‘No child should have to go through this’: The lives of three siblings in Texas after their parents’ deportation

Sarah Moreno will turn 15 on August 26. That same month, she will return to school. Any other teenager her age in Texas would be with her parents preparing for the start of classes, but even more importantly, her quinceañera, the Latin American tradition celebrating a girl’s 15th birthday. She and her two siblings, 16 and 13, can no longer live with their parents. Their parents were deported, and now they are struggling to pay the rent, buy food and find someone who can drive them an hour to the Brownsville border crossing to visit their parents in Matamoros, Mexico.

“I had never felt so much stress. Before all this happened, I only worried about my grades, my after-school activities,” the girl says in a video call from Matamoros while visiting her parents.

On December 28, 2025, the family was broken apart. Sarah and her younger sister were in the car with their parents: their mother, Jessica Treviño, 34, has been a beneficiary of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) since 2015, and her permits were valid through April 2027.

It had been a normal day for Sarah. The family had bought breakfast and coffee at a Starbucks in Álamo, where they lived, and were on their way to church. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents began following them in unmarked vehicles. Her father, frightened, tried to flee until he stopped the car at a Home Depot. An ICE vehicle rammed them from the front. The airbags deployed and the coffees spilled. Officers pulled the family from the vehicle, and Sarah recalls seeing them strike her father.

“I was telling them, ‘Don’t hit him. Why are you hitting him? He didn’t do anything wrong.’ And they started yelling at me and my sister, telling us that because of him they would also take our mother,” Sarah recalls. The teenager says one of the agents shoved her hard and slammed her against the car door. The blow left a bruise on her neck: “That day I was in shock.”

That night, at her grandmother’s house, Sarah remembers having nightmares about what had happened: “I would wake up with teary eyes, full of tears, trying to understand whether what I had lived through was a dream or real.”

‘My home is in Texas’

Every time her children visit her in Matamoros, Jessica Treviño is heartbroken when they leave. She would like to be at her home in Álamo making sure her three children are eating well, have clean clothes, and are getting ready to go back to school. “I feel like my home is there, in Texas. It has been very hard because my children come every weekend, they leave, and it hurts because I can’t go with them. This really changed their lives,” the mother says.

Treviño says that her eldest son took his sisters to school during the previous school year and had been working to supplement the money their parents send them from Mexico. Sarah, Treviño explains, used to cook with her at home so has taken on most of the responsibility for preparing meals.

When they were in the United States, Treviño says she loved having food ready for her children when they came home from school. On Tuesdays, they watched movies. On Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays, they went to church. On Saturday evenings, they went out to dinner as a family. “It hurts me a lot to be separated from them. I feel powerless, like I can’t do anything, like I’m tied up. The only thing that divides us is a river, a border. I’m really desperate.”

When they were detained last December, Treviño told agents she had DACA, a benefit that protects her from deportation. If she could not be deported, she should not have been held in detention: “They said it didn’t matter, that that wasn’t a legal status,” she recalls. She spent almost 90 days at the ICE facility in the Rio Grande Valley, near the Texas border, until, at her final hearing, a judge granted her voluntary departure on the grounds that there was no evidence her DACA status was valid. Because she was in detention, she was unable to retrieve the permit from her home and present it as proof.

In an email to EL PAÍS, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said that Treviño “knowingly accepted voluntary departure and waived her right to appeal. She departed the United States on March 25, 2026, and will not return.” Treviño, however, insists that she refused to accept that option.

Her lawyer, David Rozas, says Treviño was “forced” into a voluntary departure but was ultimately subjected to a harsher measure: she was deported to Mexico, a penalty that can result in a longer bar on returning to the United States. Afterward, she received a letter from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services notifying her of its intent to revoke her DACA status on the grounds that she had left the United States without authorization.

“It’s the irony that the U.S. government fully knows she has DACA and deported her,” the attorney says. “She was forced to accept a voluntary departure. But then they didn’t allow her a voluntary departure; they ended up deporting her, and it was only after that that she received a notice saying, ‘hey, by the way, we’re going to revoke your DACA because you left the country.’”

The lawyer says cases like Treviño’s are becoming increasingly common among DACA recipients, particularly those living in border states.

They are now suing the government in a Texas court in an effort to allow the mother to return to the United States. “We are arguing to the judge that what was presented as voluntary departure and then turned into a deportation order was made under false pretenses, because she did not want to leave and she had valid DACA; she just couldn’t show it at the time.”

Under Donald Trump’s second administration, 86 DACA beneficiaries have been deported, according to a letter sent by the Department of Homeland Security to Democratic Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois.

A return to routine

In March 2026, Sarah could not hide her sadness when she saw other children arriving at school with their parents or embracing them after school events. “And I was there, alone.” She felt different then and will feel different now, when the school year begins and her mother won’t be there to take the typical first-day-of-school photo or to have a hot meal waiting at home.

She hasn’t made plans for her quinceañera either. “I can’t even take photos because my parents are on the other side. I don’t even know who I’m going to celebrate with, because it’s just my siblings, my aunt and me,” she says.

Sarah says she feels emotionally overwhelmed. She doesn’t know if, once the school year starts, she’ll have enough time to visit her parents in Matamoros. For now, some relatives in Álamo and her community are supporting the family. Sarah is grateful for that, and for being able to cross the border to hug her mom and dad; she knows not all children can do that.

But she still feels the pain of family separation. “When will my parents come back?” she asks. “Everything is harder without them.” She dreams that at least her mother will one day be allowed to return home. “I don’t think any child my age or younger should have to go through this. It saddens me how cruel people can be.”

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