Earlier this year, days after Camila’s dad didn’t come home for dinner one night, the then-6-year-old had many questions for her father.
Where are you? What are you eating for dinner? Can I come there to have dinner with you?
Luis said his daughter, curious, bubbly and intelligent, is normally glued to his side. She follows him around their home in San Diego, joins him on trips to the store and asks him questions he says are far beyond her years.
But this time, as Luis listened to his daughter’s voice through a payphone inside an immigration detention center, tears welled in his eyes. He struggled to find the right words to explain to the first grader that he was arrested by immigration officials just as he was arriving to work one morning in February and that he didn’t know when he would see her again.
I’m in a little school right now, he told her. They gave me a lot of work, but once I finish, I’ll come back home.
Editor’s note:
inewsource is withholding some personal details of Camila and her family and not using their real names because they fear being identified and targeted by immigration authorities. We shield the identity of sources in rare instances and only when there is a compelling news interest and the story likely could not be told without taking these steps.
More families across the country could soon face similar conversations as the Trump administration attempts to carry out the largest deportation campaign in U.S. history. While his predecessor focused arrests in the interior on those with serious or violent criminal histories, Trump officials have made clear that anyone in the U.S. unlawfully is a target.
The president has justified mass deportations as protecting the American people from the violence he says immigrants are perpetrating throughout the country. His supporters point to individual cases of people killed by immigrants in recent years as evidence of the problem.
However, research does not support a relationship between immigration and crime. Studies suggest immigrants actually commit violent crimes at a lower rate than U.S.-born citizens. Reports indicate recent arrests have mostly targeted those without criminal records, apart from immigration violations.
But some say there’s a group of U.S. citizens at risk in the president’s agenda: the children of parents living in the country without legal status. In San Diego County, there are more than 56,000 such kids, according to an estimate from the American Immigration Council, a research and advocacy group.
Many could stand to be separated from a parent – or both – or their life in their home country, as parents facing deportation weigh whether to leave their kids in the U.S. or take the kids with them.
The White House did not answer specific questions about how its immigration policy affects those children, but said anyone in the country unlawfully should “immediately self-deport.”
“Illegally entering the United States and having a child does not give aliens a free pass to violate federal immigration law without consequence,” said Abigail Jackson, a spokesperson for the White House.
U.S. Rep. Juan Vargas, a Democrat whose congressional district includes parts of south San Diego and Chula Vista, said the situation violates the rights of American children, who should be able to remain with their parents in their home country.
“It really is an incredible misuse of the law to create an incredible injustice,” Vargas said.
Both of Camila’s parents, who are from Mexico, are without lawful status and said they have been in the U.S. for more than a decade. They’ve worked as cleaners, car washers and trash collectors and have no existing criminal records apart from immigration violations. While Camila and her 11-year-old brother are U.S. citizens, their older sister — who came with their mother when she was 7 — is also without lawful status.
On those phone calls from the detention center after his arrest, Luis wanted Camila to know he was OK. He didn’t want her to worry. He wanted her to be able to focus in school, to keep being a kid.
But there was one question he couldn’t answer that she asked in every call:
When are you coming home?
Few options
When Luis came to San Diego in 2008, after crossing the border with the help of a smuggler, he didn’t plan to stay. He wanted to save money to start a business back in Mexico and help support his family.
A few years later, his now wife and oldest daughter joined him after crossing with a visa. Eventually, the couple had two children in the U.S. and decided to stay. While they know they’re in the U.S. unlawfully, the couple said they’ve worked hard to provide for their kids, stay out of trouble and pay their taxes, hoping one day they might be able to legalize their status.
inewsource visited Luis’ former workplace and spoke with a coworker who said he was there when Luis was arrested. We also spoke to a friend of Luis who is from San Diego, works at a local university and said he has known the family for more than a decade. inewsource ran the names of the parents through federal and state criminal court records, which did not yield results.
While Camila’s parents have lived in the U.S. without status through previous administrations, the scale of Trump’s current crackdown could mean more parents like them are impacted, according to Nan Wu, director of research with the American Immigration Council. Around 4 million U.S. kids have at least one parent living here unlawfully, according to the group’s estimate.
Trump rolled back a previous policy directing the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to prioritize arrests of people with serious or violent criminal records. He rolled back another one preventing immigration enforcement in schools, places of worship, health care centers and other “sensitive” locations.
Top officials including Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff, and Kristi Noem, Homeland Security Secretary, are pushing for 3,000 immigration arrests daily across the country, which would triple figures from earlier this year.
Amid increasing pressure, agents, sometimes masked and using unmarked cars, have detained people at gas stations, car washes, restaurants, stores and other places in Los Angeles and across California.
Some Republican efforts are trying to prevent U.S. citizenship for kids like Camila in the first place.
The Trump administration is attempting to end birthright citizenship – a right enshrined in the U.S. Constitution for more than a century – claiming the 14th Amendment does not actually guarantee citizenship to those born on U.S. soil whose parents are in the country unlawfully or temporarily. Several judges have already blocked the attempt, with one ruling it “blatantly unconstitutional.”
Current immigration law provides few options for people like Camila’s parents to obtain lawful status, and “even those options come with significant risk at times,” said Ariel Ruiz Soto, senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, an immigration policy think tank.
Generally, once a person enters and remains in the U.S. unlawfully, it’s very difficult to gain status, Ruiz Soto said. Because of that, many instead continue to keep living here without status instead of risking separation from their families.
“In some administrations, that has been easier. Under the current Trump administration, that becomes significantly harder,” he said.
Valerie Sigamani, Luis’s immigration attorney, said he has a difficult case ahead of him.
“It’s really upsetting to see that families are being torn apart this way and are having to make decisions about what it would look like to be separated from each other,” Sigamani said.
After Luis’ arrest, Maria kept her kids home from school for several days, fearful ICE would find her there. She herself was nearly arrested by agents while Luis was still detained, she said, and worried her kids would be left alone, without their parents to pick them up from school.
Over those days, they grew restless. Camila would ask to play outside with her neighbor, but Maria wouldn’t let her.
“How can it be possible that we are locked in our own house?” Maria said she asked herself.
‘De facto’ deportation
Camila’s parents have already decided: If Luis is ordered deported, the entire family of five will leave the U.S. for Mexico. They don’t have family here who could care for the kids, they said, and want to stay together.
Maria has tried to be positive and prepare her kids for what that could bring – new friends in school and new pets at home – but she still wonders how they will adjust, and research indicates she could be right to worry.
According to a study from the University of California in Davis, “de facto” deported children, those who left the U.S. to join parents who were ordered deported, were more likely to lack health insurance and stable housing than American kids who moved to Mexico for other reasons.
That study found that about one in six – or between 80,000 to 100,000 – U.S. citizen kids living in Mexico moved there with a family member who was deported.
Claudia Masferrer, one of the study’s authors, said that some kids struggle to adjust to the language and school curriculum, and they face bullying in school. There are especially few resources for those kids in rural parts of Mexico where only a few or even just one U.S. citizen child lives, she said.
“For far too long, our immigration law has completely disregarded harm to U.S. citizen children, specifically,” said Wendy Cervantes, who advocates for immigrant families and children at the Center for Law and Social Policy. That harm includes the fear that families live in during periods of increased immigration enforcement like this one, as well as the direct impacts of the deportation of a parent.
inewsource asked Jackson, the White House spokesperson, whether the government would offer any help or resources to U.S. citizen children who are separated from a parent or who have to live outside their home country due to a parent’s deportation.
She didn’t answer those questions. Instead, she said those parents “can choose to bring their children back to their home country, just like they chose to break the law and illegally enter America.” Jackson also referenced two mothers of women killed by immigrants in the U.S. in recent years, who Jackson said don’t have the choice to stay with their kids, and whose stories have been cited by the administration and its supporters as justification for mass deportations.
While Luis’ immigration hearing looms, the family, for the most part, is going on with life as normal.
In May, they celebrated Camila’s birthday at home with pink frosted cupcakes and pizza. On a more recent afternoon, the now-7-year-old splashed in a plastic storage tub filled with water in the yard, her and her friend’s playful screams ringing down the street.
But there are still times when something reminds Camila, and her questions begin again.
One morning, she sat on the couch, putting her shoes on while her mom scrolled through Facebook. A video appeared of ICE agents arresting a mother, Maria said.
Mom, what’s happening? Is ICE taking them? Can they do that to you if you take me to school?
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