On a morning last week, a mother from Ecuador nervously entered a federal building in Lower Manhattan with her 6-year-old daughter and 19-year-old son for a mandatory appointment with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.
Inside, ICE agents detained the mother, Martha, and the two children. Officers drove the teenage son to a detention center across the river in New Jersey and flew the mother and her daughter to a family detention center in Texas.
On Tuesday, exactly a week later, Martha and her daughter boarded a plane and were deported to Ecuador, leaving behind two other children in New York who had not been detained.
The detention of the family, especially the 6-year-old girl, touched a nerve among New York elected officials like few other ICE arrests have during President Trump’s second term. Their arrest ignited a scramble to try to stop their deportation, and prompted a rare rebuke from Gov. Kathy Hochul, who called the arrest “cruel and unjust.”
The family’s case illuminated a practice the Trump administration has revived across the country: the detention and deportation of families with children.
But while the case was the first deportation of a parent and child to receive news coverage in New York, they were hardly the first family to be deported this year.
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