Last week, an undocumented immigrant from Venezuela was selling empanadas at a gas station in Tucson with two of her four kids in tow when she says a woman "verbally attacked" her and called the police.
Arizona Department of Public Safety troopers showed up. She packed up her children and her things and started to leave, but the troopers followed her and pulled her over down the road for driving under the speed limit. The woman says Border Patrol denied her request to see her two other children before she was deported to Mexico — leaving her 8- and 14-year-old boys in the United States.
It is one of the first reported cases of a family being separated amid the Trump administration’s mass deportations.
Arizona Luminaria reporter John Washington joined The Show to about what happened next — and what it says about what family separations might look like under Trump.
Full conversation
JOHN WASHINGTON: They took her out of the vehicle. She called a church elder that is a community member that she had gotten to be close with, who came to the scene. As they were in discussions, the Border Patrol showed up, so the troopers had called Border Patrol, and the Border Patrol Agents proceeded to put her in handcuffs in front of her children and began to question her.
They then took her and her two kids, ages 6 and 9, into custody. They took them to Border Patrol's short term holding facility just off the air force base. And this mom describes that moment, the beginning of that time in detention, as a night of interrogation.
She says that she was aggressively questioned, accused of being a gang member. She says that agents accused her 6-year-old daughter of her father being a gang member, all of which the family vehemently denies. An important point here is that she has two other children, and they were at home at that point with her sister-in-law, and she said that she told the state troopers, the Border Patrol Agents, repeatedly throughout the night that she wanted to contact her kids or her family to let them know where she was and why she hadn't come home, and they never once afforded her a single phone call.
LAUREN GILGER: Right. So she is taken into custody with two of her children, but two other children are still in Tucson, and for days, they did not know where she was. This was a bit of a scramble. People were frantic.
WASHINGTON: People were frantic. They presumed that she was taken into custody with the kids, but they did not know, and they didn't hear from her at all for over three days. And when they finally did hear from her, she had been already deported to Mexico. Remember, she's from Venezuela, right?
And she had been bused 2,000 miles south to the southern end of Mexico. And that was when she was able to borrow a phone, a working phone, and call her family, who were both, at that point, relieved to be back in touch, but also in a state of shock after three days of knowing nothing, and then hearing that the family is separated, and two of the kids are 2,000 miles away.
GILGER: Right. So deported, they're in southern Mexico. Now I know you've been in contact with them, but let me ask you a little bit about what happened and how this all played out, because what you said was that the troopers pulled her over, Border Patrol was contacted, and they were there very quickly afterward. Is that typical procedure for law enforcement in Arizona?
WASHINGTON: It is a legal procedure. I don't know if I could say it's exactly typical. I think there's been a ramp up of this kind of rapid enforcement. DPS has in the past had agreements with the Department of Homeland Security as immigration agents.
The other most commonly present law enforcement agencies in Tucson, TPD and then the sheriff's department, say that they don't act as immigration agents nearly as much as DPS, but we have seen this in the past.
What is more unusual with this case is how swiftly she was deported. So she and her children were picked up in the evening on a Tuesday night, and they were out of the country very early Wednesday morning. So it was maybe 10 hours, we don't know exactly, but it was really quick.
GILGER: Let me ask you about that in particular, because there are certain rights that you are supposed to have under the U.S. legal system, even if you were in the country without papers. What are they and how would this deportation have played out should there have been due process, a court hearing, etc.?
WASHINGTON: Yeah. Well, there is a very critical piece of context here that she had already been given a final order of deportation. So that means that she could be deported pretty much at any time. However, the family explains and her attorney, who I've been in touch with, also explained that when she first came to the United States, she settled for a time in Chicago with her family.
She moved to Texas and then to Arizona, and she petitioned to change the venue so that she could attend court locally in Tucson. And on the day that she was supposed to show up in court, she went to the court, but they hadn't successfully changed her venue, so her hearing was being held in Chicago.
She showed up to court in Tucson, trying to follow all the regulations, and yet, she was ordered deported in absentia, and she was fleeing, as she made very clear, because she and her family were being persecuted in Venezuela. She feared for her death in Venezuela. She also, the first time when she was traveling north to the United States with her kids, she was actually kidnapped in Mexico.
So she told agents, Border Patrol Agents, while she was in custody, this most recent time, that she was scared for her life not going to be returned to Venezuela, but also she was scared to be returned to Mexico. We know Mexico is not a safe place for migrants right now.
GILGER: This story fits so many of the major headlines that we're seeing about mass deportations under the Trump administration and about asylum seekers under the Biden administration, when we saw such a surge of people like her coming here and seeking asylum, she obviously did not receive that asylum, as most people who were coming here seeking asylum did not receive that that status.
What kind of broader context does this fit into, John? Should we be expecting the Trump administration to carry out deportations, regardless of family status, mixed family status, family separation? What has the Trump administration said about family separation?
WASHINGTON: So the first round of family separation, starting in 2018, was a really intentional policy to go after and to deliberately separate families as a deterrent strategy. This is not exactly what we're seeing right now.
I think we're going to see more family separation as a consequence of other policies, and those policies include basically everyone who does not have papers, or everyone who is being stripped of papers, as we're seeing the taking away of TPS, or temporary protected status, to including Venezuelans.
All those people are targets now for ICE, for Border Patrol, so people are going to be separated from their families when they are picked up indiscriminately, basically. We have reports of people being detained when they're going to their check ins with ice. So these are people who have some sort of provisional status, or are working to get status.
They go to their check ins as is mandated by ICE, and instead of saying, “Yes, I'm here, I'm still working on my case,” they just get arrested and put into the deportation process.
