For two months after their arrest, Yerson and Kelly Vargas and their 6-year-old daughter, Maria Paula, were held at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, a family detention facility in Texas. One day, they said, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents confronted them with chains and handcuffs and threatened to drag them away by force if they didn’t agree to board a plane to Colombia, the country they had fled three years earlier.
After a nauseating, 18-hour bus ride and a transcontinental flight, the family arrived in Colombia in November with one bag between them and little more than the shirts on their backs. Immigration officials never gave them a chance to reclaim the belongings they left behind in their apartment in New York. They lost their car, clothes, a fish tank and Maria Paula’s toys. A kind neighbor stepped in to save their beloved cat, Milu.
Immigrant families, lawyers and advocates say the way President Donald Trump’s administration is carrying out deportations is unnecessarily traumatic for children and leaves parents struggling to make arrangements for housing, medical care or schooling after deportation. Under Trump, ICE has deported thousands of children under 18, according to data from the Deportation Data Project.
The Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Texas.
Families who have gone through the detention system said that ICE kept them in the dark about when they would be deported, and gave them little time to prepare. Multiple lawyers also told The Marshall Project that they were kept from their clients during the process.
ICE did not respond to a detailed list of questions about specific cases or in general about the deportation process for families.
Some experts say that although deportation will almost always be difficult for children, the government could take steps to make it less damaging, including not detaining them and their families. President Joe Biden largely ended the practice of family detention, allowing parents and children to live in the community while their immigration cases unfolded.
Families can still be deported without detention. In the past, case management programs ensured that they appeared in court and provided them advance notice to prepare for departure, said Michelle Brané, the executive director of Together and Free, an advocacy organization for families affected by immigration enforcement. She said living outside detention, and being given notifications, allowed families to plan for children’s schooling and housing in the country they were deported to.
“Giving families the time to make those arrangements is critical for their safety,” said Brané, who also served as the immigration detention ombudsman, an independent oversight role for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security under Biden.
Brané said giving notice allowed families time to make arrangements for their belongings, which could include selling expensive items like cars. There are also some possessions that are essential to arranging a life after deportation, like phones or notebooks with contact information for family and friends. When families were allowed to make those kinds of plans, their lives were more stable in the places they were deported to and were less likely to try to return to the U.S., Brané said.
Left, Maria Paula Vargas holds her cat, Milu, whom they later had to leave behind in New York when they were detained. Right, Maria Paula works on a drawing in Colombia.
The Vargas family said they’ve been scrambling to rebuild their lives in Colombia. Every day, their former neighbor in New York sends them video clips of their cat so that Maria Paula can see. She still thinks that her family is only on vacation, and talks about being in “jail” in Texas all the time.
She has regressed academically and emotionally, according to her parents, who want to send her to a pediatric psychologist. Maria Paula also has problems with her vision after somebody working at Dilley accidentally hit her in the eye with a mop handle, an incident documented in medical records reviewed by The Marshall Project. In Colombia, her parents have not been able to get her to an eye specialist. She “entered Dilley in excellent condition and left in a very unfortunate state of health,” Kelly Vargas said.
Lesly Rodriguez Gutierrez had been living in the U.S. since 2022 when ICE officials told her to come to an appointment in March with her family to have their photos updated. Instead, ICE arrested them, according to Nikolas De Bremaeker, managing attorney at Centro Legal de la Raza, a legal advocacy organization for immigrants. Just days after their arrest, she was deported to Colombia with her 6-year-old and 4-year-old sons. Her older son is Deaf and uses expensive, custom-fitted medical devices to assist with hearing, and did not have them with him when the family was arrested, which has made communicating especially challenging.
The lawyer said that for the two days between the family’s arrest and deportation, he had trouble getting accurate information about their location and as a result could not offer them legal counsel. “Honestly, it feels intentional,” De Bremaeker said. “This is a move that shocks the conscience.”
In another case, in the spring of 2025, a 4-year-old boy with Stage 4 kidney cancer was deported without medication, according to the ACLU of Louisiana. A U.S. citizen, he was deported with his mother, who came to the country as a teenager and had lived here for over a decade. In response to controversy about the case, Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, defended the deportation, according to the BBC. “Having a US citizen child does not make you immune from our laws,” he said.
The family was denied access to their lawyer, according to legal filings, despite active efforts to fight their case.
“It is not an anomaly. Lack of access to counsel is legion,” said Nora Ahmed, legal director at ACLU of Louisiana.
Lawyers for immigrant children say the inability of people to reach their attorneys is not the only issue that may lead to deportations. Some families stop fighting their cases, even when they have valid claims to stay in the U.S., because they are so desperate to leave detention centers like Dilley, where families have reported inedible food and poor medical care. So they give up and allow the government to deport them.
Others have petitioned judges to let them leave the country, a process known as voluntary departure, which allows people to escape the dire conditions of detention by returning to their home countries. About 180 children left the country in the first nine months of the Trump administration through voluntary departure.
“What is happening to kids in custody now seems particularly cruel and has made people uncomfortable enough and unhappy enough that they have accepted going back to a place where they don’t want to be,” said Becky Wolozin, an attorney at the National Center for Youth Law who represents children in a lawsuit that has led to key protections for families in immigration detention.
The deportation process can compound the trauma families have already experienced in detention. José asked to use only his middle name because of safety fears in his native Colombia. In August, he was arrested with his family after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border and attempting to claim asylum. He was detained at Dilley with his wife, their 17-year old daughter and their 9-year-old son with autism. Their 19-year-old daughter, who had never lived away from them, was sent to a separate facility for adults.
About a month after he was detained, José was going to the gym at the Dilley detention center with his son. They’d done their best to establish routines at Dilley, because predictability is essential for his son’s well-being. He said a guard approached them and told him to start packing his things because they were leaving immediately. The guard wouldn’t say where they were being sent or why. José said he felt terrified, and his son wouldn’t stop crying. Once they were on a bus, along with his wife and younger daughter, he figured out they were being driven to an airport in Louisiana by looking at signs along the highway and listening to conversations between the driver and guards.
After an overnight bus ride and hours more sitting in the bus at the airport, the family finally boarded a plane to Colombia. When they landed, they quickly made arrangements to go to Trinidad, for their safety. Their 19-year-old daughter remained in detention in the United States; she had been assigned a different immigration judge and was allowed to stay to fight her case.
When José was eventually able to talk to her by phone, his daughter said she’d become so ill in detention that she wanted to give up on her case and be reunited with the rest of her family. They said the government took weeks to arrange her departure. The family reunited and now lives in Argentina, where the son has returned to school and José volunteers as a pastor while looking for work as an engineer.
The memory of their time in detention and subsequent deportation remains with them. José said they had trusted the U.S. government to handle their case fairly, but instead they ended up enduring a string of traumatic events. He said that through it all he’s tried to keep himself steady and unemotional for the family, but inside he was totally broken.
