This Back to School Season, Kids Face a New Fear: ICE Taking Their Parents

Just a year ago, Martín Soto was making breakfast at home with his wife, Gabriela, while their daughter got ready for her first day of school. But this September, Martín is in solitary confinement at the Elizabeth Detention Center (EDC) in New Jersey.

“I was crying, but my daughter, she told me, ‘Mommy, don’t cry. Daddy’s gonna come home,’” Gabriela Soto told Truthout. “I said, ‘I know, but I don’t want you to miss Daddy on your first day of school.’ And she was like, ‘It’s okay. I know Daddy’s with me.’ And then she pointed to her heart.”

On February 1, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents kidnapped Martín while he wason his way to buy diapers for their 11-month-old son. He was sent to Delaney Hall, an immigration jail in Newark run by the for-profit prison company GEO Group. At Delaney, heorganized a hunger and labor strike to protest the jail’s inhumane conditions, which sparked protests in solidarity outside the jail. In retaliation forhis organizing, he was transferred to EDC, where he has been held in solitary confinement, according to Gabriela.

In addition to the emotional impact of his absence, Gabriela is also struggling to afford rent and other necessities. Martín was the breadwinner for their family and Gabriela lost her job shortly after he was detained. She’s had to rely on donations to support their family.

“I worked as a cleaner, but the hours are not flexible,” she said. “They excused me the first week that my husband was detained, but they can’t continue, so I had to leave the job.”

Gabriela’s story is an increasingly common one. As a new school year begins, families must grapple with their loved one’s absence from yet another milestone, while also fearing that ICE will take them next. In August, ICE officersabducted parents at school bus stops in Danbury, Connecticut,setting off massive protests and eliciting condemnation from Senator Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut.)

Under the Trump administration, an estimated205,000 children have had one or both parents detained, including about 145,000 U.S. citizen children, according to a May report by The Brookings Institution. The number now is likely even higher. The Department of Homeland Security boasted in a recent press release that ICE hadarrested nearly 51,000 people in August alone, a new record for arrests in a single month.

The governmentdoes not track how many children are impacted by a parent’s detention, so the exact number of children starting off the school year with one or both parents detained is unknown.

“We see both parents taken into custody, leaving the children alone,” Sally Pillay, the director of the Mami Chelo Foundation, told Truthout. Pillay is one of the organizers of the Radical Hospitality Zone outside Delaney Hall, where visitors can get groceries, information on resources, children’s toys, and a hot lunch while they wait to see their loved one.

“We have a 15 and a 17-year-old who are fending for themselves at home because both parents are here,” she said.

Pillay also described another family where both parents of three young children, between the ages of one and seven, are detained. Friends and neighbors have taken them in.

“We do our part, a little bit, to try to support the families who are taking care of the little kids … supplementing them with grocery cards, with food when we get food donations, pantry bags, diapers, wipes, anything for that matter,” she said.

Pillay says they recently held their second annual back-to-school drive and distributed backpacks to families with loved ones at Delaney Hall. On the day Truthout visited the Radical Hospitality Zone, volunteers from Saint Anastasia’s Parish in Teaneck, New Jersey, dropped off several plastic containers filled with new clothes. The group also collected backpacks for children who have a parent at Delaney Hall.

“Every little kid should have a new outfit to wear on back-to-school day,” Judy McKay, one of the organizers, told Truthout.

Esperanza, a mother of three, says her family has been struggling to survive since her husband, who was the family breadwinner, was detained about six months ago. Esperanza is not her real name. Truthout is using a pseudonym to protect her identity. Truthout spoke with Esperanza through a translator at the hospitality zone.

“It’s so difficult — not just for school [supplies], but for daily food, paying rent, paying for everything,” she said. “I do everything I can for them — whether it’s clothes or food — I accept it with all my heart.”

Fearing ICE, Esperanza says she kept her children home all summer.

“They had to stay inside all summer,” she said, expressing how sad she felt that they were cooped up at home that entire time.

She says her husband, who has diabetes, has been experiencing pain in his kidneys and other symptoms, but is not receiving any medical care.

“Because he wasn’t getting antibiotics for a throat infection, he did what some of the men are doing inside — taking their own urine as a method to address infections,” she said.

When Truthout spoke with Esperanza, her children — ages 8, 11, and 15 — were starting school the following week. She says they’re overwhelmed with anxiety and that her eldest daughter fears what will happen if she gets of school and Esperanza is not there anymore.

Although the school is only about six or seven blocks from their home, her eight-year-old son is terrified to be that far away from home because he hasn’t been outside all summer. She says when her children hear a siren, they think ICE is coming to get their family.

“I pray a lot. I’m not Christian or Catholic, but I think about the children — waking up hungry, wanting to eat, wanting to go out, and the worry involved in sending them to school,” she said, expressing her hope that “every family take care” because “the pain is so immense” and adding, “I think that if I didn’t return home, I’d go out of my mind.”