokesperson did not provide any data on how many cases the agency is aware of where US citizen children have been separated from their parents and would not comment on the removal of “humane” from official ICE policies. The spokesperson claimed that ICE “goes out of its way” to give parents the opportunity to designate a guardian or have their children accompany them upon removal.

“CNN is trying to obscure the fact that each of the illegal alien parents they are defending willingly chose to break our nation’s criminal and administrative laws and as a result of those choices, are responsible for what happens to their children – just as any U.S. citizen parent who breaks the law is when they are taken to jail,” the spokesperson said.

Accounts gathered by CNN included an autistic 11-year-old who was placed in foster care in Nebraska when her father was picked up by ICE in June, and a 10-month-old left with family friends when her single mother was arrested during a workplace raid at a cannabis farm in Southern California in July. In Michigan, the oldest daughter of four reportedly scrapped plans to attend college in the fall so she could raise her three younger siblings after their widowed father was detained.

“It’s literally a kid’s worst nightmare having someone come take your parents in the middle of the night,” said Wendy Cervantes, a longtime immigration policy expert who has worked with Democratic and Republican lawmakers to help craft federal policies that protect the children of immigrants. “No matter the outcome, you are turning a kid’s life upside down.”

‘Children at risk’

Federal agents donned riot gear and lobbed flash bang grenades and smoke bombs at protesters as they raided a pair of cannabis farms near the California coast this summer. When the smoke cleared, multiple employees were left injured and a worker fleeing one of the facilities plummeted 30 feet from the roof of a greenhouse to his death.

The raids made headlines for the chaotic and deadly scene that unfolded, as well as reports that a protestor fired at ICE agents.

What went largely unnoticed was just how many US citizen children — more than a dozen, according to CNN’s analysis — were left without parents to care for them.

One 15-year-old ended up on his own with his two younger brothers, 8 and 9, when his mother was arrested, her immigration attorney told CNN. From detention, the mother had told the attorney she wanted to see her children as soon as possible. But she was deported to Mexico only three days after the raid.

Martita Martinez-Bravo and her small nonprofit organization, Friends of Fieldworkers, have been attempting to fill in some of the gaps — gathering donations and delivering diapers, formula, clothes and toys to those in need. Since the raids, which swept up more than 300 undocumented workers, Martinez-Bravo’s phone constantly rings. Many families contacting her have had their primary or sole income-earner ripped away, leaving the remaining parent without a way to pay rent and other bills.

She said some of the most alarming calls have come from people who are now unexpectedly caring for children. She recalled one call about a babysitter who showed up to one of the farms with two babies in her arms the morning after the raid. Their parents had never come home, Martinez-Bravo said she was told.

“There is no government support, so all the support that is happening is from nonprofit groups and families,” said Martinez-Bravo. “It’s leaving children at risk.”

Martinez-Bravo wore a cheerful, embroidered red blouse on a Friday afternoon last month when she dropped off a large Target bag full of supplies — including toothbrushes, toothpaste and Lysol wipes — at a one-bedroom apartment where seven people had been living for more than a month.

The apartment had been tight when it was just a family of four living there – two farmworkers and their two children. But then the couple took in three more children – their niece and two nephews – when those kids’ parents were detained and quickly deported.

The aunt and uncle struggled to pay for food and rent, and their landlord told them too many people were living in the small apartment. The stress had become so great that the aunt — who is also undocumented — kept getting headaches. Just the week prior, she ended up in the hospital, she said.

When she could no longer afford a babysitter for the youngest of the children, she said, a family friend drove the 2-year-old boy — a US citizen — across the border to live with his father in Tijuana, Mexico. The father said he had come to the United States days after he found his own father shot dead in his house in Mexico. He said he and his son are now sharing a room with a roommate while his wife stays with her family thousands of miles away. He found a job on a farm and works six days a week, but nets less than $20 a day. After paying for child care, it’s a struggle to afford food and diapers, he said.

Back in California, the aunt says she worries about being separated from her own children, a teenager and 4-year-old, who were both born in the US and are citizens. She wants a better future for them, one where they don’t come home from long days picking produce, caked in mud like her and their father.

“Now I feel sad for everything happening,” she said in Spanish. “What happens if ICE takes me?”

A new kind of family separation

Previous immigration crackdowns had primarily focused on immigrants who had violent criminal records or were recent arrivals.

But now, as immigration agents scramble to meet the Trump administration’s aggressive quotas of 3,000 arrests a day, many immigrants who have lived in the country a decade or longer with no criminal records are being arrested, detained and deported — often within a matter of weeks or even days.

Many parents in the cases CNN identified had dutifully attended immigration appointments, paid taxes and received work permits and other authorization to remain in the country, according to interviews and records from parents, families and attorneys.

In prior policy documents, ICE noted that there were “limited circumstances in which detention is appropriate” for parents. While it was not unheard of under past administrations for immigrant parents to end up deported, ICE has historically given agents “discretion” to prevent children from being separated from their sole caregivers.

ICE has taken a different approach under Trump’s second term. The administration’s “border czar,” Tom Homan, has repeatedly said parents are to blame for entering the country illegally and having children here without being documented. “If (you’re) in the country illegally and you choose to have a US citizen child, that’s on you,” Homan told Politico in July. “If we want to send a message to the whole world … go have a US citizen child and you’re immune … we’re never going to solve this problem.”

ICE echoed this in its statement to CNN, saying that even if an undocumented immigrant attends immigration appointments, pays taxes or receives authorization to work in the US, they “are not absolved of their original offense of illegally entering the country.”

The agency’s “Detained Parents Directive,” meanwhile, has been changed to weaken protections for undocumented parents, most notably removing a written commitment to pursue “humane enforcement” of deportation laws. Instead, the guidance states that agents should “remain cognizant of the impact enforcement actions may have on a minor child.”

The administration’s updated policy still provides that undocumented parents should be given time to find an appropriate caregiver or to make travel plans for their children. Yet, some detained parents have alleged they were not given such accommodations, according to immigration attorneys and accounts detailed in interviews and online fundraisers.

In one case, a young girl was placed in foster care despite having family members who were willing to care for her, according to a nonprofit. In others, parents were deported so quickly that there wasn’t enough time for them to secure passports for their children to be able to join them.

“This ICE is not using their discretion,” said Heidi Altman, vice president of policy at the National Immigration Law Center. “The checks and balances that used to exist are gone.”

In Honduras and Guatemala — two countries many undocumented immigrants are being deported to — parents are arriving without their US citizen children and saying they weren’t given the option to bring them, researchers from the nonprofit advocacy group Women’s Refugee Commission said after visiting both places.

“Some parents were showing up inconsolable because they did not know where their children were or who was caring for them,” said Zain Lakhani, the group’s director of migrant rights and justice. “This is the new family separation crisis.”

In its statement, ICE said parents are given the opportunity to designate a guardian to care for their children or to have their children accompany them when they are deported. “That decision is entirely up to the illegal alien parents, and they are given a reasonable amount of time to make that decision,” the spokesperson said.

Citing the increasing likelihood that undocumented parents could end up in ICE custody, nonprofits have been holding community workshops to help parents consider their options, such as designating guardians for their children in the event they are separated. Lawmakers in several states have also recently introduced legislation to make it easier for parents to designate appropriate caregivers if they are taken.

“We are witnessing families being torn apart in real time — parents detained, unable to pick up their children from school and childcare,” Democratic California Assemblywoman Celeste Rodriguez said in a statement about legislation that is currently awaiting the governor’s signature. “This bill is not just about planning; it’s about creating a safety net.”

Lasting trauma

Mimi Lettunich was in the middle of work when she received a call from an immigration agent asking her whether she could pick up her friend Jackie Merlos’ four children. Merlos was being detained, and if she didn’t immediately find a US citizen to take her kids, they would end up in foster care.

Within hours, Lettunich found herself driving along the highway with 9-year-old triplets and their 7-year-old brother to care for indefinitely.

The children sat stunned in the back seat. Lettunich herself was trying to wrap her mind around what was happening, she told CNN. She couldn’t understand why immigration authorities would take away Merlos and her husband, well-regarded local business owners who had come to Portland, Oregon, from Honduras decades ago.

Lettunich hadn’t cared for young children in years — her own kids were now grown up. And she had a full-time job. As they drove to her Portland home, she realized she and her husband hadn’t even started to think about what they needed or how this was all going to work: Did they have toothbrushes? Where were they going to sleep? What were they going to have for dinner? How do we make sure they feel comfortable but also give them their space?

That first night at Lettunich’s, the children slept in their clothes because they didn’t have pajamas. She comforted them before bed, telling them they were safe and reading them stories. She told them they could think of this as “summer camp,” and the kids now call it “Camp Reindeer” because of how many deer they see in the backyard. In the days and then weeks that have followed, she and her husband have taken the kids swimming, to the zoo and out to dinner — anything to try to cheer them up. Because they have had to keep working too, they enrolled the children in day camps, and they often visit their parents in detention on the weekends.

But Lettunich said she worries every day about the impacts that they will be coping with for the rest of their lives because of the ordeal. “They fear for their parents,” she said. “They ask, ‘are Mom and Dad not coming home?’”

One of the kids has been keeping everything bottled up, she said. He doesn’t want to hear anything about what happened or talk about it, only wanting to “think of happy things.” And all of the children have started talking with a psychiatrist to try to begin processing the trauma, she said.

Less than three hours away in her cell at an ICE detention center in Tacoma, Washington, their mother, Jackie Merlos, is grappling with her own emotions, writing regular journal entries about her experience and her worries. US Customs and Border Protection, which initially detained Merlos and her husband, told CNN she was arrested “as she attempted to smuggle illegal aliens into the United States” and that formal removal proceedings were underway. Neither Merlos nor her husband has been charged with a crime related to this allegation, however, and Merlos has said she and her family were simply meeting her sister — a Canadian resident — at a park along the US-Canada border. ICE did not comment.

It has been more than 70 days since Merlos was separated from her kids, and her next court date isn’t until the middle of October.

“I feel powerless not being able to see or hug my children, play with them, and watch them grow,” she wrote a week after her children were separated from her. “I’m suffering, and my children are suffering psychologically. It’s not fair to separate children from their mom and dad.”

Sometimes Merlos convinces herself that what is happening is just a nightmare that she will wake up from. “My life feels meaningless without them,” she wrote.

But until the whole family is reunited, she urged her children to keep praying and to continue living their lives without her.

“Please don’t stop practicing your piano (David), guitar (Carlitos), violin (Abigail), and piano (Caleb),” Merlos wrote.

An untracked issue

Pleas for donations to help stranded children have been popping up online since immigration efforts ramped up earlier this year.

In some cases, the children themselves are asking for financial support to help pay for food, rent and utility bills. Teenagers describe being left on their own with younger siblings, and recent high school graduates say they have dropped out of college and returned home in the hopes of keeping their siblings housed, fed and out of the care of strangers.

“My mother is the most hard working woman I know, she is a single mother of 3 and has worked for us to always have everything we need and everything she’s had worked for her whole life was just taken away from her,” a daughter wrote in a July fundraiser. “Truly anything helps.”

Because the number of kids left behind by the ongoing ICE raids and deportation efforts is not being publicly tracked, CNN used the crowdfunding platform GoFundMe as a way to provide a snapshot of the issue, as well as interviews with families and attorneys, who confirmed additional cases to reporters. CNN’s count of more than 100 US citizen children does not include dozens of children whose citizenship status or age was unclear, or where fundraisers couldn’t be verified.

The fundraising accounts, which GoFundMe confirmed to CNN had been verified by the company’s trust and safety team, also served as a window into where separated children have ended up. Some were taken into foster care. Most were being cared for by family friends, community members or relatives.

ICE said it couldn’t comment on CNN’s analysis because it included anonymous families and some of the information had come from what it called “notoriously biased and unreliable” crowdfunding websites. The spokesperson did not respond to questions about how often children were ending up in this situation or whether this was something being internally tracked by the agency.

Immigration experts said said it is difficult to fully assess how widespread the issue is until the federal government comprehensively tracks and releases that data. There are millions of US citizen children living in households where their only parent or both parents are undocumented, Brookings Institution research shows.

Attorneys told CNN about cases ranging from an 8-year-old who allegedly watched her single mother get handcuffed and taken away by ICE to a one-year-old who is currently living with a foster family as the toddler’s mom fights for custody from detention.

“It’s stunning that we’re putting so much emphasis on hitting deportation numbers, and not thinking about all the collateral damage we’re doing,” said Leecia Welch, deputy litigation director at nonprofit Children’s Rights, who has been visiting families in immigrant detention centers to monitor conditions. “We’re traumatizing everybody involved in these situations and completely destabilizing their lives and causing long-term trauma.”

‘It terrifies me’

It was around 6:30 in the morning when Kenia Perez arrived home from her overnight shift at the hospital.

She had stopped at the store to get milk for her daughter’s cereal and was planning to go inside and wake her kids up and get them ready for school, when she saw two large, unfamiliar cars parked outside her apartment.

ICE agents were waiting for her.

“Run away as far as you can,” she texted her 14-year-old son, Isaac, who jumped out the window. Since Isaac was also undocumented, she worried ICE would take him too — leaving Febe and Angelo without any family in the country.

Agents in tactical vests and local police officers surrounded her in the parking lot.

Desperate to keep her children out of foster care, her next call was to Jeff Chaney, a family friend and coworker who had agreed just a day earlier to take guardianship of the children if ICE came for her — something she had become increasingly nervous about under the Trump administration.

Perez had been in the US for roughly a decade, fleeing cartel violence in her native Honduras. She described to CNN how she was assaulted, raped and left in a dumpster on her journey. She was pregnant when she was apprehended at the border and records show she was released under an order requiring regular check-ins with ICE. She met and married her husband in the years that followed and created a family in Galveston, Texas. Only months after she gave birth to her third child, her husband passed away from Covid in 2020, and she suddenly became the sole caregiver for her three children — two of whom, Febe and Angelo, are US citizens.

Perez said she paid taxes and documents show that she never missed a check-in with ICE. Her work permit is not set to expire until the spring of 2026. But ICE came for her anyway.

Unlike other cases examined by CNN, Perez said she was allowed to go into her apartment, wake her children, and tell them goodbye.

“I need you to be strong,” she remembers telling Febe and Angelo. “You see those men. They’re going to take Mom.”

Perez prayed she would be able to take her children with her to Honduras. Even though she knew it would be dangerous, she couldn’t imagine being separated.

But she was deported 11 days after her arrest, leaving her friend, Chaney, trying to lighten the kids’ moods. He took them to IHOP on the weekends and held movie nights at his house.

Chaney couldn’t keep the kids at his house given the long hours he worked at his two jobs, so the children spent several days bouncing around among a network of Perez’s coworkers’ homes until one of her undocumented friends gave them a place to stay, at least temporarily. Because the kids didn’t have access to any of the funds Perez had saved from her job, community members began supporting the family through a GoFundMe campaign.

In an interview with CNN, Chaney said that when he voted for Trump last year, he understood that immigration enforcement was a top priority for his administration. He supported the Republican Party’s promise to secure the border and to go after criminals and gang members.

But he never imagined that someone like Perez, his close friend and co-worker, would end up caught in the crackdown.

“This is not what I voted for,” he said, adding that he never supported the targeting of working-class people who had been doing everything right. “You don’t do this. This is inhumane what they’re doing.”

An ICE spokesperson told CNN Perez asked to be reunited with her children before she was deported, but that she refused to provide agents with their specific location. Perez told CNN she did not want to endanger any of her undocumented friends who were helping to care for her kids when she was first arrested, but that she had hoped that while she was in detention, she would have an opportunity to secure their passports so that they could be reunited when she was deported. “After exhausting all efforts, ICE proceeded with her removal in accordance with federal law,” the spokesperson said in a statement.

The spokesperson described Perez as an “irresponsible parent,” who “chose to use her children as a bargaining chip in an attempt to prevent her own removal from the country.”

“Any claims by her now that ICE improperly separated her from her kids are patently false and just another attempt to manipulate the system for her own benefit,” the spokesperson said.

From a small home on a dirt road in a neighborhood of San Pedro Sula, Honduras, known for gang violence, Perez called her kids every night, telling them everything was going to be OK. Her daughter’s dolls and her son’s toys sat waiting for them, along with two spots next to her in her bed.

More than two months after she was deported, Perez was finally able to secure the paperwork and passports needed for Febe and Angelo to reunite with her in Honduras, where her oldest son had also joined her. But she told CNN she worries about her children and the life they will have in one of the most violent countries in the world.

“It terrifies me,” she said. “I don’t like the decisions I’m making, but I’m tied hand and foot.”

METHODOLOGY

CNN’s analysis, which provided a snapshot of the number of US citizen children being stranded by ICE actions, included accounts from interviews with families, attorneys and nonprofit organizations, as well as fundraisers from the crowdfunding platform GoFundMe. CNN provided GoFundMe with a list of roughly 150 campaigns to confirm which fundraisers had been verified by the company’s Trust & Safety Team as part of its standard verification process, and reporters contacted the organizers and family members. The count does not include dozens of children whose citizenship status or age was unclear, or where fundraisers couldn’t be verified.

CNN’s Abel Alvarado, Norma Galeana and Yahya Abou-Ghazala contributed to this report.

‘The new family separation crisis’: More than 100 US citizen kids left stranded by ICE enforcement actions, CNN finds | CNN Politics
Children across the US have ended up in the care of relatives, neighbors, friends, coworkers and even strangers after ICE detained or deported their parents.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/23/politics/us-citizen-children-separated-parents-deported-ice-invs

Mirror US: ‘Two-thirds’ of detainees brought to Alligator Alcatraz are missing, chilling report finds

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More regarding Gulag Noem aka Alligator Alcatraz

According to the report, the whereabouts of nearly two-thirds of the 1,800 men brought to the facility during the month of July could not be determined

Hundreds of the more than 1,800 men brought to the recently constructed South Florida immigration detention center, branded “Alligator Alcatraz,” have disappeared from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) records, according to new reporting from the Miami Herald.

According to the report, the newspaper could not determine the whereabouts of nearly two-thirds of the 1,800 men brought to the facility during the month of July. Around 800 detainees showed no record in ICE’s database, and more than 450 detainees listed no location and were only instructed to “Call ICE for details.”

It is possible that some of the men detailed in the report could still be detained at Alligator Alcatraz, but unlike federal facilities, the Everglades detention center is run by the state of Florida, which does not maintain a searchable database of people detained at the facility. According to the report, they are also often not included in federally maintained databases.

But that alone would not have accounted for all the detainees without records in the federal database, as the facility’s population had declined rapidly by late August, falling below 400 people due to a federal court ruling essentially halting operations at the site.

The outcomes for the hundreds of detainees have become even more important recently, with a federal appeals court overruling the lower court’s decision, allowing the facility to resume normal operations for now while the case proceeds through the courts.

Some of the detainees that were not able to be located by the outlet may have already been deported, despite the internal data obtained by the Herald showing the vast majority of detainees didn’t have final orders of removal from a judge before entering the facility.

Many of those deportations were a result of detainees deciding to abandon their ongoing immigration cases to put an end to their detention at the facility, which human rights organizations have criticised for its abhorrent conditions.

“It became a game of chicken to see who’s going to blink first, to see if the client’s going to say ‘I don’t want to be detained in these conditions, just send me back,'” Miami immigration attorney Alex Solomiany told the Herald.

However, some of the detainees who didn’t want to voluntarily surrender their immigration cases were also deported, even if they had a legal right to remain in the country. One of Solomiany’s clients is a 53-year-old man from Guatemala who has been in the United States since 2001.

According to the Herald, the man was sent to Alligator Alcatraz after being stopped by the Florida Highway Patrol in Palm Beach County.

Solomiany told the Herald that he filed a motion to be released on bond for the Guatemalan man, who worked as a house painter and is married with children. He then attended a scheduled hearing at the Krome Detention Center in Miami on Aug. 1, expecting to see his client. That’s when an attorney for the government told Solomiany his client had accidentally been deported to Guatemala, instead of being transferred to Krome ahead of the hearing, Solomiany told the Herald.

The attorney is now working with ICE to have his client returned to the U.S.

‘Two-thirds’ of detainees brought to Alligator Alcatraz are missing – report
According to the report, the whereabouts of nearly two-thirds of the 1,800 men brought to the facility during the month of July could not be determined

https://www.themirror.com/news/us-news/two-thirds-detainees-brought-alligator-1407183

Fox News: ICE agents break car window to arrest resisting illegal immigrant in exclusive Fox News ride-along

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U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) began Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago this week, arresting multiple criminal illegal immigrants as Fox News joined agents for an exclusive ride-along.

On Tuesday, ICE agents arrested a Mexican national on a federal criminal arrest warrant for multiple felony reentries into the United States. Fox News learned that the individual had been deported twice to Mexico and returned a third time to the U.S. He is also facing charges for assault in a previous case.

Fox News cameras followed agents as they approached the Mexican national outside his home. The individual tried to enter his car to avoid arrest, forcing ICE agents to break its window and extract him from the vehicle. He then appears to continue resisting arrest.

The Mexican national will face federal criminal prosecution before he is deported, potentially spending time in jail, Fox News learned.

ICE and Fox lie as usual — this guy’s only “crime” was being in the U.S. too often. We are not made the least bit safer by his arrest, and taxpayers will be funding his room and board.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/ice-agents-break-car-window-to-arrest-resisting-illegal-immigrant-in-exclusive-fox-news-ride-along/ar-AA1McWfM

News Nation: Mexican immigrants more likely to remain behind bars after arrest, data shows

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Mexican nationals are more likely to be detained after being apprehended by federal immigration officers, according to data compiled by Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

TRAC figures show that in July, 57 percent of Mexican nationals arrested for crossing the border or for being in the country illegally were held in detention centers while their proceedings take place in immigration court.

By contrast, overall, only 30 percent of migrants were detained after their apprehensions.

According to TRAC, ICE determines when a person is held, and that there is no specific pattern in the decision-making.

“In reality, little is known about the factors that influence these custody decisions,” writes TRAC. “The ICE agents have wide discretion to make decisions and their criteria is rarely revealed.”

According to TRAC, it appears decisions are taken by the agents themselves and are influenced by their own backgrounds and ethnic identity.

However, the state in which migrants are apprehended can also determine whether they are detained.

TRAC says being detained can have major implications, adding that individuals who remain in custody have a more difficult time obtaining the documents and the legal help to make a case against deportation.

TRAC also says that the vast majority of individuals in ICE custody, through June 30, had no criminal record, and that 4 out of 5, either had no record or had only committed a minor offense such as a traffic violation.

Racial discrimination? Probably!

Click on one of the links below to see their detention rates nationality by nationality.

Mexican immigrants more likely to remain behind bars after arrest, data shows
“In reality, little is known about the factors that influence these custody decisions,” writes TRAC. “The ICE agents have wide discretion to make decisions and the criteria used b…

https://www.newsnationnow.com/us-news/immigration/border-coverage/mexican-immigrants-more-likely-to-remain-behind-bars-after-arrest-data-shows

Reuters: In Chicago, ICE fears turn Mexican parade into a ghost town

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A normally raucous, colorful parade to mark Mexican Independence Day in Chicago turned quiet and nervous on Saturday as U.S. President Donald Trump signaled he intended to ramp up deportations in the nation’s third-largest city.

In a break from traditional celebrations, twirling folklorico dancers decked in glimmering jewelry and billowing, multi-colored dresses distributed “know your rights” pamphlets to sparse crowds in the city’s historically Mexican Pilsen neighborhood. Horses wore the colors of Mexico’s flag in their tails, while their riders wore neon-orange whistles around their necks in case they needed to alert attendees of Immigration and Custom Enforcement agents. Along the sidelines, volunteers also kept watch for ICE.

“This place would normally be packed,” Eddie Chavez, a lifelong Pilsen resident, said while waving a Mexican flag in a lone row of lawn chairs along the parade route. “Now it’s empty, like a ghost town.”

Trump alluded to immigration raids in Chicago in a Truth Social post that echoed the movie Apocalypse Now.

“I love the smell of deportations in the morning,” his post said, opens new tab, above an image of Trump in a military uniform juxtaposed against flames and Chicago’s skyline. “Chicago is about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.”

Trump signed an executive order on Friday to rename the Department of Defense as the “Department of War.”

Illinois Govornor JB Pritzker, a Democrat and vocal critic of Trump, said on Tuesday he believed ICE raids would coincide with Mexican Independence day festivals scheduled for this weekend and next weekend. Some Mexican festivals in the Chicago area were postponed or canceled, opens new tab amid fears of immigration raids.

“We’re scared, but we’re here,” said Isabel Garcia, a dancer in Saturday’s parade wearing a marigold-yellow dress and multi-colored ribbons and flowers in her hair.

“We’re Mexican. We have to celebrate, and they’re not going to stop us.”

ICE has not responded to requests for comment on whether it sent more agents to Chicago, and residents said they had not seen significantly stepped-up immigration enforcement so far.

A large protest against ICE was expected later on Saturday in Chicago, after thousands turned out for a Labor Day protest on Monday.

Trump last month deployed National Guard troops to Washington, saying they would “re-establish law, order, and public safety.” In addition to Chicago, he has suggested the possibility of deploying troops to Democratic-run Baltimore in Maryland.

In Chicago, ICE fears turn Mexican parade into a ghost town
“We’re Mexican. We have to celebrate, and they’re not going to stop us.”

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/chicago-ice-fears-turn-mexican-parade-into-ghost-town-2025-09-06

Associated Press: Legal aid group sues to preemptively block U.S. from deporting a dozen Honduran children

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A legal aid group has sued to preemptively block any efforts by the U.S. government to deport a dozen Honduran children, saying it had “credible” information that such plans were quietly in the works.

The Arizona-based Florence Immigrant & Refugee Rights Project (FIRRP) on Friday added Honduran children to a lawsuit filed last weekend that resulted in a judge temporarily blocking the deportation of dozens of migrant children to their native Guatemala.

In a statement, the organization said it had received reports that the U.S. government will “imminently move forward with a plan to illegally remove Honduran children in government custody as soon as this weekend, in direct violation of their right to seek protection in the United States and despite ongoing litigation that blocked similar attempted extra-legal removals for children from Guatemala.”

FIRRP did not immediately provide The Associated Press with details about what information it had received about the possible deportation of Honduran children. The amendment to the organization’s lawsuit is sealed in federal court. The Homeland Security Department did not immediately respond to email requests for comment on Friday and Saturday.

The Justice Department on Saturday provided what is perhaps its most detailed account of a chaotic Labor Day weekend involving the attempted deportation of 76 Guatemalan children. Its timeline was part of a request to lift a temporary hold on their removal.

Over Labor Day weekend, the Trump administration attempted to remove Guatemalan children who had come to the U.S. alone and were living in shelters or with foster care families in the U.S.

Advocates who represent migrant children in court filed lawsuits across the country seeking to stop the government from removing the children, and on Sunday a federal judge stepped in to order that the kids stay in the U.S. for at least two weeks.

The government initially identified 457 Guatemalan children for possible deportation, according to Saturday’s filing. None could have a pending asylum screening or claim, resulting in the removal of 91. They had to have parents or legal guardians in Guatemala and be at least 10 years old.

In the end, 327 children were found eligible for deportation, including 76 who boarded planes early Sunday in what the government described as a first phase, according to a statement by Angie Salazar, acting director of the U.S. Health and Human Services Department’s Office of Refugee Resettlement. All 76 were at least 14 years old and “self-reported” that they had a parent or legal guardian in Guatemala but none in the United States.

The Justice Department said no planes took off, despite a comment by one of its attorneys in court Sunday that one may have but returned.

Children who cross the border alone are generally transferred to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which falls under the Health and Human Services Department. The children usually live in a network of shelters across the country that are overseen by the resettlement office until they are eventually released to a sponsor — usually a relative

Children began crossing the border alone in large numbers in 2014, peaking at 152,060 in the 2022 fiscal year. July’s arrest tally translates to an annual clip of 5,712 arrests, reflecting how illegal crossings have dropped to their lowest levels in six decades.

Guatemalans accounted for 32% of residents at government-run holding facilities last year, followed by Hondurans, Mexicans and El Salvadorans. A 2008 law requires children to appear before an immigration judge with an opportunity to pursue asylum, unless they are from Canada and Mexico. The vast majority are released from shelters to parents, legal guardians or immediate family while their cases wind through court.

Justice Department lawyers said federal law allows the Department of Health and Human Services to “repatriate” or “reunite” children by taking them out of the U.S., as long as the child hasn’t been a victim of “severe” human trafficking, is not at risk for becoming so if he or she is returned to their native country and does not face a “a credible fear” of persecution there. The child also cannot be “repatriated” if he or she has a pending asylum claim.

The FIRRP lawsuit was amended to include 12 children from Honduras who have expressed to the Florence Project that they do not want to return to Honduras, as well as four additional children from Guatemala who have come into government custody in Arizona since the suit was initially filed last week.

Some children have parents who are already in the United States.

The lawsuit demands that the government allow the children their legal right to present their cases to an immigration judge, to have access to legal counsel and to be placed in the least restrictive setting that is in the best interest of the child.

Legal aid group sues to preemptively block U.S. from deporting a dozen Honduran children
A legal aid group has sued to preemptively block any efforts by the U.S. government to deport a dozen Honduran children, saying it had “credible” information that such plans were quietly in the works.

https://apnews.com/article/immigration-children-trump-deportations-guatemala-honduras-70c0912b3ee8c1038e793974b7141d67

CNN: Immigration raid at New York business left workers terrified and slowed production, co-owner says

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When Lenny Schmidt arrived at his family-run nutrition bar manufacturing business in upstate New York Thursday morning, federal immigration agents were already there.

“The agents were swarming the plant,” he said. “There were probably over 100 of these agents, on four-wheelers, on foot, they had dogs.”

“They had surrounded the facility and forced their way through into the plant … using, I think, crowbars,” Schmidt, the company’s co-owner and vice president, told CNN’s Laura Coates on Friday.

By the end of the hourslong raid at Nutrition Bar Confectioners in Cato, a rural community about 30 miles northwest of Syracuse, dozens of employees had been detained.

The raid in Cato coincided with a similar operation in Ellabell, Georgia, where federal agents detained 475 workers, mostly Korean nationals suspected of living or working in the US illegally. It marked the largest sweep yet in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown at worksites, which has increasingly targeted industries like manufacturing and agriculture that often depend on immigrant labor.

At the New York facility, agents sealed the exits, halting production and corralling workers for questioning.

“They cornered all of our workers, seemingly targeting just the Hispanic employees, separated everybody … later on, they ended up escorting them into vans,” Schmidt said.

Schmidt said his company, which has been operating since 1978, complies with all federal labor laws.

“We vet each person as best as we can in accordance with those laws and get the correct documentation to support this,” he said, adding that all his employees possessed the necessary documentation to legally work in the US.

ICE told CNN affiliate WSTM the raid was a “court-authorized enforcement operation,” but did not provide further details. Employees told WSTM that around 60 workers were detained. CNN has reached out to the agency for details.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul sharply condemned the raid, calling it a cruel disruption to immigrant families.

“What they did was shatter hard-working families who are simply trying to build a life here, just like millions of immigrants before them,” the governor said.

‘Everyone got scared’

The operation began around 9 a.m., according to a Guatemalan worker who has been working on the production line for two years. Speaking on condition of anonymity, the worker described the mounting panic as agents surrounded the building and gathered up to 70 workers – many from Guatemala and Nicaragua – into the lunchroom, where the entire workforce was questioned.

“They surrounded the building. Everyone got scared.”

The worker, a legal US resident, said ICE agents neither showed warrants nor explained the reason for the raid.

“They went straight to the workers,” the employee said. “They asked what country we were from, if we had permission to be in the US. They demanded papers.”

After showing his identification card, the worker was released within half an hour, but others, including coworkers with valid work permits, were taken into custody, he said.

CNN contacted the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement to find out if the detainees had valid work permits and awaits a response.

Some employees who were released from detention returned to the plant almost immediately, Schmidt said.

“It’s heartbreaking … some of them came back to work. I remember seeing somebody punching the clock and I walked up to him and I couldn’t believe my eyes. So I shook his hand and gave him a hug,” he said.

Production at the plant came to a standstill during the raid, but Schmidt said operations have resumed – though at reduced capacity.

“It’s going to slow us down probably half speed or just less until we get hopefully some of these workers back,” Schmidt said, adding they will also start the hiring process for new workers this weekend.

“What makes us successful is having these wonderful workers,” he said. “We hope and pray for our workers to be safe and to return home to their families and, hopefully, back to work.”

Immigration raid at New York business left workers terrified and slowed production, co-owner says | CNN
When Lenny Schmidt arrived at his family-run nutrition bar manufacturing business in upstate New York Thursday morning, federal immigration agents were already there.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/06/us/cato-new-york-immigration-raid-business-owner-hnk

L.A. Times: Trump administration plans to remove nearly 700 unaccompanied migrant children, senator says

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  • Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) called on the government to halt the deportation plans.
  • The removals would violate the Office of Refugee Resettlement’s long-established practice of protecting such children, Wyden said.

The Trump administration is planning to remove nearly 700 Guatemalan children who had come to the U.S. without their parents, according to a letter sent Friday by Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, and the Central American country said it was ready to take them in.

The removals would violate the Office of Refugee Resettlement’s “child welfare mandate and this country’s long-established obligation to these children,” Wyden told Angie Salazar, acting director of the office within the Department of Health and Human Services that is responsible for migrant children who arrive in the U.S. alone.

“This move threatens to separate children from their families, lawyers, and support systems, to thrust them back into the very conditions they are seeking refuge from, and to disappear vulnerable children beyond the reach of American law and oversight,” the Democratic senator wrote, asking for the deportation plans to be terminated.

It is another step in the Trump administration’s sweeping immigration enforcement efforts, which include plans to surge officers to Chicago for an immigration crackdown, ramping up deportations and ending protections for people who have had permission to live and work in the United States.

Guatemalan Foreign Affairs Minister Carlos Martínez said Friday that the government has told the U.S. it is willing to receive hundreds of Guatemalan minors who arrived unaccompanied to the United States and are being held in U.S. facilities.

Guatemala is particularly concerned about minors who could age out of the facilities for children and be sent to adult detention centers, he said. The exact number of children to be returned remains in flux, but they are currently discussing a little over 600. He said no date has been set yet for their return.

That would be almost double what Guatemala previously agreed to. The head of the country’s immigration service said last month that the government was looking to repatriate 341 unaccompanied minors who were being held in U.S. facilities.

“The idea is to bring them back before they reach 18 years old so that they are not taken to an adult detention center,” Guatemala Immigration Institute Director Danilo Rivera said at the time. He said it would be done at Guatemala’s expense and would be a form of voluntary return.

The plan was announced by President Bernardo Arévalo, who said then that the government had a moral and legal obligation to advocate for the children. His comments came days after U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem visited Guatemala.

The White House and the Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the latest move, which was first reported by CNN.

Quoting unidentified whistleblowers, Wyden’s letter said children who do not have a parent or legal guardian as a sponsor or who don’t have an asylum case already underway “will be forcibly removed from the country.”

The idea of repatriating such a large number of children to their home country also raised concerns with activists who work with children navigating the immigration process.

“We are outraged by the Trump administration’s renewed assault on the rights of immigrant children,” said Lindsay Toczylowski, president and CEO of Immigrant Defenders Law Center. “We are not fooled by their attempt to mask these efforts as mere ‘repatriations.’ This is yet another calculated attempt to sever what little due process remains in the immigration system.”

Santana, Seitz and Gonzalez write for the Associated Press. Gonzalez reported from McAllen, Texas. AP writers Sonia Pérez D. in Guatemala City and Tim Sullivan in Minneapolis contributed to this report.

They already tried.

Judge already said “nyet”.

One airborne plane was even forced to return & unload the kids.

Trump administration plans to remove nearly 700 unaccompanied migrant children, senator says
The Trump administration plans to remove nearly 700 Guatemalan children who crossed into the U.S. without their parents

https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2025-08-29/trump-administration-plans-to-remove-nearly-700-unaccompanied-migrant-children-senator-says

Time: Judge Blocks Deportation of Hundreds of Unaccompanied Children as Flights Were Ready to Take Off

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A federal judge temporarily blocked the Trump Administration from deporting hundreds of unaccompanied children back to their home country of Guatemala, just as some of the children were boarded on planes and ready to depart.

The last-minute order wrapped up a frenetic legal battle that began in the early hours of Sunday morning, when immigration advocacy groups filed an emergency lawsuit after discovering shelters holding unaccompanied children were abruptly told to prepare them for deportation within two hours.

District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan issued a temporary block on the deportations at 4 a.m. and called a hearing for Sunday afternoon. That hearing was moved forward when she heard the deportations were already underway, and the judge issued a temporary restraining order blocking deny deportations for 14 days.

“I do not want there to be any ambiguity about what I am ordering,” Judge Sooknanan said, adding that the government “cannot remove any children” while the case is ongoing.

The judge ordered the children to be taken off the planes and made clear that her ruling applies to all Guatemalan minors who arrived in the U.S. without their parents or guardians.

Some children were taken off planes as they were waiting to take off on the tarmac. A government lawyer said in the hearing that one plane had taken off, but later came back when the order was issued.

In their lawsuit, lawyers from the National Immigrant Law Center (NILC) said the children—who are in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR)—were due to be handed over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and deported to Guatemala on Sunday.

The ORR sent memos to shelters holding the children on Saturday telling them to “take proactive measures to ensure [unaccompanied children] are prepared for discharge within 2 hours of receiving this notification.” The memo called for the shelters to “have two prepared sack lunches” and one suitcase per child.

The NILC attorneys said in the lawsuit that they were filing on behalf of “hundreds of Guatemalan children at imminent risk of unlawful removal from the United States,” aged between 10 and 17 years.

The lawsuit said the estimated 600 children had “active proceedings before immigration courts across the country,” and removing them from the country violated the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008, the Immigration and Nationality Act, and the Constitution.

“All unaccompanied children — regardless of the circumstances of their arrival to the United States — receive the benefit of full immigration proceedings, including a hearing on claims for relief before an immigration judge,” the attorneys wrote in the lawsuit. 

“Congress provided even further procedural protection to unaccompanied minors in removal proceedings by mandating that their claims for asylum be heard in the first instance before an asylum officer in a non-adversarial setting rather than in an adversarial courtroom setting,” they added. 

Judge Sooknanan granted the plaintiffs’ request for a restraining order to block the deportations early Saturday morning “to maintain the status quo until a hearing can be set.”

At the hearing on Sunday, lawyers for the U.S. government insisted that the children were being repatriated with their parents. Justice Department attorney Drew Ensign said it was “outrageous that the plaintiffs are trying to interfere with these reunifications.”

That claim was contested by the immigration advocacy groups and attorneys for some of the children, who said at least some of the children said they did not want to return and some faced danger back in Guatemala.

“I have conflicting narratives from both sides here,” Sooknanan said.

“Absent action by the courts, all of those children would have been returned to Guatemala, potentially to very dangerous situations,” she added.

Ensign told Judge Sooknanan the deportations were underway when the order was issued and that he believed one plane had taken off, but had come back.

Minutes after the hearing ended, the Associated Press reported that five charter buses pulled up to a plane parked at an airport near the border in Harlingen, Texas, where deportation flights are known to depart from.

Efrén C. Olivares, vice president of litigation and legal strategy at the National Immigration Law Center, said the deportations could have caused the children “irreperable harm.”

“In the dead of night on a holiday weekend, the Trump administration ripped vulnerable, frightened children from their beds and attempted to return them to danger in Guatemala,” he said in a statement following the ruling.

“We are heartened the Court prevented this injustice from occurring before hundreds of children suffered irreparable harm. We are determined to continue fighting to protect the interest of our plaintiffs and all class members until the effort is enjoined permanently,” he added.

The ORR, which lies within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), said the deportations were the result of an agreement between the U.S. and Guatemala. Attorneys representing the children were sent memos informing them that the “Government of Guatemala has requested the return of certain unaccompanied alien children in federal custody for the purposes of reunifying the UAC with suitable family members.”

“This communication is provided as advance notice that removal proceedings may be dismissed to support the prompt repatriation of the child,” the memo, which was reviewed by TIME, said.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller criticized Sooknanan for blocking the deportations.

“The minors have all self-reported that their parents are back home in Guatemala. But a Democrat judge is refusing to let them reunify with their parents,” he wrote on X.

The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to a request for comment. ICE did not respond to a request for comment.

King Donald & cronies are preying on the most vulnerable so as to maximize their deportation stats.

Judge Halts Deportation of Hundreds of Unaccompanied Children
Immigrant groups are seeking a restraining order to block the abrupt deportation of hundreds of children to Guatemala.

https://time.com/7313641/deportation-guatemala-ice-judge-blocked

CBS News: U.S. citizen told “you have no rights” during immigration arrest speaks out

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Video of an 18-year-old U.S. citizen being violently arrested in Florida by immigration agents back in May has drawn heavy scrutiny, with advocates saying the expansion of state and local law enforcement’s role in illegal immigrant crackdowns contributed to the incident. 

Border Patrol and the Florida Highway Patrol were conducting immigration enforcement on May 2 when they detained Kenny Laynez, a high school senior who was on his way to work as a landscaper with two other co-workers and his mother, who was driving.

Video Laynez recorded of the arrest shows an officer telling him, a U.S. citizen who was born and raised in the country, “You got no rights here. You’re an amigo, brother.”

“It hurts me, hearing them saying that I have no rights here because I look like, um, you know, Hispanic, I’m Hispanic,” Laynez told CBS News. 

The car was pulled over for having too many people sitting in the front seat. Two passengers were undocumented, according to Laynez, and officers are seen on the video using a Taser. The teens’ two co-workers were both detained, and Laynez says he has been unable to contact them.

“We’re not resisting. We’re not committing any crime to, you know, run away,” Laynez said, recalling the arrest.

Laynez’s phone continued recording after he was detained, capturing an exchange in which an officer tells another, “They’re starting to resist more. We’re gonna end up shooting some of them.”

Another officer replies, “Just remember, you can smell that too with a $30,000 bonus.”

Florida Highway Patrol did not comment.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection told CBS News in a statement that the individuals “resisted arrest” and said immigration agents are facing a surge in assaults while doing their job. The statement made no mention that a U.S. citizen had been detained.

The video comes as Florida is set to deputize more than 1,800 additional law enforcement officers to conduct immigration operations as part of a statewide crackdown.

“Laws are just, you know, they’re no longer being respected. They’re no longer being upheld,” said Mariana Blanco, director at the Guatemala Maya Center, an advocacy group that opposes Florida’s new crackdown. “Deputizing these agents so quickly, it is going to bring severe consequences.” 

U.S. citizen told “you have no rights” during immigration arrest speaks out: “It hurts me”
Border Patrol and the Florida Highway Patrol arrested Kenny Laynez, an 18-year-old high school senior who was on his way to work as a landscaper, back in May.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kenny-laynez-arrest-you-have-no-rights-interview