The baby needed somewhere to go . So in the frantic hours before officers took her parents away to immigration detention, her mom turned to their pastor and his wife. As squad cars waited outside the family’s Lakeland, Florida, trailer home, she gave the couple a crash course in how to care for the 4-month-old.
Briany, with her plump cheeks and full head of dark hair, wasn’t normally this fussy. But it was late that January night — around midnight — and she was still hungry. Her mom, Doris Flores, had tried nursing her to calm her down. It didn’t work. When she brought Briany to her breast, the milk wouldn’t come. Flores thought it had to do with the panic that set in after the officers arrested the baby’s father and told her she was next. The baby also drank formula. The pastor and his wife, who’d never had children themselves, should take her bottles and the yellow cans of formula, too, and follow the instructions on the label. They should use distilled water, never from the tap. Briany drank 5 ounces at each feeding. She needed to eat every two to 2½ hours.
She was almost due for her next round of vaccinations. She was getting big enough for Size 3 diapers. What made her happiest was to be held in someone’s arms. Her mom turned to their pastor and his wife. The Rev. Israel Vázquez, 58, soft-spoken with close-cropped hair, had held Briany before, when he formally presented the baby to God in a ceremony at his Pentecostal church in Lakeland. If he and his wife, a fellow pastor at the church, didn’t take Floris’ two daughters in, they would have to go into foster care. “What else could we do?” he said.
The baby’s half sister would be easier for the older couple to take care of. Eight-year-old Briana is quiet and humble. She prefers speaking in English rather than Spanish. Her favorite color is blue.
Deputies from the Polk County Sheriff’s Office helped load a baby stroller and bouncy swing into the couple’s car. Then the officers, employed by one of the hundreds of Florida agencies carrying out immigration enforcement for the Trump administration, handcuffed a sobbing Flores. Incidents like this, involving the arrest and detention of immigrant parents with American citizen children, occurred twice as often after President Donald Trump returned to office, according to an analysis of a new nationwide Immigration and Customs Enforcement dataset shared exclusively with ProPublica. In the first seven months of Trump’s second term, authorities arrested and detained parents of at least 11,000 U.S. citizen children — a number that, if the pace held up, will have roughly doubled by now. That’s an average of more than 50 U.S. citizen kids a day with a parent pulled into detention.
The data underlying this analysis was obtained by the University of Washington Center for Human Rights as part of an ongoing public records lawsuit . It covers the last three years of the Joe Biden administration and the Trump administration until mid-August 2025. The differences between the fates of detained immigrant parents under the two presidents are stark, our analysis shows. The impact on mothers is particularly pronounced. Trump is deporting about four times as many moms of U.S. citizen children per day as Biden did. Immigration authorities are arresting more of these moms in the first place, but that doesn’t account for all of the surge in deportations . If arrested, they are seldom allowed to return home to their families anymore . About 30% of such arrests under Biden resulted in a deportation. Under Trump, almost 60% resulted in a deportation.
Compared with the Biden administration, Trump officials are detaining many more parents with only minor criminal histories or none at all . Under Trump, more than half of the detained fathers of American citizen kids, and about three-quarters of the mothers, had no criminal convictions in the United States except for traffic- or immigration-related offenses.
Current and former officials from the Department of Homeland Security said such separations are not necessarily a violation of policy. Instead, guidelines on the way officers should exercise discretion have changed. Among the changes: A document once known as the Parental Interests Directive has been given a new name under Trump — the Detained Parents Directive . And its preamble, which once instructed agents to handle immigrant parents in a “humane” manner, has been stripped of the word. John Sandweg, who oversaw ICE when the original directive was adopted under President Barack Obama, said, “Back then, we were operating from a lens that family unity is everything.” Tom Homan, then a top ICE official and now Trump’s border czar, introduced the directive to field offices around the country. If agents encountered parents, the directive would help them enforce immigration laws without “unnecessarily undermining their parental rights,” according to his August 2013 talking points, which were obtained by ProPublica.
Now, Sandweg and the other former officials said, the second Trump administration has put aggressive enforcement goals like arresting 3,000 immigrants a day above concerns about the harms of hastily separating children from their parents. ProPublica sent detailed questions about our findings to the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE. Acting DHS Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis said in an emailed statement that the agency “cannot verify the veracity of the data” that ProPublica analyzed. (We validated the data, which the agency provided via Freedom of Information Act requests, and our approach in our analysis with outside experts.) Bis also said in the statement, “ICE does not separate families.”
Immigrant parents facing deportation can choose to leave the country with their children or designate someone to care for them, Bis said, which “is consistent with past administration’s policies.” The revised directive “simply standardizes the required forms.” She added that “under President Trump, ICE will not ignore the rule of law.”
A White House spokesperson wrote in a statement that those in the country illegally “who wish to avoid the deportation process should self-deport.” * * * The unraveling of Flores’ family began with another child’s alleged threat against 8-year-old Briana.
According to a Jan. 15 police report, the girl’s school bus driver had contacted the Polk County Sheriff’s Office after Briana claimed a student at her elementary school, a boy with blond hair and blue eyes, had threatened to kill her.
The sheriff’s office dispatched a deputy to the family’s mobile home, where she introduced herself to Flores and her fiance, Egdulio Velasquez, and asked to speak with Briana. The girl was “timid,” according to the deputy’s report, and initially denied any trouble with fellow students. The family said the deputy questioned Briana alone, outside the trailer. Eventually, the girl let on that her classmate had indeed been bothering her, poking her in the back and face with his fingers — but did not say the boy had threatened to kill her, according to the deputy’s report.
The deputy went to the classmate’s house, and the boy told her it was Briana who had made the threats. He said she had pointed a broken pencil at him. The deputy filled out two threat assessment forms, one for the boy, one for the girl, noting that she hadn’t checked the boy’s home for firearms because his “father was uncooperative” but had searched Briana’s trailer. Flores and Velasquez were both immigrants from Honduras. “I was unable to determine probable cause,” the deputy wrote in her report. She would have to drop the case. But her investigation had turned up something else: Flores and Velasquez were both immigrants from Honduras.
A second sheriff’s deputy arrived at the trailer not long after and took their passports. According to police records, he then called an ICE hotline, a requirement stemming from Florida’s close cooperation with the agency. An operator told him that both parents had deportation orders, Velasquez resulting from a DUI conviction and Flores because of a missed asylum hearing.
Flores said she missed the hearing because of computer issues and was trying to appeal the ruling. She crossed the border into the United States and applied for asylum in 2023, after a man in Honduras had threatened to kill her, she said. The DHS’ Bis confirmed that Flores entered the country in 2023 and had a deportation order issued in May 2025. Flores had met Velasquez, who is from the same rural Honduran province of Olancho, in the United States. Briana, his daughter from a previous relationship, was born in Honduras. The family built a life together in Lakeland, where he worked in a factory that built shipping pallets, and they became members of Vázquez’s church.
A third squad car appeared outside the trailer. The officers arrested Velasquez first, keeping him handcuffed in the back of one of the cars for hours. But before they could arrest Flores, they needed to figure out what to do with the kids.
“Don’t be like this,” Flores recalled saying to the officers as she held baby Briany. “My girl needs me.” She said they told her they were just doing their jobs. She said she prayed to God: “Lord, I’m putting everything in your hands.”
According to Flores and Velasquez, one of the deputies took a liking to a family kitten and offered to take it home with him. Velasquez said he later saw the kitten clinging to the officer’s pants.
The Polk County Sheriff’s Office did not respond to specific questions about the incident, instead sending an emailed statement that outlined its state-mandated cooperation with federal immigration authorities . If she couldn’t find someone to take the children, the state would place them in the foster care system. It was close to 11 p.m. when an investigator from Florida’s child protection agency finally arrived, the family said. She informed Flores that if she couldn’t find someone to take the children, the state would place them in the foster care system. So Flores called her pastor.
Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd recently began calling for a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who have committed no crimes and have strong community ties. A spokesperson for the sheriff’s office wrote in the statement to ProPublica that deputies do not make any decisions on whom to detain — they report suspects to ICE, and ICE makes the decision.
But she noted that they now make an effort to determine citizenship status.
“Nothing has changed in how we deliver day-to-day law enforcement services in our community,” she wrote, “other than asking everyone with whom we interact their place of birth.” * * * Federal policy still says ICE officers should ask people they arrest if they are the parents or legal guardians of minors — and if they are, they should be allowed to make arrangements for the children’s care. The Trump administration’s July revision to this directive, the one that removed the word “humane” from the preamble, also added a new line. It specifies that the directive “in no way limits the ability of ICE personnel to make enforcement decisions on a case-by-case basis.”
In practice, instances when parents are spared are becoming increasingly rare, said Andrew Lorenzen-Strait, a former ICE official who oversaw implementation of the directive at ICE during the Obama and first Trump administrations. “It may happen on a case-by-case basis because an officer in and of himself has humanity,” he said.
ProPublica followed multiple families through their sudden separations — examining the moment itself and its aftermath — and found a wide variety of outcomes for the children. Fernanda, a Florida restaurant worker, made an agonizing decision after the father of her children was arrested and deported: She would send their toddler son and 4-year-old daughter to Guatemala to live with him. She feared it was only a matter of time until immigration agents came knocking on her door. She didn’t want the children, both U.S. citizens, to be stranded.
Fernanda asked to be identified by only her middle name because of her immigration status. The Guatemalan-Maya Center, a nonprofit, helped her take the kids to the Fort Lauderdale airport in early February — the little boy dressed in a Spider-Man outfit, the little girl in a CoComelon sweatshirt and pink hat — and put them on a plane.
Griselda, a single mom originally from Honduras, had to leave her young daughters with their babysitter for four months. She said she was getting a ride to a house painting job in Melbourne, Florida, when the car’s brakes failed and it crashed into a stop sign. Police officers showed up, she said, then called ICE. A domestic abuse survivor who asked to be identified by only her first name, Griselda said she told the officers, and then ICE, about her children, but she was sent out of state to be detained in Dilley, Texas, without them. Griselda was desperate to reunite with her 4-year-old, who was born in Mexico during her journey to the southwest border, and her 1-year-old, who is a U.S. citizen. She said she decided not to file an appeal after a judge denied her asylum claim and that an ICE agent and a social worker were dispatched to Florida to retrieve the girls. Then, she said, she and her daughters were escorted to the border to cross on foot into Mexico — where they knew no one and had no money. Instances when parents are spared are becoming increasingly rare. A DHS spokesperson confirmed that the family was sent to Mexico together.
Mauricio Ayala, a 24-year-old engineer working at a firm in downtown Seattle, called 911 after immigration agents arrested his dad last April. “My father has been illegally detained,” he told the dispatcher nervously, stumbling over his words. “A bunch of masked men in unmarked vehicles pulled up and detained him.” (A DHS spokesperson wrote in a statement that “our officers verbally identify themselves” and wear badges and vests that display their agency name.)
His dad, a roofer, had been swept up in one of the first large-scale workplace raids of the new Trump administration. It was the beginning of a role reversal for Ayala, his college-age sister and his brother, a high school senior. All citizens, they would be the ones supporting their parents. Their mom had been forced to leave the country after an immigration arrest over a decade ago, Ayala said, but officers didn’t arrest his dad at the time because there were young children in the home. His dad was found guilty of reckless driving in 2015 but had no other criminal convictions that ProPublica could find in the United States. But now, as the siblings entered adulthood, their dad would be deported, too.
To cut costs and send money to his parents in Mexico, Ayala moved from his Seattle apartment back into the trailer his dad owned in a smaller city 90 minutes away. His sister did the same. Their little brother picked up part-time jobs.
Maria Magdalena Callejas, her boyfriend and her 14-year-old son were detained in Texas while on a road trip last spring. She called a friend back home in California who was taking care of her two younger children — both U.S. citizens — until her return. She begged the friend to keep them longer.
Callejas’ boyfriend was deported. She and her older son, Edwin, were held in family detention, where said he was stressed and became ill because it felt like a prison. He said he lost 10 pounds in a week after he got sick. He was so despondent, his mother said, that she felt her only option was to allow them to be sent back to El Salvador, a country Edwin left when he was 5. (ICE has said conditions in its facilities are safe for families and that everyone is provided proper medical care.)
Callejas said she agreed to return to El Salvador only because she understood that her 6-year-old and 4-year-old would be allowed to join her and their older brother. The kids’ father had previously pleaded no contest to domestic battery and had a restraining order placed against him, which allowed brief supervised visitation. (Attorneys for both parents said Callejas allowed him to spend time with the kids despite the order.) When he found out their mom had been deported, he opposed the children leaving the country and decided to fight for custody. Since Callejas’ deportation, the children have been with a caretaker, and a judge has allowed their father more time with them, according to lawyers for both parents. The result: a monthslong battle in a Los Angeles court — with Callejas attending hearings virtually from El Salvador. * * * Back in Lakeland, Israel Vázquez takes no credit for feeding the baby that first night or the ones after. “That girl can drink milk!” he said. His wife, the Rev. Raysa Vázquez, woke up every couple of hours and tended to Briany, sitting with her in the brown recliner in the living room, rocking her back to sleep.
They did not know how long the girls would be with them. They decided 8-year-old Briana should stay at the same elementary school, to keep her with her friends and teacher. They drove around 45 minutes round trip to the school every day.
Meanwhile, the girls’ parents bounced among holding rooms, jails and detention centers. In detention, Flores said, she began to suffer a painful swelling, which she believed could have been mastitis brought on by her inability to nurse her baby. Her chest became hot to the touch, her whole body feverish. The fever lasted a week. The Vázquezes wanted to do whatever they could to make the girls feel at home. But they also wanted to make sure the girls could be reunited with their parents. If Flores and Velasquez were going to be deported, the pastors wanted the girls to go with them. And to go with them, Briany would need a passport. The pastors would have to get both parents’ signatures while they were in detention. They also wanted to make sure the girls could be reunited with their parents. Briany was sitting on Raysa’s lap as they watched TV in the living room, babbling along as she listened to the couple talk, when Israel’s phone rang. It was an ICE deportation officer. He said Flores would be removed from the country soon and the window for getting her daughters on a plane with her was closing. He offered to help the Vázquezes get the parents’ signatures and said ICE would bring Flores to Tampa.
The next day, they drove to a government office in Tampa to get Flores’ signature, where the girls were allowed to see and hug her. She let out a loud scream and started weeping at the sight of the children. Volunteers rushed to the Mississippi detention center where Velasquez was being held and got his signature, too.
The couple drove Briany to Miami a few days later and picked up her passport. Then they brought the girls to the Tampa airport.
They met Flores at the terminal. She was clad in a sweatshirt and bleary from the early hour. Israel handed over the diaper bag he’d been carrying around and the baby’s bottles. Velasquez would be deported to Honduras a few weeks later. Her eldest child, a son from a previous relationship who had to go live with his father after she was arrested, would remain in the U.S. So for now, it was just Flores and the two girls. They posed for a photo, then said goodbye.
The family now lives at Velasquez’s father’s house in the town of San José, deep in rural Honduras. The baby no longer breastfeeds. She hasn’t since the night deputies separated her from her mother. “I brought her to my breast,” Flores said, “but she doesn’t want it anymore.”
Briany’s preferred formula costs too much for the family to afford. To keep the baby fed, they rely again on their church back in the U.S. A box of it recently arrived, enough to last several weeks, sent by the Vázquezes and their Lakeland congregation.
Graphics by Chris Alcantara . Al Shaw contributed data reporting.
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