Deportation of 6-Year-Old Puts Spotlight on ICE’s Detention of Families

On a morning last week, a mother from Ecuador nervously entered a federal building in Lower Manhattan with her 6-year-old daughter and 19-year-old son for a mandatory appointment with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

Inside, ICE agents detained the mother, Martha, and the two children. Officers drove the teenage son to a detention center across the river in New Jersey and flew the mother and her daughter to a family detention center in Texas.

On Tuesday, exactly a week later, Martha and her daughter boarded a plane and were deported to Ecuador, leaving behind two other children in New York who had not been detained.

The detention of the family, especially the 6-year-old girl, touched a nerve among New York elected officials like few other ICE arrests have during President Trump’s second term. Their arrest ignited a scramble to try to stop their deportation, and prompted a rare rebuke from Gov. Kathy Hochul, who called the arrest “cruel and unjust.”

The family’s case illuminated a practice the Trump administration has revived across the country: the detention and deportation of families with children.

But while the case was the first deportation of a parent and child to receive news coverage in New York, they were hardly the first family to be deported this year.

ICE has detained about 50 children younger than 18 in the New York City area, largely from Ecuador, from Mr. Trump’s inauguration in January through the end of July, according to federal data obtained by the Deportation Data Project at the University of California, Berkeley.

At least 38 of them have been deported, the data shows.

Mariposa Benitez, a volunteer who helps migrants in the city, said she had recently worked with seven families with children who had been detained after showing up for ICE check-ins at the agency’s offices at 26 Federal Plaza.

“We offer our support every day, including Saturdays and Sundays, and it’s been more and more families being arrested with children enrolled in schools,” said Ms. Benitez, who founded Mi Tlalli, a grass-roots organization offering mental health counseling and other support to families.

Ms. Benitez said those arrests had included a father and his 15-year-old son, a public high school student, who were deported to Ecuador less than a week after being detained this month at an ICE check-in, and a mother who was also deported to Ecuador with her five children.

In March, the Trump administration reinstated the practice of detaining immigrant families, a tactic that began when George W. Bush was president and was expanded during the administration of Barack Obama before it was largely halted under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2021.

ICE has cast the practice as a tool to deter illegal migration by families with children and an efficient way to ensure that families charged with entering the country unlawfully appear for immigration court hearings. Immigrant groups and human rights organizations have condemned the practice, arguing that it harms the mental health of children, punishes families seeking asylum and is expensive for taxpayers.

Thomas Homan, President Trump’s top border adviser, has portrayed family detentions as an alternative to separating migrant children from their parents, a tactic that drew public outcry during Mr. Trump’s first term. Mr. Homan has also blamed parents in the country illegally for putting their children at risk of deportation.

“Families can be deported together,” he told CBS last year, when he first hinted at the strategy.

Elora Mukherjee, the director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School, said she had represented four families with children as young as 6 who were detained this year after they showed up for routine immigration court hearings in Los Angeles. Two of the families, from Honduras, were apprehended after living in the United States for months, while the other two families, from Russia, crossed the border in May.

Like the Ecuadorean mother and her daughter in New York, Ms. Mukherjee’s clients were sent to a large Texas detention center for families that the Trump administration reopened this year after it had closed under Mr. Biden.

That facility, the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, is run by CoreCivic, a private prison company, and is expected to hold up to 2,400 people, making it one of the largest ICE detention centers in the country.

Though the families have freedom of movement inside the facility, detainees have complained about inadequate access to clean water and medical care, limited recreation for children and trouble accessing legal counsel, according to lawyers with clients there. Hundreds of families have already been held at the center, which is about an hour south of San Antonio.

“It’s a mix of both recent border crossers, though there are not that many of them, and those who have been living in the United States for months, if not years,” Ms. Mukherjee said.

Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, the agency that runs ICE, said that the detention center had been “retrofitted for families.”

“Adults with children are housed in facilities that provide for their safety, security and medical needs,” she said. She added that the agency was offering parents living in the country illegally $1,000 and “a free flight to self-deport now.”

Recently armed with $45 billion from Congress to increase detention capacity, Mr. Trump has moved to expand the government’s ability to hold families together. The administration recently sought to terminate a decades-old legal agreement that mandates basic standards of care for children in custody, arguing that it limits expansion efforts.

Martha and her 6-year-old daughter, who crossed the border into the United States in 2022, were sent to Texas after being detained in New York last week. Manuel, her 19-year-old son, is still being held at a detention facility in Newark known as Delaney Hall; his lawyers said an immigration judge had halted his removal on Tuesday.

Their last names are being withheld at the request of the family, which fears that Martha’s two other children — a 16-year-old daughter and 21-year-old son who arrived separately from Ecuador and are in different immigration proceedings — could be detained.

The family declined to be interviewed. Their case was first reported by The City, a digital news outlet.

“We urge this administration to stop separating families and support those like Martha and Manuel who come to this country for a better life,” said Paige Austin, a lawyer at Make the Road New York, an advocacy organization representing Manuel.

Ms. McLaughlin, the D.H.S. spokeswoman, said that Martha, “an illegal alien from Ecuador,” had illegally entered the United States with her children on Dec. 30, 2022, “and was released into the country by the Biden administration.”

“They have all received final orders of removal from an immigration judge,” she said. Their asylum claims were denied last year, triggering the deportation orders.

Martha’s daughter was enrolled at the Jose Peralta School of Dreamers in Queens.

The arrests of at least four other migrant students older than 18 who were enrolled in New York City public schools have led to desperate pleas from teachers and principals, and sober statements from the school chancellor, Melissa Aviles-Ramos, reassuring parents that “our schools are safe, welcoming places.”

In May, the arrest of Dylan Lopez Contreras, a 20-year-old from Venezuela who attended a Bronx school that enrolls older migrant students, was the first reported instance of a public school student in the city being detained by ICE this year. The legal efforts to release him from the Pennsylvania detention center where he has been detained the past three months have been unsuccessful.

More arrests soon followed.

On June 4, Derlis Snaider Chusin Toaquiza, 19, an 11th grader from Ecuador at Grover Cleveland High School in Queens, was detained and sent to a Texas detention center before being released on bond six weeks later. Joselyn Chipantiza-Sisalema, 20, also from Ecuador, was detained on June 24, sent to a Louisiana detention center and released three weeks later. And Mamadou Mouctar Diallo, 20, from Guinea, who attends Brooklyn Frontiers High School, was arrested on Aug. 4 and sent to a Pennsylvania jail.

They were all detained while attending routine immigration hearings in Lower Manhattan — not on school premises — and were part of larger-scale arrests at immigration courthouses. The city’s Department of Education did not immediately respond to questions about how many students had been detained by ICE so far this year.

Despite the Trump administration’s efforts to deport families as a unit, immigration lawyers said that the courthouse arrests, which have emerged as the main detention tactic in New York City, were inevitably leading to the break up of families every day.

ICE officers, in some cases, allow fathers to say goodbye to their wives and children before arresting them, but they are often ripped away from their relatives’ arms in the courthouse hallways, said Allison Cutler, an attorney at the New York Legal Assistance Group.

“We’ve just continued to see family units get, essentially, torn apart,” she said.

Albert Sun contributed reporting.