Mexican citizen Maria de Jesús Estrada Juárez was among the hundreds of thousands of people shielded from deportation under an Obama-era program allowing people brought to the U.S. as children to stay in the country if they generally stay out of trouble.

But that changed Feb. 18 when she showed up for an immigration hearing and was arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and deported the next day.

“I didn’t get to say goodbye,” the 42-year-old mother said at a news conference Tuesday in Sacramento. “It all happened so fast. This has been one of the most painful experiences of my life.”

Estrada Juárez held hands with her daughter and began to choke up as she recounted those experiences.

“It’s hard to describe what it feels like to lose your mother so suddenly, especially when you believed she was safe,” said Damaris Bello, Estrada Juárez’s 22-year-old daughter. “It was like grieving someone who was still alive.”

The federal government has deported dozens of recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, also known as DACA, during President Donald Trump’s second term, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The events come amid the Trump administration’s reshaping of immigration policy more broadly.

Immigration advocates say Estrada Juárez’s removal highlights the need to offer more permanent protections for DACA recipients, often referred to as “Dreamers.”

The case is a rare example of a judge ordering a person’s return to the United States after being deported, said Talia Inlender, deputy director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at the UCLA School of Law.

“But, perhaps unsurprisingly, it feels like this is happening with more frequency under the current administration which is prioritizing speed and quotas, rather than fairness and process, in facilitating removals,” Inlender said in a statement.

The federal administration said Estrada Juárez was deported because of a 1998 removal order when Estrada Juárez was a teenager, shortly after she arrived in the U.S. She was sent to Mexico at the time but returned to the U.S. weeks later and has had DACA status since 2013. Federal officials reinstated the 1998 order in February after arresting her.

Estrada Juárez spent the next few weeks after being deported with relatives, stressed about being separated from her daughter.

“You can’t enjoy life when the most important part of your life is not there,” she said.

U.S. District Judge Dena Coggins, who was appointed by then-President Joe Biden, issued a temporary restraining order on March 23, giving the federal government seven days to facilitate Estrada Juárez’s return to the U.S. Her deportation was a “flagrant violation” of her DACA protections and infringed upon her due process rights, Coggins wrote.

The Department of Homeland Security has defended the deportation.

“ICE follows all court orders,” a department spokesperson said in a statement. “This is yet another ruling from a Biden-appointed activist judge.”

But Estrada Juárez wasn’t aware of the 1998 order, which her lawyer argues wasn’t final.

“DACA gives you a vested right to not be deported once it’s granted,” said Stacy Tolchin, an immigration attorney based in Pasadena, California. “I really don’t understand what they’re doing.”

Bello, who was reunited with her mother Monday night, said she is recovering from the events and hopes other families don’t have to endure the same thing.

“Having her back home means everything to me,” she said. “It means we can begin to heal, to rebuild and to move forward together as a family.”

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Nelson Gonzalez, 59, and his wife Gladys Gonzalez, 55, of Orange County, originally entered the states near San Ysidro before ultimately settling in Laguna Niguel and starting their family.  

While the couple tried numerous legal avenues to remain in the country over the years, including appeals to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and the Board of Immigration Appeals, a spokesperson for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement told The Orange County Register that the Gonzalezes had “exhausted all legal options to remain in the U.S. between March 2000 and August 2021,” and were ultimately in violation of immigration law.  

Their three daughters, Gabby, 23, Jessica, 33, and Stephanie, 27, all U.S. citizens, told KTLA that they were devastated when they learned their parents had been detained on Feb. 21 during a regular check-in with U.S. immigration officials.  

“They were put into handcuffs by their wrists and ankles and treated as criminals before getting to these detention centers,” Stephanie Gonzalez told KTLA. “All they said is they extended their stay, even though every year they’ve had permission to be here and they’re law-abiding citizens who show up and are doing their duty to check in with immigration and say, ‘Hey I’m here. I’m not hiding or doing anything wrong.’ Then they just arrested them like that.” 

Gladys and Nelson, neither of whom have a criminal record, were originally held at the Adelanto Detention Center in San Bernardino County before being transferred to a facility in Arizona and later Louisiana.  

Stephanie told The Register that though her parents have been traumatized by everything that’s transpired, they are grateful to no longer be in detention centers and have made contact with family in Colombia who are helping them start a new life.  

The two younger sisters, Gabby and Stephanie, are currently living with Jessica and her husband in Newport Beach. They all plan to visit their parents within the coming weeks.  

Family members also acknowledged they’re one of many who have been affected by President Donald Trump and his administration’s goal of ramping up arrests and deportations of undocumented immigrants throughout the U.S.  

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With the Trump administration promising the largest deportation effort in U.S. history, more than 200 people marched through downtown Ontario on Saturday morning in support of the Inland Empire’s immigrant community.

The energetic crowd waved American and Mexican flags, banged drums and unleashed noisemakers as they paraded along the sidewalks. They chanted, “We are not leaving,” and the United Farm Workers’ motto, “Sí, se puede.” Demonstrators erupted into cheers when vehicles along Euclid Avenue honked in support.

The protest — promoted on social media as a “mass mobilization against mass deportation” — was led by the San Bernardino-based Inland Coalition for Immigrant Justice, which is comprised of more than 35 organizations serving the immigrant community in the Inland Empire.

The region is home to a sizable immigrant population. According to a 2018 report from UC Riverside’s Center for Social Innovation, the Inland Coalition for Immigrant Justice and the California Immigrant Policy Center, one in five Inland Empire residents was an immigrant, with nearly 1 million immigrants across Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

San Bernardino County also is home to the Adelanto ICE Processing Center, one of California’s largest immigration detention centers, which is managed by the private prison corporation GEO Group. A coalition of immigrant rights groups has advocated for the facility’s closure for years, citing health, safety and human rights concerns.

Addressing the crowd before beginning the march, Javier Hernandez, executive director of the Inland Coalition for Immigrant Justice, framed the administration’s rhetoric as an attempt to sow fear and panic among the immigrant community; a ploy to make people cower in the shadows or self-deport.

“The way we fight back is by coming out to the streets,” Hernandez said. “We’re leaving fear behind and pushing forward with our fight for immigrant rights.”

“Sin papeles, sin miedo,” he cried out, leading attendees in a boisterous chant. “Undocumented, unafraid.”

Confronting that fear — and speaking out for those feeling attacked and afraid to protest — was on the minds of many protesters.

Andy Garibay came to the country as a baby and now has work authorization and deportation protection through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA. A mother of two, she lives in Rialto and works in payroll administration.

She said the Trump administration’s threats have her and her family on edge. Her family group chat seems to be constantly pinging with possible sightings of immigration officials near the warehouses where many relatives work, she said.

“Why should it be like this?” said Garibay, who held signs reading, “One Love,” and had a Mexican flag wrapped around her hair.

Deanna Pennino, of Ontario, is the daughter of a Mexican immigrant. He taught her and her siblings to work hard and be proud Americans, while never forgetting their roots, she said.

Pennino, a respiratory therapist at a local hospital, said several colleagues have stopped coming to work, afraid immigration authorities could show up at any moment. Trump on his first day in office rescinded a Biden-era policy that protected certain sensitive locations, including churches, schools and hospitals, from immigration enforcement.

Pennino also fought against Proposition 187, a 1994 ballot initiative that sought to bar immigrants lacking documentation from receiving any public benefits, including healthcare, education and social services. That experience, she said, proved to her that “we can fight and make a difference.”

During Saturday’s march, she carried a sign reading “Deport Elon,” a reference to Elon Musk, a South African immigrant who is leading a controversial effort to weed out alleged fraud, waste and abuse from the federal government.

Trump initially focused his rhetoric on tracking down immigrants lacking authorization and who have been accused of violent crimes. His administration now says it considers all immigrants in the U.S. without legal authorization to be criminals, because they have violated immigration laws.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has already conducted well-publicized operations in Chicago and New York, among other places. The pledge of more enforcement actions has rattled immigrant communities throughout California and across the country and spurred a groundswell of activism.

Last weekend, rumors that the federal government was planning a massive immigration enforcement sweep in Los Angeles County put many people on high alert. At that time, ICE officials did not say whether any special operations had taken place and did not release daily arrest figures. However, it appeared any such operation had not been anywhere near as widespread as many had predicted.

In early January, at the tail end of the Biden administration, Border Patrol agents conducted a multi-day raid in rural parts of Kern County, resulting in the detention and deportation of scores of laborers lacking documentation.

This week, ACLU attorneys representing the United Farm Workers and five Kern County residents sued the head of the Department of Homeland Security and Border Patrol officials, alleging the raid amounted to a “fishing expedition” that indiscriminately targeted people of color who appeared to be farmworkers or day laborers.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — A government watchdog says the Trump administration, under its practice of separating families at the border, forced migrant parents to leave the U.S. without their children, contradicting claims by officials that parents were willingly leaving them behind.

The Department of Homeland Security Inspector General said in a report released Monday that it found at least 348 cases in which Immigration and Customs Enforcement had no records showing migrants wanted to leave their children in the U.S. It also found “some” cases in which agency officials deported parents even while knowing they wanted to take their children with them.

That contradicted assertions by senior DHS officials that parents were choosing to leave their children in the U.S. to stay with family or for other reasons while they were deported in 2017 and 2018 as the administration sought to enforce a hard-line approach to immigration enforcement.

The findings, issued by Trump-appointed Inspector General Joseph Cuffari, provide new insight into a policy that became a significant political crisis for the previous administration and a continuing challenge for the current one, which is working to reunite children who remain separated even now.

“Those who conceived of this travesty will have to live with the memory of their cruelty for the rest of their lives,” said Sen. Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat who is chair of the Judiciary Committee and requested the report.

The Trump administration separated thousands of migrant parents from their children since the summer of 2017 as it moved to criminally prosecute people for illegally crossing the southwest border. Minors could not be held in criminal custody with their parents and were transferred to the Department of Health and Human Services.

The mass separation of families sparked public outrage and a lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union, which also collected reports of parents being deported without the opportunity to take their children with them.

“Throughout the litigation, we learned that some parents were even told their child would join them on the plane only to have the plane take off without the child,” ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt said.

That contradicts what DHS officials were telling the public.

Then-DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, according to the report, testified to Congress in December 2018 that “every parent” had a choice to take their child back to their country and those who did not “made the choice not to have the child accompany them.”

Nielsen told Congress in March 2019 that there has been “no parent who has been deported, to my knowledge, without multiple opportunities to take their children with them.”

Nielsen did not immediately respond to a request for comment. She has said previously that her agency did not set out to intentionally separate families but had no choice because the administration was criminally prosecuting border-crossers.

Trump issued an executive order halting the practice of family separations in June 2018, days before a federal judge’s ruling that did the same and demanded that separated families be reunited.

In response to the report, ICE said it concurred with the findings and is working to address the issues around recordkeeping raised in the report.

Shortly after taking office, President Joe Biden set up a task force to reunite hundreds of children who remain separated. It announced the first four reunifications this month.

That effort is going on as the Biden administration confronts an increase in the number of migrants under 18 attempting to cross the southwest border by themselves.

The administration has transferred about 19,000 to facilities overseen by HHS. Those children are being allowed to remain in the U.S. while the government decides whether they have a legal claim to residency through a citizen parent or for some other reason.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration continues to turn back adult migrants, including asylum-seekers, and many families crossing together under a public health order issued at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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