Trump separates families again: Two mothers are deported to Cuba and Venezuela without their babies

On Wednesday afternoon, Carlos Yuniel Valle held his 16-month-old daughter Kailyn in his arms and headed to the neurologist’s office at a Tampa clinic. Although he was always the one to drive on these occasions, it was the mother who normally entered the doctor’s office, held the child’s hand, calmed her down, laid her on the examination table, and helped place the multicolored wires on her head as part of a study to decipher the cause of her repeated seizures. This time around, it was the father who took her in. The little girl began screaming and crying with tremendous force, leaving Valle and the doctors exhausted. “All she was screaming was ‘Mom, Mom,’” the father recounted shortly afterward. “It broke my heart.”

Over the days, Kailyn has understood that her mother isn’t around anymore. When she hears Heydi Sánchez’s voice over a video call, she gets nervous: “Mommy, come back, mommy, come back.” Since Sánchez has been gone, “life is agony, this house is in an emotional rollercoaster,” says the 40-year-old man.

On the morning of April 22, the family went in for a routine appointment for the mother with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). They didn’t know it would be their last day together. At one point, Sánchez called her husband, who was waiting outside in the car. She asked him to please pick up their daughter, saying she was about to be deported to Cuba. “She was in tears,” Valle recalls. “I heard her screaming. Then the lawyer and an immigration officer handed the child over to me. I told them to please let me say goodbye to my wife, to give her a hug. But they said no and took me out of there.”

Two days later, Sánchez, who worked as a home health aide, was deported to Cuba along with seven other women on a return flight with a total of 82 migrants, the fourth such flight that Havana has received since the beginning of the year. She had sold her apartment on the island in 2019 to embark on a migration journey to the U.S. via the Mexico border, but her life in the United States was overshadowed by a deportation order, I-220B, issued after she mistakenly missed an appointment with authorities but which had not been acted on — until now.

The father, a naturalized Cuban American, recalls that terrible day at the ICE facility when his wife asked that if they were going to deport her, she wanted her daughter to come with her. “She told them to send her and her daughter to Cuba. But they said no, because her daughter was an American citizen.” Now, while Kailyn tirelessly asks to be breastfed, back in Havana her mother has to pump and discard her milk.

The case of this Cuban family from Tampa has garnered the attention of the local press and politicians. In a letter to President Donald Trump, Democratic Congresswoman Kathy Castor of Florida asked that due process be respected and that humanitarian parole be considered for Sánchez, for what she considers “cruel and unlawful” treatment. “It is unconscionable and wrong for your ICE personnel to harm families in this way. Ms. Sánchez is entitled to due process, and her husband and daughter (both U.S. citizens) deserve to be treated with the dignity we value as Americans,” the congresswoman said in the letter.

Tom Homan, the “border czar,” was questioned this week about the deportation to Honduras of three U.S.-born children with their mothers. According to Homan, the children were returned at their mothers’ request. “We’re keeping families together. So when a parent says, ‘I want my two-year-old baby to come with me,’ we make it happen,” he said at a White House press conference. This doesn’t appear to be the case with Sánchez.

“We haven’t heard anything more about the baby”

But the intention of “keeping families together”—which contrasts with the separation of some 4,600 migrant children from their parents during Trump’s first term—was not what the government applied to Kailyn or to Maikelys Antonella Espinosa Bernal. Antonella, as she is known, is a two-year-old girl living in a foster home under the supervision of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, despite the fact that her mother, Yorely Bernal, 20, requested that she come with her when she was deported to Venezuela just over a week ago.

“We haven’t heard anything more about the baby,” says her paternal grandmother, María Escalona Fernández, 56, from her home in the Venezuelan state of Barinas. “We don’t know her condition, where she is, or who she is with,” she says in tears.

At the end of March, María, a seamstress, received a call from one of her daughters in Colombia. The young woman said, “Mom, are you sitting down?” María jumped. Her son, Maiker Espinosa, 24, was one of the 238 Venezuelans who arrived on the first flights to the Center for the Confinement of Terrorism (CECOT), the mega-prison created by President Nayib Bukele in El Salvador. The image of Maiker Espinosa caught her sister’s attention, among all the shaved, white-clad inmates, kneeling in the prison facility. The young man began to feel ill and said he wanted to vomit, to the deaf ears of the authorities.

Espinosa and Bernal had met in Peru after emigrating from Venezuela in 2018. Six years later, after a journey to the Mexican border, the couple and their baby surrendered to U.S. authorities. However, they never set foot beyond the Texas prison where they remained for more than a year. The baby, according to the grandmother, “was taken away from them.” The parents were never released. They only left prison to be deported: Maiker to El Salvador, and Yorely back to her native Maracaibo in Venezuela.

Like dozens of other people, the two were accused of being members of the Tren de Aragua criminal gang. The charges were based on the tattoos they bear on their bodies featuring stars, comic book drawings, the names of close relatives, and a crown. Neither of them has a criminal record in the countries where they have resided.

However, U.S. authorities insist that the father was a “lieutenant” for the Tren de Aragua, while the mother directed the “recruitment of young women for drug smuggling and prostitution,” according to a statement issued by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) after the Nicolás Maduro government accused them of “stealing” Venezuelan migrant children.

The mother claims that, before boarding the deportation flight, authorities promised her they would send her daughter back with her, but that never happened. DHS, for its part, insists they are keeping the child away from her parents for “safety and well-being.” “We will not allow this child to be abused and further exposed to criminal activity that endangers her safety,” they stated.

During their time in detention, the parents were only able to find out about their daughter through photos and videos that her caregiver sent to her grandmother in Venezuela. But now they’ve lost track of her. María says that her daughter-in-law, since arriving back in Venezuela, has been in very bad shape. “They have to sedate her to get her to sleep,” she says. She says she spends her days looking at photos of the little girl and wondering how she’s doing and when she’ll be able to have her back home, where she belongs.

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