It was summer break, so Deisy Mendoza and her four siblings were still sleeping at 8 a.m, in the apartment they shared with their parents.
The kids awoke to a knock on the door from a neighbor. Down in the parking garage, both of their parents had been arrested by ICE.
“I basically broke down,” Mendoza, the oldest, age 21, said.
Soon, her parents were transferred to the Otay Mesa Detention Facility, a half hour drive away from the family’s home in San Diego. In the weeks that followed, it became clear they weren’t coming home soon.
Mendoza added her parents’ routines to her own, dropping off her younger siblings, who range from age 8 to 18, at school, cooking, cleaning, and paying bills. The deadline to register for her next semester of college came and went. She and her closest sister postponed plans to move out of the family apartment together.
Having lost their breadwinner, Mendoza’s father, who worked in construction, the family slid into immediate economic uncertainty. Mendoza made a plea for community support on Gofundme and raised $18,000, half of which was gone within three months, most of it used to pay the rent on the family’s three bedroom apartment. She supplemented that with the several hundred dollars a week she earned from her part-time job at an ice cream shop.
From afar, Mendoza’s parents instructed her on how to update the car registration, and they intervened when the kids bickered. But full-time parenting had funneled into short phone calls and hour-long weekend visits, under the supervision of guards. The Otay Mesa facility, Mendoza says, felt like a prison, even though most inmates, including her parents, had no criminal record. Her parents, and the dozen other detainees in the visitation room, were forced to wear blue uniforms.
“At first it was insane to see that because they make them look like prisoners,” Mendoza said. She began to notice her parents losing weight.
Mendoza’s parents hired a lawyer, who argued that their detention was illegal, because it took place on private property, and the agents did not present a warrant. But their case became a cycle of competing appeals between their lawyer and the lawyer representing the Department of Homeland Security. “It’s just so draining,” Mendoza said in an interview in October, “Not knowing what could happen.”
Deisy Mendoza and her younger siblings are part of a cohort of hundreds of thousands of people in the United States whose parents were detained in immigration raids last year, as the incoming administration of President Donald Trump expanded enforcement efforts to pursue thousands of new arrests weekly, rejecting longstanding practices and pursuing detention even of people with no criminal record or who were midstream in the process of seeking asylum.
According to the Migration Policy Institute, over six million people in the United States have a parent at risk of deportation, which amounts to one in twelve children in the country. In California, one in six children lives with at least one undocumented parent. The Brookings Institute estimates that over 2.6 million children risk losing both of their parents to immigration enforcement. In 2026, the Trump administration aims to separate thousands more families, with the goal of a million deportations.
Across California, interviews with people like Mendoza reveal those families’ distinct sense of loss, a change that is both nebulous and profound. Their parents and their legal struggles are a constant daily presence — yet their parents are absent, due to circumstances beyond comprehension and entirely out of their control.
Those changes affect not just a family but a whole community, as children battle the financial, logistical and emotional challenges of being left behind. The psychological repercussions then spread to their friends and neighbors, who fear the same fate.
The Rev. Hung Nguyen, a priest at Our Lady of Guadalupe parish in San Diego, compares the immigration raids to the COVID-19 pandemic, in which the initial shock gave way to the formation of protective routines, like social isolation. After months of indiscriminate arrests in immigrant neighborhoods, undocumented people have learned to keep the curtains closed, only leaving home to go to work, and if they’re daring, the supermarket.
Often, multiple undocumented people live in the same household, and when one person is detained, another must look for extra work — while taking on an increased risk of detention.
A family without a father
One of Nguyen’s most devout churchgoers was deported last February, he said, after he was arrested by federal agents in the parking lot of a supermarket. His wife, Lupita, is also undocumented, and says she prays whenever she leaves the house, because she believes divine intervention is the reason she was not deported along with her husband.
“The cars started coming out from every direction, one was burning rubber and stopped really fast in front of him. When they [the agents] got out, I saw they had their faces covered and were wearing [bulletproof] vests,” she said. “There were a thousand things in my head. Are they going to take me too? What should I do? What are we going to do?”
Lupita’s husband was deported to Tijuana that same day, most likely after signing his own voluntary deportation order, though the intent of the document was not explained to him by the agents in charge. He had lived in the United States for more than 20 years and Lupita says he had no criminal record.
Lupita, with her children, siad she is worried a stranger will report her to ICE. The children acclimated to their new economic reality once their father was deported. (Photo by Adrian Childress/Times of San Diego)The family has five children, three still underage, the youngest 8 years old. For Lupita, who did not want to be identified by her last name, the financial burden was immediate, and she began pawning gold jewelry to cover the family’s expenses. Cleaning houses for an average of $100 a day, she earns enough to pay the rent, but nothing else. Though she is hunting constantly for more work, she relies on personal referrals, because she is worried a stranger will report her to ICE. The children acclimated to their new economic reality — there would be no Christmas presents this year.
The shift in the family’s financial standing was accompanied by psychological changes. Lupita said she and her husband, now living with family in Mexico City, both have battled depression since the deportation.
“He was taken just nine days after my father died. I felt like I had arrived at an ocean of tears,” Lupita said.
In order for the pair to see each other again, Lupita’s husband would need to pay over $10,000 to cross the border with a smuggler, putting his life in danger, and also risking six months in prison if he were discovered by Border Patrol. The other option would be for Lupita and the three youngest children to move to Mexico, which she said would disrupt their education and compromise their safety. Neither is an ideal path, but Lupita said she doubts they can endure another year apart.
In an interview in Mexico, her husband said the sadness caused by the separation from his family is so strong “the body feels it.” He has relied on his Catholic faith for solace, specifically passages where Jesus tells his disciples not to doubt his plan, like the Gospel of John, where Jesus says, “When you ask, you must believe and not doubt, because the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind.” He is asking God for an opportunity to see his wife again, and he does not allow himself to doubt that the universe will deliver.
Lupita has also vowed to push forward despite the pain, for the sake of the children. “I suffered a lot, but I didn’t cry in front of my kids,” she said.
Her children, she said, are numb. Their sadness is marked by an absence of excitement about their lives. “When the kids saw I had put up the Christmas tree, they told me not to put ornaments on it…Right now they don’t have any emotions at all,” she said.
Other families show the same numbness, says Nguyen, a manifestation of deeper feelings hidden from view. “When the parents are tense, you see that in the children too,” he said.
Psychological, social effects
Mariel Horner, a social worker who volunteers with immigrant families, said the increasing frequency of ICE raids could cause a “major onslaught” of PTSD and adjustment disorder diagnoses in children.
Adrienne Shilton, senior vice president of policy and strategy at the California Alliance for Child and Family Services, a state-wide organization that partners with local providers to offer educational and mental health support to low income children, said “the effects of this [immigration enforcement] are compounding” on children mentally, and could cause them to “withdraw from their communities” at adolescence, leading to higher rates of suicide and homelessness.
A 2020 study published in JAMA Pediatrics found that adolescents with a deported parent were more likely to develop suicidal ideation and alcohol dependence in the six months after the event.
These psychological effects are not limited to those directly affected by deportation, but instead, circulate through communities and the public at large, causing widespread fear, even among those unlikely to be targeted by ICE agents. In addition to making arrests on sidewalks and parking lots in immigrant neighborhoods, federal agents arrested at least three people outside schools in the San Diego area in 2025, with small children watching.
“People are having daily panic attacks,” Horner said.
This anxiety could linger in the chemistry of children’s brains for years to come. “Chronic fear of their own or a loved one’s imminent arrest, the separation of a parent, and detention in an immigration facility are all sources of toxic stress that can accumulate as families move deeper into the immigration system,” the Society for Research in Child Development wrote in a report in March 2025. “Adolescents whose loved ones are detained or deported exhibit higher levels of suicidal ideation, substance use and depression, indicating potential lifetime mental health challenges.”
Depression and anxiety are also prevalent in immigration detention centers, like the Otay Mesa facility, where Mariel Horner, the social worker, participates in weekly protests. The detainees yell their identification numbers through a wall, so Horner and other volunteers can contact them through a phone application. Because they don’t have commissary funds, or their family members don’t know how to contact them, some have not spoken with their loved ones in months. “They yell over each other because I think they just get so excited to be able to tell somebody who they are,” she said. In subsequent conversations, Horner, said, detainees have told her about witnessing severe depression and suicide attempts.
Even those who are in contact with their families are sometimes thousands of miles away from home, unable to have in-person visits. A Guatemalan woman detained at the Imperial Regional Detention Facility in Calexico, two hours east of San Diego, is more than two thousand miles away from her children, who are back in Jacksonville, Florida, where she was arrested. She has not seen them since April, missing birthdays and the holidays, interacting with them only through the phone. However, the phone calls cost several hundred dollars a month, money she’ll need to pay back to a friend upon her release. She is also in debt to another friend, who is taking care of her children while she is detained. There is no money for a lawyer.
If the woman is deported back to Guatemala, she says she would fear for her life, because her ex-boyfriend, who lives there, has sent her death threats. During interrogations at the detention center, ICE agents have offered to request passports for her two children, who are both U.S. citizens, but she says bringing her children with her to Guatemala would be putting them at risk, and she is worried if she gives the ICE agents their birth certificates as part of the passport application, the documents would disappear. “I don’t trust anyone. I don’t know if it’s true [that they would request the children’s passports], I just have so much mistrust,” she said.
In the phone calls, her children, ages 11 and 8, continue to ask when she’s coming home. Though a nonprofit organization agreed to submit an appeal in her case, she said the Board of Immigration Appeals claimed this month that the paperwork was never filed. “If I’m deported, I don’t know what I’ll do. I’ll go into hiding, because it’s the only thing I can do,” she said.
In 2025, the Trump administration deported at least seven U.S. citizen children accompanying their undocumented parents. If children are left in the U.S. without any legal guardian and no close family members to take them in, they will be turned over to the foster system.
A 2022 internal ICE memo directs agents to ask deportees for the name of a person who can take over the care of any children left behind. In October 2025, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a new law allowing immigrants to legally designate secondary caregivers who have partial guardianship rights during temporary absences including detention.
For now, Deisy Mendoza will not have to take legal charge over her younger siblings. Her parents’ lawyer submitted a petition for writ of habeas corpus to a federal judge, arguing that their arrest and continued detention was illegal under federal law, and the couple was released just before Thanksgiving. But they are not in the clear just yet, and could still be deported. The process, like everything in this new climate of immigration enforcement, is uncertain. Even their next court date in May, Mendoza says, will not decide whether they can stay.
In the meantime, her parents are forced to wear ankle monitors, an unavoidable reminder that the nightmare is ongoing. “I still feel anxious they could be taken again,” Mendoza said. “They have no laws to protect them.”
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