A 6-year-old Chinese boy has been separated from his father after federal agents arrested the family following a routine immigration appointment in New York City.
The boy’s father, Fei Zheng, is detained inside Orange County Correctional Facility in upstate New York, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s custody records.
But “nobody knows” where Yuanxin is being held, according to immigrants’ rights advocates. Homeland Security officials have not disclosed his location.
Yuanxin, who attends first grade at a school in Astoria, Queens, and his father were arrested during a check-in with ICE inside 26 Federal Plaza last week, according to advocates who accompanied the family. Now he’s “missing,” according to advocates.
“This is a 6-year-old who should be in school, not living in detention,” family friend and advocate Jennie Spector told The City, which first reported the case. “And certainly now not being separated from his father, who is a caring, intelligent person who takes good care of him. They should not be separating families.”
In a statement to The Independent, Homeland Security assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin disputed that ICE had separated the father and son while acknowledging that they were in separate custody.
“ICE does not separate families,” she said. “This is consistent with past administrations immigration enforcement. Parents are asked if they want to be removed with their children or ICE will place the children with a safe person the parent designates.”
After the family was given an order of removal, the boy’s father “refused to board the plane and was acting so disruptive and aggressive that he endangered the child’s wellbeing. He even attempted to escape and abandon his son,” McLaughlin said.
She added that if police had pulled over a U.S. citizen and “chose not to comply” with an officer’s orders, “the children would be placed in safe custody.”
New York officials have demanded ICE reunite the family and withdraw from the city, which has emerged as a flashpoint for Donald Trump’s anti-immigration agenda. Several protesters were arrested last week after dozens of demonstrators foiled an ICE raid in Manhattan, and a federal building has faced growing legal scrutiny over conditions inside its makeshift jail and the practice of arresting immigrants moments after their immigration court hearings.
Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, who represents Astoria in the state assembly, said “this cruelty serves no one.”
“It must end,” he wrote Tuesday.
New York City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams called their separation “indefensible.”
“ICE won’t tell anyone where 6-year-old Yuanxin is. He was separated from his dad at a mandatory check-in,” added New York City council member Tiffany Caban, whose district includes Astoria. “The cruelty is unfathomable [and] makes us all unsafe.”
Diana Moreno, who is running for Mamdani’s vacant seat in the state assembly, said: “ICE's cruelty has reached our district.”
“We must end this inhumanity,” she said.
Democratic Rep. Nydia Velázquez, whose district includes parts of Brooklyn and Queens, said ICE is “tearing families apart and traumatizing kids.’
“My heart is with this family,” she said. “We need answers now.”
The family’s arrest on November 26 marks the third time they have been held inside ICE detention centers following their attempt to seek asylum in the U.S. after crossing the border earlier this year, according to advocates.
They spent several weeks inside a detention center for families with children before their release this summer. They were arrested again in August during an ICE check-in and returned to the family ICE facility.
During a hearing in September, an immigration court closed their asylum case, signaling that ICE was not imminently seeking their removal from the country. But they faced arrest yet again as they returned for a court-ordered ICE check-in appointment last month.
“The father does not know where his son is. He has not been told where his son is," Spector told CBS News. “They basically have kidnapped his son.”
Yuanxin’s placement in federal custody follows a surge in child detainment nationally and growing concerns among immigration attorneys that the Trump administration is imminently planning to remove dozens of them.
ICE has sent more than 600 immigrant children into a federal shelter system this year — more than over the previous four years combined, according to data collected by ProPublica.
That includes children who have been arrested inside 26 Federal Plaza behind closed doors, according to legal advocates who accompany immigrants at their hearings and appointments inside the building.
A federal network of shelters for “unaccompanied” immigrant children is run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which operates under the Department of Health and Human Services.
Earlier this year, a federal judge blocked the administration from deporting hundreds of Guatemalan children in shelters after they had crossed the U.S. border alone, after lawyers and shelter workers scrambled to prevent their abrupt removal.
