The 3-year-old has barely slept in six months. She wakes up in the middle of the night calling for her father. The mother rises, gives the girl milk to calm her down, and lies, saying her daddy is driving his truck farther away than ever, but he’s coming back soon.
The girl settles. A while later, she asks again. Since last October, when her father was detained at a routine check-in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and deported to Mexico, this scene plays out every night in a Houston household.
Her little brother is only 2. He doesn’t ask much yet. In April, on his birthday, his father sent a message via WhatsApp from Cancún. “Forgive me for not being able to be by your side on this special day. It saddens me not to be able to hug you and congratulate you in person. Dad loves you very much,” he wrote in Spanish, alongside a photo of the boy wearing a little cowboy hat.
These children are American citizens. They were born in Texas. The same government that deported their father is, in theory, responsible for protecting them. But when the man we’ll identify by a family name, Lazo, was deported, his family was left to try to survive without him.
And they’re not alone: Nationally, authorities arrested and detained the parents of at least 11,000 U.S. citizen children in just the first seven months of Trump’s second term—more than 50 American kids a day with a parent pulled into detention, according to a ProPublica analysis of ICE data obtained by the University of Washington as part of a lawsuit.
Lazo’s daughter turned 3 eleven days after her father’s detention in October. It was the first birthday they’d spent apart.
Her mother, who is not being named because she is not a citizen and fears being targeted, was terrified. Suddenly, she was alone with two small children, no steady work, the rent due, and all their other bills. Her daughter’s birthday fell on a Thursday, and on Friday Lazo’s partner went looking for a job. She was hired that same day at a lumber and vinyl plank factory at $14 an hour. Since then, she has been getting up before sunrise and returning near dark. Her hands are already beaten up and raw, but when they call her for overtime, she can’t say no. Her highest biweekly paycheck has been $1,300. The monthly rent costs $1,600.
Those numbers don’t add up. She had to return the car they shared. She got a cheaper one—but even that is barely manageable. “I work practically to pay for the car.”
They’ve been apart for seven months now. She needs the car to get to the factory. She needs the factory to pay for the car. Somewhere inside that loop are the two children, who are asleep when she leaves and who spend the day with their aunt—a Spanish citizen who traveled here on a tourist visa to help.
The only institutional support the family receives is $785 a month in SNAP, the federal food assistance program whose average benefit in Texas amounts to $6.19 per person per day, according to Feeding Texas. They also get assistance from WIC, a nutrition program for low-income families with children under 5. Once a month, they receive fruits, vegetables, milk, rice, and beans.
All that support combined covers only three weeks of food for the children each month.
Before Lazo was deported, the parents shared expenses. He brought in more money, and she had more time for the children, who aren’t yet school age. (PreK, if she can find space, would be available only for her daughter next year.) Now it seems impossible.
A recent study by American Families United, an advocacy group for mixed‑status families, suggests this kind of economic pressure was already common even without the specter of increased detention and deportation that began last year.
About 822,500 U.S. citizen children in Texas live with at least one undocumented parent, according to data from the American Immigration Council. No federal or state program exists to help these divided families cover rent, utilities, or childcare—financial holes that open in a household when the breadwinner is deported. “There are no programs in place to specifically assist families who are separated by immigration enforcement activity,” said Trudy Taylor Smith, director of policy and advocacy at Children’s Defense Fund Texas.
Lazo came to the United States in June 2017 from Cuba. He made a perilous journey across the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico via speedboat and then crossed the border from Mexico to the United States on foot. In some ways, he arrived too late: Six months earlier, President Barack Obama had ended the so-called wet foot/dry foot policy, which since 1995 had guaranteed any Cuban who set foot on U.S. soil a path to permanent residence.
Lazo turned himself in at Nuevo Laredo along with eight other Cubans. According to him, all the others were granted immigration parole. He was not. That meant the others could apply for a green card under the Cuban Adjustment Act, which generally allows any Cuban who has been “inspected and admitted or paroled” to apply for permanent residence after one year in the country. Lazo received an I-220B, an order of supervision—not the equivalent of parole.
Later, he hired an attorney and tried applying again. His case was administratively closed—neither approved nor denied. So he built a life in Texas. He studied and received a commercial driver’s license and started driving trucks, maintaining a license with no penalties for six years. Every year, without exception, he went to check in with ICE.
Then, on October 7, he typed his information into the machine, which normally just printed a slip with his next appointment date. Instead, agents emerged and detained him on the spot.
ICE has maintained an internal policy on the detention of parents since 2013. The latest version of the Detained Parent Directive, issued in July 2025, still requires agents to ask whether the person being detained has children and to give them the opportunity to make arrangements.
When Lazo was detained, he said that no one asked him about his children.
Suma Setty, senior policy analyst for immigration and immigrant families at the Center for Law and Social Policy, a nonprofit that focuses on low-income families in Washington, D.C., said the directive may be unenforced.
“There’s no accountability mechanism in place to make sure that ICE officers actually account for parents’ rights,” she said. “There [are] a lot of reports out there that have found that ICE is not doing that and that children have been left in dangerous situations.” She described a mother with children in the Detroit metro area who went a week without eating in October 2025 because she was too afraid to go to the grocery store.
Lazo is one of many Texas parents who have been separated from U.S. citizen children under the Trump administration. In Corpus Christi, a 28-year-old Nicaraguan mother who cleaned houses for a living was detained on April 29, 2025, while driving to work. Two cars cut her off in the street. She never got to say goodbye to her husband or their six-month-old baby, who is an American citizen. She had a valid work permit, and her asylum case—denied at the first level—was on appeal. Fifteen days before her arrest, she had attended her ICE check-in with no trouble. She was eventually released.
In Wimberley, a Russian artist who fled his country because of his anti-war activism was detained at a routine ICE check-in in February. He had lived openly in Texas for two years, complying with every appointment without incident. His U.S. citizen daughter was eight months old. According to a fundraising page his partner published to cover legal fees, officers confirmed his detention was not caused by anything he had done—only by “new policies.”
Lazo arrived at the ICE detention center in Montgomery County in October with a cough and cold that only got worse. “There were about 90 of us in bunk beds,” he said. “Everyone sick.” He requested medical appointments, but was never seen.
After 21 days, he was loaded in a bus with his hands cuffed and his ankles shackled in the middle of the night. Three days later, he was dropped off about 1,000 miles south in the Mexican state of Chiapas. Lazo had only his phone and his Apple Watch. He made it to Cancún only because a friend wired him money. There, he’s been trying to find work and a way to survive.
Meanwhile, Lazo’s family is struggling. Historically, social service agencies have not collected information on parents’ immigration status in applications for programs like WIC and SNAP. But many undocumented families are not claiming benefits out of fear of being targeted by ICE.
In order to pick up their children’s WIC benefits, Lazo’s partner must drive. One afternoon, after leaving the factory, she saw several patrol cars ahead in the street. She turned around. Her supervisor came out to check and told her it was only an accident. “I see a sheriff and that’s it—I freeze up. Imagine what could happen to my kids if I get stopped,” she said.
She’s not the only one to get spooked. A WIC provider in Texas told researchers that whenever patrol cars were parked near her clinic, families would call to cancel appointments, according to a report called “Caregiving in Crisis,” published in April.
If something happened to their mother, Lazo’s children’s options are limited. They have cousins here, but they are undocumented too.
In its report, CLASP documented five early childhood educators who had been asked by parents to serve as temporary guardians in case they were detained.
In 2022, the U.S. Administration for Children and Families (AFCARS) began requiring states to report whenever a child entered foster care because a parent had been detained or deported. But by 2024, only about half of the states had incorporated that field into AFCARS submissions, and the data is incomplete. In Texas, none of the 9,750 children who entered foster care in fiscal year 2025 were classified under that category. Nationally, 232 of 175,008 children who entered foster care that year were recorded as linked to a parent’s detention or deportation.
Lazo’s partner knows her daughter will likely one day realize that her father isn’t on an endless truck route. But she doesn’t want to take her children to Mexico.
She left Cuba in 2017, lived three years in Chile, crossed the Darién Gap—one of the world’s most dangerous migration routes—and arrived in Texas in 2021. She doesn’t want to move again. “First of all, Mexico is a dangerous country. And second, where would I even go? I have nothing there.”
What they both pray for is that her pending U.S. residency application is approved. It’s been pending for 500 days already. If that happens, she could travel to Mexico, legally marry her husband, and request an immigration waiver for him—though each step in that process could take years.
The last option rests with her children. Under federal law, a U.S. citizen can petition for a deported parent to return—when they turn 21. Her older child is only 3. She isn’t sure she can “hold on alone for that long.”
