As Ice officers ramp up arrests, hundreds of migrant children are being sent to federal shelters. Some parents are given a choice: Deport with their children or face separation.
Sulma Martinez had just left the dentist’s office with her 14-year-old twin daughters when an unmarked US Immigration and Customs Enforcement vehicle pulled up behind her and flashed its blue lights. The officers asked for her papers.
Martinez, a 35-year-old originally from Honduras, had a work permit, a pending asylum claim and a pathway to a visa for crime victims. But none of that mattered, she said the officers told her.
They gave her a choice: she could head to a hotel and be deported with her daughters, or she could contest her removal and try to stay in the United States. If she chose the latter, she’d be arrested and the twins would be sent to a shelter for child immigrants.
“We were crying. We were scared,” Martinez said. “I didn’t want them to separate me from my girls.”
As President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign ramps up, Ice has sharply increased the number of migrant children it is sending to federal shelters for unaccompanied minors. Officers have referred more than 400 children nationwide to shelters run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement since Trump took office, according to two people who have reviewed internal records. While some allegedly were removed from dangerous situations, many were separated from parents, relatives or government-vetted sponsors as part of immigration enforcement actions.
Ice officials disputed that information and said its referrals are not that high. But the agency and ORR did not provide the data.
The separations recall the “zero tolerance” policy Trump implemented along the southern border during his first term, which led to the forced separation of more than 4000 newly arrived children from their parents without a plan to reunite them. A federal judge called the episode “one of the most shameful chapters” in US history and approved a court settlement that barred such separations for several years. But that agreement does not apply to families apprehended beyond the border, in US cities and towns where many of the children and teens have lived for years.
In July, the Trump administration withdrew a Biden administration policy urging that parents be detained only in “limited circumstances”. As a result, immigrant advocates and lawyers say, Ice officers are arresting growing numbers of people with children to meet the President’s mass deportation goals and, in some cases, using the threat of separation to push them to abandon their immigration cases and leave the country.
“What we are seeing now is a reckless attempt to deport as many people as possible without regard at all to family unity or family relationships,” said Efrén Olivares, an attorney with the National Immigration Law Centre who has filed a lawsuit to stop the rapid removal of unaccompanied minors in federal custody. “And it’s happening in darkness without any kind of oversight or accountability for what this process means for families.”
US Customs and Border Protection has historically been, and continues to be, the primary agency that sends migrant children to federal shelters. Most of those cases involve unaccompanied minors who crossed the border illegally in hopes of reuniting with a parent or relative in the United States. Ice officers enforcing immigration laws beyond the border have typically sent children to shelters only when a minor had run away, been arrested or been abused.
But today, lawyers are hearing reports of separations happening during immigration court hearings, workplace raids and elsewhere as enforcement ramps up.
Neha Desai, a lawyer with the National Centre for Youth Law, whose team represents immigrant children in federal immigration custody, said she is aware of more than 50 children and teens who were taken into custody during situations as minor as traffic stops.
DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said the agency is not splitting up families. Ice gives parents the option of having their children removed with them or being placed with “a safe person the parent designates,” she said in a statement. ORR, which oversees shelters for unaccompanied minors, did not respond to questions about the number of children apprehended and placed in the agency’s care.
As the officers put her in shackles that July morning, all Martinez could think about was her daughters. Their father had been killed in an apparent robbery less than two years earlier. They could not lose their mother, too.
“Look at Sulma”
Martinez said she and the twins had never intended to leave Honduras. Her husband, the girls’ father, Melvin Rodriguez Manueles, had come to the United States illegally years earlier with a plan to work in construction, save money and return home. He sent them money to cover their expenses, and Martinez said she and the girls were “doing well”. But in 2019, Martinez said, she fled with her daughters to the US border after gang members assaulted her father and torched his house. She feared they would come for her and the girls next.
Border agents released Martinez and the girls after they crossed the southern border illegally and surrendered, seeking asylum. But Ice never filed charges against them in court. They settled in Louisiana, and Martinez hired an immigration lawyer in 2022 and submitted an asylum claim.
On November 5, 2023, Rodriguez was fatally shot in what prosecutors believe was an attempted robbery in front of the family’s house in New Orleans.
Martinez remembers waking to the sound of gunfire and rushing outside to find her husband in a pool of blood. She recalls trying to shake him awake and shouting at the twins to stay inside. Rodriguez’s wallet was never found. But Martinez found an iPhone and turned it over to the police, who say it led to the arrest of Jose Gamboa Escobar. He has pleaded not guilty to charges of second-degree murder.
The Orleans Parish District Attorney’s office has certified that Martinez is a crime victim, clearing the way for her to apply for a U visa for victims who help with an investigation. Prosecutors said she may be needed to testify at the trial.
“Our office takes seriously its responsibility to prosecute crime and protect all victims, regardless of their immigration status,” District Attorney Jason Williams said in a statement. “When victims and witnesses are afraid to come forward, violent perpetrators go free, police are placed in greater danger, and our entire community is less safe.”
Yolani and Loany, Martinez’s daughters, had just begun emerging from the shock of losing their father. He had doted on the girls and took them on camping trips. The girls, poised to start their first year of high school, dreamed of becoming flight attendants. Yolani flirted with the idea of being a fashion influencer. Loany is more low-key and hides her braces when she smiles.
Martinez worked as a cook at a pizzeria, chopping vegetables and other toppings, and became a deacon at the small congregation outside New Orleans that has become an extended family. Everyone was looking forward to the twins’ double quinceañera party in December.
“Look at Sulma,” Eunice Alvarado, the youth minister at the Ministerio Pentecostal Restauracion y Poder, and other churchgoers would say when they fell on hard times. She had lost so much and remained strong.
A choice or coercion?
Ice records show that Martinez has no criminal history and was not the person the officers had been searching for that day. She just happened to drive by them after taking Loany to have her braces adjusted, and officers followed her.
Almost as soon as she agreed to voluntarily deport to Honduras, she said, she began to regret her decision. She was a single mother responsible for protecting her daughters. Gang members had warned her family not to report them to authorities in Honduras or they would attack them again, she said, but her family did anyway.
After the officers drove them home to pack, Martinez told them she wanted to stay.
By nightfall, she was in an Ice detention centre in Basile, Louisiana, and the twins were in a Government shelter in San Antonio, hundreds of miles away.
Ice said in a statement that officers separated Martinez from her daughters because she “changed her mind last minute and chose not to voluntarily depart the United States”. The agency said officials informed her that she would be placed in immigration proceedings “rather than on her way to her home country with her kids”.
Ice has reopened a family detention centre in Texas that was closed during the Biden administration. But it held fewer than 400 people in August, well below its stated capacity of 2400 beds, federal records show. The agency did not answer questions about why the family and others could not be held together there instead.
American Civil Liberties Union attorney Lee Gelernt, who led the legal effort to reunite families separated during Trump’s first term, said the ACLU is investigating the legality of the new separations inside the United States.
In some cases, he said, parents are being told their children will be taken away unless they give up their right to a hearing and return home. In other cases, children who arrived as unaccompanied minors are being sent back to government shelters for months after they had already been released to vetted sponsors.
Mishan Wroe, also with National Centre for Youth Law, said she represents a teen from Latin America who arrived at the US-Mexico border alone in February 2023 and was released to his sister in Georgia after a few weeks in a federal shelter. He enrolled in high school and played for the soccer team, but he ended up back in ORR custody in March after a traffic stop. He was later released to a short-term shelter shortly before turning 18.
Jonathan Ryan, a lawyer and CEO of Advokato, a nonprofit legal service provider in San Antonio, said he represents a pair of underage siblings from Afghanistan who were separated from their mother in May after they tried to cross into Canada. The family had been living in Texas for about two years.
“I fear that what we are seeing is only the beginning,” Gelernt said. “Although I had hoped for the best, it doesn’t surprise me that we are seeing new separation tactics given that the Trump administration has never acknowledged its original policy, much less its cruelty.”
“Your daughters are yours”
From detention, Martinez cannot shake the fear that she could lose the girls forever.
Her anchor is the Ministerio Pentecostal Restauracion y Poder, a red-brick church outside New Orleans, where churchgoers say the sudden absence of Martinez and the girls has left a hole. The church is where Martinez and Rodriguez had the formal wedding ceremony she had always wanted, with a white gown, a frosted cake and matching dresses for the girls. It’s also where Rodriguez’s funeral was held.
Alvarado, the youth minister, said the girls were teacher’s aides at Sunday school and entertained children with a yearly puppet show. The church cancelled the show this year.
“They really made a home here,” she said.
People in the neighbourhood where Martinez was stopped said Ice arrests have rattled the community and taken away people who paid rent on time and construction workers who fixed hurricane-damaged roofs free. One neighbour said Ice had arrested the mother of a little girl in the neighbourhood. Since then, he said, he has seen the girl on walks with her father, crying for “mama”.
In phone calls with their mother, the twins have said they are doing fine in the shelter. They went on a field trip to a restaurant in San Antonio and attend school in the shelter, though the girls said their math class is below their grade level. But they are also scared. They recounted how immigration officers recently visited the shelter at night and picked up a child for deportation. They are worried that could happen to them, too.
“They tell me they are worried, and I can hear it in their voices,” Alvarado said.
Ice said in a statement that Martinez’s daughters are “being cared for by professionals and will remain in ORR custody until her immigration proceedings are complete”. Alvarado and her parents, meanwhile, are trying to reassure Martinez that she will be reunited with her twins.
“Your daughters are yours,” Veronica Salazar, Alvarado’s mother, said on a recent phone call with Martinez from detention.
Republicans and Democrats clashed over the treatment of immigrant children in the United States at a Senate hearing on Wednesday.
Republicans accused the Biden administration of allowing tens of thousands of children into the country and then releasing some to abusive or dangerous conditions. Democrats countered that Trump officials have tried to strip minors of legal aid, attempted to expel dozens of Guatemalan children without warning, and separated families like Martinez’s.
“Don’t lecture me about kids and then refuse to speak out when we hear parents are being forced to decide whether to be deported with their children, or let them be sent to ORR shelters,” Senator Alex Padilla (D-California), ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on border security and immigration, said at the hearing. He called the Martinez case “heartbreaking”.
Martinez’s final deportation hearing is scheduled for October 10 in the detention centre in Louisiana where she is being held. Her daughters have been scheduled for a hearing before a judge in Texas one week later.
Arelis R. Hernández contributed to this report.