{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://www.padilla.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/washington-post-trumps-mass-deportations-bring-a-new-wave-of-family-separations/", "Washington Post: Trump\u2019s mass deportations bring a new wave of family separations", "2025-09-17", "2025", "2025-09", "Democrat", "Senate", "CA", "Alex Padilla", "P000145", "www.padilla.senate.gov", "padilla", "https://www.padilla.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/", "scraper", "By Maria Sacchetti\n\nSulma Martinez had just left the dentist\u2019s office with her 14-year-old twin daughters when an unmarked U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement vehicle pulled up behind her and flashed its blue lights. The officers asked for her papers.\n\nMartinez, a 35-year-old originally from Honduras, had a work permit, a pending asylum claim and a pathway to a visa for crime victims. But none of that mattered, she said the officers told her.\n\nThey gave her a choice: She could head to a hotel and be deported with her daughters, or she could contest her removal and try to stay in the United States. If she chose the latter, she\u2019d be arrested and the twins would be sent to a shelter for child immigrants.\n\n\u201cWe were crying. We were scared,\u201d Martinez said. \u201cI didn\u2019t want them to separate me from my girls.\u201d\n\nAs President Donald Trump\u2019s mass deportation campaign ramps up, ICE has sharply increased the number of migrant children it is sending to federal shelters for unaccompanied minors. Officers have referred more than 400 children nationwide to shelters run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement since Trump took office, according to two people who have reviewed internal records. While some allegedly were removed from dangerous situations, many were separated from parents, relatives or government-vetted sponsors as part of immigration enforcement actions.\n\nICE officials disputed that information and said its referrals are not that high. But the agency and ORR did not provide the data.\n\nThe separations recall the \u201czero tolerance\u201d policy Trump implemented along the southern border during his first term, which led to the forced separation of more than 4,000 newly arrived children from their parents without a plan to reunite them. A federal judge called the episode \u201cone of the most shameful chapters\u201d in U.S. history and approved a court settlement that barred such separations for several years. But that agreement does not apply to families apprehended beyond the border, in U.S. cities and towns where many of the children and teens have lived for years.\n\nIn July, the Trump administration withdrew a Biden administration policy urging that parents be detained only in \u201climited circumstances.\u201d As a result, immigrant advocates and lawyers say, ICE officers are arresting growing numbers of people with children to meet the president\u2019s mass deportation goals and, in some cases, using the threat of separation to push them to abandon their immigration cases and leave the country.\n\n\u201cWhat we are seeing now is a reckless attempt to deport as many people as possible without regard at all to family unity or family relationships,\u201d said Efr\u00e9n Olivares, an attorney with the National Immigration Law Center who has filed a lawsuit to stop the rapid removal of unaccompanied minors in federal custody. \u201cAnd it\u2019s happening in darkness without any kind of oversight or accountability for what this process means for families.\u201d\n\nU.S. Customs and Border Protection has historically been, and continues to be, the primary agency that sends migrant children to federal shelters. Most of those cases involve unaccompanied minors who crossed the border illegally in hopes of reuniting with a parent or relative in the United States. ICE officers enforcing immigration laws beyond the border have typically sent children to shelters only when a minor had run away, been arrested or been abused.\n\nBut today, lawyers are hearing reports of separations happening during immigration court hearings, workplace raids and elsewhere as enforcement ramps up.\n\nNeha Desai, a lawyer with the National Center for Youth Law, whose team represents immigrant children in federal immigration custody, said she is aware of more than 50 children and teens who were taken into custody during situations as minor as traffic stops.\n\nDHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said the agency is not splitting up families. ICE gives parents the option of having their children removed with them or being placed with \u201ca safe person the parent designates,\u201d she said in a statement. ORR, which oversees shelters for unaccompanied minors, did not respond to questions about the number of children apprehended and placed in the agency\u2019s care.\n\nAs the officers put her in shackles that July morning, all Martinez could think about was her daughters. Their father had been killed in an apparent robbery less than two years earlier. They could not lose their mother, too.\n\n\u2018Look at Sulma\u2019\n\nMartinez said she and the twins had never intended to leave Honduras. Her husband, the girls\u2019 father, Melvin Rodriguez Manueles, had come to the United States illegally years earlier with a plan to work in construction, save money and return home. He sent them money to cover their expenses, and Martinez said she and the girls were \u201cdoing well.\u201d But in 2019, Martinez said, she fled with her daughters to the U.S. border after gang members assaulted her father and torched his house. She feared they would come for her and the girls next.\n\nBorder agents released Martinez and the girls after they crossed the southern border illegally and surrendered, seeking asylum. But ICE never filed charges against them in court. They settled in Louisiana, and Martinez hired an immigration lawyer in 2022 and submitted an asylum claim.\n\nOn Nov. 5, 2023, Rodriguez was fatally shot in what prosecutors believe was an attempted robbery in front of the family\u2019s house in New Orleans.\n\nMartinez remembers waking to the sound of gunfire and rushing outside to find her husband in a pool of blood. She recalls trying to shake him awake and shouting at the twins to stay inside. Rodriguez\u2019s wallet was never found. But Martinez found an iPhone and turned it over to the police, who say it led to the arrest of Jose Gamboa Escobar. He has pleaded not guilty to charges of second-degree murder.\n\nThe Orleans Parish District Attorney\u2019s office has certified that Martinez is a crime victim, clearing the way for her to apply for a U visa for victims who help with an investigation. Prosecutors said she may be needed to testify at the trial.\n\n\u201cOur office takes seriously its responsibility to prosecute crime and protect all victims, regardless of their immigration status,\u201d District Attorney Jason Williams said in a statement. \u201cWhen victims and witnesses are afraid to come forward, violent perpetrators go free, police are placed in greater danger, and our entire community is less safe.\u201d\n\nYolani and Loany, Martinez\u2019s daughters, had just begun emerging from the shock of losing their father. He had doted on the girls and took them on camping trips. The girls, poised to start their first year of high school, dreamed of becoming flight attendants. Yolani flirted with the idea of being a fashion influencer. Loany is more low-key and hides her braces when she smiles.\n\nMartinez worked as a cook at a pizzeria, chopping vegetables and other toppings, and became a deacon at the small congregation outside New Orleans that has become an extended family. Everyone was looking forward to the twins\u2019 double quincea\u00f1era party in December.\n\n\u201cLook at Sulma,\u201d Eunice Alvarado, the youth minister at the Ministerio Pentecostal Restauracion y Poder, and other churchgoers would say when they fell on hard times. She had lost so much and remained strong.\n\nA choice or coercion?\n\nICE records show that Martinez has no criminal history and was not the person the officers had been searching for that day. She just happened to drive by them after taking Loany to have her braces adjusted, and officers followed her.\n\nAlmost as soon as she agreed to voluntarily deport to Honduras, she said, she began to regret her decision. She was a single mother responsible for protecting her daughters. Gang members had warned her family not to report them to authorities in Honduras or they would attack them again, she said, but her family did anyway.\n\nAfter the officers drove them home to pack, Martinez told them she wanted to stay.\n\nBy nightfall, she was in an ICE detention center in Basile, Louisiana, and the twins were in a government shelter in San Antonio, hundreds of miles away.\n\nICE said in a statement that officers separated Martinez from her daughters because she \u201cchanged her mind last minute and chose not to voluntarily depart the United States.\u201d The agency said officials informed her that she would be placed in immigration proceedings \u201crather than on her way to her home country with her kids.\u201d\n\nICE has reopened a family detention center in Texas that was closed during the Biden administration. But it held fewer than 400 people in August, well below its stated capacity of 2,400 beds, federal records show. The agency did not answer questions about why the family and others could not be held together there instead.\n\nAmerican Civil Liberties Union attorney Lee Gelernt, who led the legal effort to reunite families separated during Trump\u2019s first term, said the ACLU is investigating the legality of the new separations inside the United States.\n\nIn some cases, he said, parents are being told their children will be taken away unless they give up their right to a hearing and return home. In other cases, children who arrived as unaccompanied minors are being sent back to government shelters for months after they had already been released to vetted sponsors.\n\nMishan Wroe, also with National Center for Youth Law, said she represents a teen from Latin America who arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border alone in February 2023 and was released to his sister in Georgia after a few weeks in a federal shelter. He enrolled in high school and played for the soccer team, but he ended up back in ORR custody in March after a traffic stop. He was later released to a short-term shelter shortly before turning 18.\n\nJonathan Ryan, a lawyer and CEO of Advokato, a nonprofit legal service provider in San Antonio, said he represents a pair of underage siblings from Afghanistan who were separated from their mother in May after they tried to cross into Canada. The family had been living in Texas for about two years.\n\n\u201cI fear that what we are seeing is only the beginning,\u201d Gelernt said. \u201cAlthough I had hoped for the best, it doesn\u2019t surprise me that we are seeing new separation tactics given that the Trump administration has never acknowledged its original policy, much less its cruelty.\u201d\n\n\u2018Your daughters are yours\u2019\n\nFrom detention, Martinez cannot shake the fear that she could lose the girls forever.\n\nHer anchor is the Ministerio Pentecostal Restauracion y Poder, a red-brick church outside New Orleans, where churchgoers say the sudden absence of Martinez and the girls has left a hole. The church is where Martinez and Rodriguez had the formal wedding ceremony she had always wanted, with a white gown, a frosted cake and matching dresses for the girls. It\u2019s also where Rodriguez\u2019s funeral was held.\n\nAlvarado, the youth minister, said the girls were teacher\u2019s aides at Sunday school and entertained children with a yearly puppet show. The church canceled the show this year.\n\n\u201cThey really made a home here,\u201d she said.\n\nPeople in the neighborhood where Martinez was stopped said ICE arrests have rattled the community and taken away people who paid rent on time and construction workers who fixed hurricane-damaged roofs free. One neighbor said ICE had arrested the mother of a little girl in the neighborhood. Since then, he said, he has seen the girl on walks with her father, crying for \u201cMama.\u201d\n\nIn phone calls with their mother, the twins have said they are doing fine in the shelter. They went on a field trip to a restaurant in San Antonio and attend school in the shelter, though the girls said their math class is below their grade level. But they are also scared. They recounted how immigration officers recently visited the shelter at night and picked up a child for deportation. They are worried that could happen to them, too.\n\n\u201cThey tell me they are worried, and I can hear it in their voices,\u201d Alvarado said.\n\nICE said in a statement that Martinez\u2019s daughters are \u201cbeing cared for by professionals and will remain in ORR custody until her immigration proceedings are complete.\u201d Alvarado and her parents, meanwhile, are trying to reassure Martinez that she will be reunited with her twins.\n\n\u201cYour daughters are yours,\u201d Veronica Salazar, Alvarado\u2019s mother, said on a recent phone call with Martinez from detention.\n\nRepublicans and Democrats clashed over the treatment of immigrant children in the United States at a Senate hearing on Wednesday.\n\nRepublicans accused the Biden administration of allowing tens of thousands of children into the country and then releasing some to abusive or dangerous conditions. Democrats countered that Trump officials have tried to strip minors of legal aid, attempted to expel dozens of Guatemalan children without warning, and separated families like Martinez\u2019s.\n\n\u201cDon\u2019t lecture me about kids and then refuse to speak out when we hear parents are being forced to decide whether to be deported with their children, or let them be sent to ORR shelters,\u201d Sen. Alex Padilla (California), ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee\u2019s subcommittee on border security and immigration, said at the hearing. He called the Martinez case \u201cheartbreaking.\u201d\n\nMartinez\u2019s final deportation hearing is scheduled for Oct. 10 in the detention center in Louisiana where she is being held. Her daughters have been scheduled for a hearing before a judge in Texas one week later.", 1, "2026-03-30T01:40:41Z", "2026-04-06T19:10:29Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["https://www.padilla.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/washington-post-trumps-mass-deportations-bring-a-new-wave-of-family-separations/"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 1.1064168065786362, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}