Mass Deportation Is Leaving American Children Without Their Parents

A recent Congressional shadow hearing revealed how the Trump administration's mass deportation agenda is making orphans of American-born children.

During a September 18 shadow hearing led by Rep. Pramila Jayapal (WA-07) on the Trump administration’s brutal mass detention and deportation agenda, Oregon resident Mimi Lettunich shared that the four U.S. children she and her husband Kris Wigger have been caring for following their mom and dad’s disappearances by ICE have just one plea: please help our parents come back home to us.

During gripping and oftentimes heart-wrenching testimony at the “Kidnapped and Disappeared: Trump’s Assault Destroys U.S. Families and Communities” hearing, Lettunich shared how triplets David, Carlos, and Abby, little brother Jeffrey, their mom Jackie, and Jackie’s mom were enjoying a picnic with Canadian relatives at Washington’s Peace Arch Historical State Park in June when federal agents swooped in to detain the group. Then just a couple days later, dad Carlos was swept up too.

While Jackie’s Canadian relatives were eventually released, the rest of the family, including the three U.S. citizen children, remained in immigration custody. And to make a cruel situation even more senseless, the American-born children were themselves threatened from expulsion out of their own country, Lettunich said.

“Despite the fact that the children all have American citizenship, Lettunich testified at the hearing that Customs and Border Patrol officials ‘expedited passports to send children out of the United States, their country of birth,’” MSNBC reported. “But worse was the state-sponsored abuse the children endured,” Lettunich said.

“They were threatened constantly with foster care, separated – even from each other. Agents interrogated the children without Jackie. They were asked ‘where did they live? Did they have any money? Did they have relatives? Did they have a father?’ Shortly thereafter, ICE took their dad. The children believe that was their fault.”

It was only thanks to “monumental collaboration” and a court ruling that their imminent deportations were stopped. Lettunich said she feared the family would have otherwise “vanished without a trace.” But while the children are now free and out of harmful detention conditions, they remain without their parents even after bogus charges against Jackie were dropped. “The children’s mother so far has been denied release on bond and doesn’t have another hearing until Oct. 14. It’s uncertain when the father will have a hearing,” The Chronicle Newspaper reported earlier this month.

Since then, Lettunich and her husband have attempted to instill as much normality in the children’s lives as possible. They have home-cooked meals, play card games, and go swimming. But they miss their parents and old lives more than anything. “‘When is everything going to go back to normal?’ Lettunich said the children ask,” The Chronicle Newspaper continued. “When will life be back to the life we had?”

“A mother and her 4 American children were disappeared by our government, nearly deported under false pretenses, and stripped of their rights,” Lettunich said during the shadow hearing. “It’s critical that we alter the precedent that is forming, not just for this family, but for all the others who don’t have representation and are being moved out as swiftly as possible. We are beyond awareness. Everybody is looking for action.”

U.S. citizen Chelsea White testified that she was forced to relocate her American children to Mexico in order to keep her family together following her husband’s deportation. Hilario Martinez Garcia was detained after the couple followed the rules by stopping at a routine DUI checkpoint. But it turned out to be anything but routine. “She couldn’t say goodbye,” a family friend said about White, who is currently expecting the couple’s fourth child. “She didn’t know where he was for seven days, not a phone call or anything.”

“Driving home alone, four months pregnant and in shock, was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done,” White said during the hearing. “I kept thinking, ‘How am I going to explain this to our kids?’ Hilario had never spent a single night away from us. How do you prepare yourself to do it all alone?” Martinez Garcia, a handyman, had called the U.S. his home for more than two decades prior to his deportation from his family and community. In order to keep the family together, White felt she had no choice but to uproot her children from their country and join him.

“After he was eventually deported to Mexico, White said she sold everything she could and took their three children, all of whom are U.S. citizens, with her to join him ‘in an unfamiliar country,’” MSNBC reported. “It shouldn’t have to be this way,” White told lawmakers during the shadow hearing.

“I came to Congress today because families like mine deserve better,” she said. “We deserve policies that recognize the human cost of deportation. Our children, especially those with disabilities, deserve the chance to thrive. Families belong together, without being forced to choose between love and survival.”

Shamefully, these stories are not unique. One CNN investigation has identified “more than 100 US citizen children, from newborns to teenagers, who have been left stranded without parents because of immigration actions this year, according to a review of verified crowdfunding campaigns, public records and interviews with families, friends, immigration attorneys and other advocates.”

And this doesn’t have to be this way, either: the report also revealed that ICE is ignoring their own guidelines permitting detained immigrants to try to find guardians for their children.

“Accounts gathered by CNN included an autistic 11-year-old who was placed in foster care in Nebraska when her father was picked up by ICE in June, and a 10-month-old left with family friends when her single mother was arrested during a workplace raid at a cannabis farm in Southern California in July. In Michigan, the oldest daughter of four reportedly scrapped plans to attend college in the fall so she could raise her three younger siblings after their widowed father was detained.”

“It’s literally a kid’s worst nightmare having someone come take your parents in the middle of the night,” Wendy Cervantes, Director of Immigration and Immigrant Families at CLASP, told CNN. “No matter the outcome, you are turning a kid’s life upside down.”