A chronicle of a family torn apart by Trump's anti-immigration raids: "Mom, I'm afraid to come home and find you're not there"

WashingtonThe call that María – a pseudonym – had dreaded for months finally arrived on the afternoon of Saturday, October 12. In downtown Washington, most people were going about their normal lives amidst the city's militarization. Far from the restaurants on 14th Street and the beer gardens Where people were enjoying the last days of good weather, Gabriel—a pseudonym—was handcuffed in the back of a black van parked on the side of the George Washington Memorial Parkway, which connects Virginia with Maryland and Washington. "Come pick up the truck, they've got me. Don't come looking for it yourself because they'll get you too. Ask someone with papers to come. As soon as I can, I'll tell you more," Gabriel said to Maria in Mam, an indigenous language of Guatemala, to avoid the impression that he was speaking to his wife. On the other end of the line, Maria looked at her nine-year-old daughter, Vanessa, who was in the living room waiting for her father to get home from work so he could take her to play in the park. “The little girl was crying, in shock, when I told her. She kept asking, ‘What did Daddy do? Why did they take him?’” Maria explains to ARA three weeks after her husband’s arrest and two weeks after he was deported to Guatemala. The 36-year-old woman holds Diego, the youngest of her three children, who is only three years old, on her lap. “We had been afraid for a while, but at first it felt like something distant. At first it was just something we saw on the news, but then they started arresting acquaintances, then family members. Until it happened to us. We were prepared, but we never would have imagined this horrible nightmare,” Maria explains.

Donald Trump returned to the White House promising to carry out the “largest mass deportation in history.” Since taking office on January 20, the president has launched a campaign of terror against the migrant community, with measures such as authorizing raids on schools and churches, or invokingthe law of foreign enemies to be able to expel migrants whom it accuses of being criminals. Across the country, thousands of families like Maria's have been torn apart by ICE detentions. The administration does not regularly report figures on deportations. By August, the United States had already deported some 350,000 people since Trump took office.

Maria, like her husband, is undocumented. She entered the United States in 2011 seeking a better life, even at the cost of leaving her first child, Alex, in Guatemala. "I had him with my ex-husband. He hit me. When I arrived in the United States, I dared to leave the relationship," she confesses. Shortly after, she met Gabriel, with whom she rebuilt her life in Virginia and with whom she had Vanessa and Diego. "It was Gabriel who suggested I bring Alex here," she says. They scraped together the $6,000 to pay for the coyote, And the boy, seven years old, crossed the border. It was 2015, and it had been four years since the woman had seen or hugged her son.

Now, ten years later, the Trump administration has once again placed María in an equally painful dilemma: self-deport with the two children to Guatemala and leave behind Àlex, who is seventeen and has legal status, or remain in the country with the danger that ICE could arrest and deport her any day. "The oldest asks me to please not go out much. He's very worried. He tells me, 'Mom, I'm afraid I'll come home one day and you won't be there. What will I do alone with my siblings?' Although the youngest is taking it the hardest; she doesn't want to grow up without a father.

María breaks down when she thinks again about the idea of separating from her son. 'But I want him to have a better future, and in the town where we are, he won't have one.' The woman explains how she and Gabriel decided to regularize Àlex's situation before their own. 'All the paperwork cost us about $10,000; we had to fight hard for the case,' explains María. The other two children, Vanesa and Diego, since they were born in the United States, are American citizens. A right recognized by the Constitution and that Trump wants to try to reverse.

Beyond the fear of being detained, Maria is also considering self-deportation because she can't pay the bills and support the children on her own. She works cleaning houses, but since many federal workers stopped receiving their paychecks due to the government shutdown, work has dwindled. She also leaves the house less for fear of being arrested. She's not the only mother in the community who has been left alone because her husband was detained at a traffic stop on his way home from work. She's convinced that men are being detained so the rest of the family will self-deport.

She recalls that the first ICE raids in the neighborhood began in March. "They took a neighbor then, and later a girl named Roxana," Maria explains. But in recent months, since Trump deployed the National Guard, the raids have increased. Especially in neighborhoods with a strong Latino presence in the metropolitan area, far from the eyes of the rest of the people who live in the capital.

Racial profiling arrests

The fear of being detained is spreading like wildfire through the Latino community, and the insecurity is no longer exclusive to undocumented immigrants. Sofia—a pseudonym—is a U.S. citizen who came to pick up Gabriel's truck two days after he was detained. She came to take Diego so Maria could have her interview in peace. She admits that, despite being a citizen, she too has long feared being stopped by immigration and carries all her documentation with her. She is not the only Latino who has expressed this feeling in recent months. In September, the Supreme Court authorized ICE to use racial profiling—skin color, physical features, or even speaking Spanish—to detain people. Gabriel says it was in accordance with this criterion that he was detained at the traffic stop where ICE stopped him.

"When they had me stopped, they opened the car door, dragged me out, and four agents pinned me to the ground. It was only after I was on the ground that they asked for my documents. Not before," Gabriel explains to ARA in a video call from Guatemala.

Six days passed between his arrest and his deportation. During this time, Gabriel was transferred three times to different immigration detention centers: the first two in Virginia, before reaching his final destination in Louisiana.

These constant transfers are not accidental; in fact, they are a legal practice that, as Samah Sisay, an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), explains to ARA, "creates a situation in which it is difficult for lawyers to contact their clients." "We have filed several lawsuits against ICE for transfers in which they are acting repressively; that is, they are using transfers to retaliate against people who are speaking out about their experiences in detention or who are on hunger strikes or similar actions. They are transferring them far away from their lawyers and their families."

For the first two days, Gabriel explains, he was moved from one place to another within hours. First, he was sent to the immigration detention center in Chantilly, Virginia, where he spent Saturday night. "This is where the terror began for me, because I'm a type 2 diabetic and I hadn't eaten anything since noon. And I need to eat to regulate my blood sugar. I started having tremors. I guess between the shock of being detained and not having eaten anything, my blood pressure was dropping," Gabriel explains. One of the agents responded to his request and gave him a burrito"It was tiny, and who knows how long it had been there, because it looked decomposed." "And water?" "No, they didn't give me any water," Gabriel replied.

Complaints about expired or spoiled food are common at immigration detention centers across the country, with cases of people leaving sick because of the food. Gabriel also remembers that the air conditioning was blasting and they didn't even give him a blanket that night.

After Chantilly, Gabriel was transferred to Richmond on Sunday, where he remained until Tuesday at noon. It wasn't until then, three days into his detention, that he was given a change of clothes and allowed to shower. On Wednesday at noon, he arrived at the detention center in Alexandria, Louisiana, which, along with eight other facilities in the southern state, is known as the black holeAfter Texas, Louisiana is the state with the most migrants detained in immigration detention centers.

"They didn't give me anything for the fever"

"I had a fever there. I asked the guards three times for some medication to control it because it was so high. The guards kept saying, 'Yes, yes, now.' But they didn't give me anything. If they see you can walk or sit up, they don't take care of you. They don't take care of men. Only if you're very ill," Gabriel says. He fainted. "I also got a stomach bug because I'd been eating things that weren't in very good condition for days," he says. The man explains that he lost 10 pounds during the six days he was in the detention system. In the area where Gabriel was held, there were about 150 people and only ten toilets. The man explains that he felt the center was overcrowded and overwhelmed. This impression is corroborated by both attorney Samah Sisay and Frances, a member of the Louisiana group Advocates for Immigrants in Detention. Both confirm that since Trump took office, the centers have been overcrowded. "The centers were already barely able to adequately care for the people who were there before. And when more people arrive, there's simply apathy, and nobody pays attention to the conditions people are in," Sisay explains. According to an article by the Migration Policy Institute, when Trump arrived at the White House in January 2025, there were a total of 39,000 detainees in ICE custody, a figure that skyrocketed to a record 61,000 by the end of August.