Carlos Yuniel Valle held his one-year-and-four-month-old daughter, Kailyn, in his arms on Wednesday as he headed to her appointment with the neurologist at a clinic in Tampa, Florida.
Until now, it had been her mother who brought her to the medical center, held the girl’s hand, calmed her, laid her on the stretcher, and helped place the multicolored wires on her head as part of a study to decipher the cause of her repeated seizures.
But now that her mother is gone, the girl began to scream with excessive force—an uncontrollable cry that exhausted the doctors.
“All she was screaming was ‘Mom and Mom,'” the father recounted shortly afterward. “It broke my heart.”
The mother had been deported without warning a week earlier.
Over the days, Kailyn has learned—or accepted—that her mother isn’t around. When she hears Heydi Sánchez’s voice over a video call, she gets nervous: “Mommy, come. Mommy, come.”
Since Sánchez has been gone, “life is agony. This house is pure emotion,” says the 40-year-old.
On the morning of April 22, the father and daughter accompanied the mother to a routine appointment with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
They didn’t know it would be their last day together. 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.
“I was in tears,” Valle says. “I heard her screaming. Then the lawyer and an immigration officer handed the daughter 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 away.”
Two days later, Sánchez, who worked as a home health aide, was deported to Cuba along with seven other women on a return flight carrying a total of 82 migrants—the fourth 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 Mexican border and had remained in the United States under a final deportation order (I-220B), imposed after she mistakenly missed an appointment with authorities.
The father, a naturalized Cuban American, recalls that terrible day at the ICE facility. His wife asked that if they were going to deport her, they should do so with their daughter.
“She told them to send her and her daughter to Cuba. But they told her no, that her daughter was an American citizen.”
Now, while Kailyn tirelessly asks to be breastfed, her mother—who is in Havana—has to pump and discard her milk.
The case of this Cuban family from Tampa has drawn 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 Sánchez be considered for temporary humanitarian parole, citing what she considers “cruel and illegal” treatment.
“It is unconscionable and wrong that your ICE personnel would harm families in this way,” the congresswoman wrote.
Tom Homan, the U.S. government’s border czar, was questioned this week about the deportation to Honduras of three U.S. children with their mothers. According to Homan, the children were returned at their request.
“We’re keeping families together. So when a father says, ‘I want my two-year-old baby to come with me,’ we make it happen,” he said at a press conference at the White House. 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 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 her daughter’s return 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 through 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 in El Salvador by President Nayib Bukele.
Among all the shaved, white-clad inmates kneeling in the prison facility, it was the image of Espinoza that caught his sister’s attention. He began to feel ill and said he wanted to vomit, but his pleas fell on deaf ears.
Espinosa and Bernal had met in Peru after emigrating from Venezuela in 2018. Six years later, after a journey to the Mexican border, the parents and baby surrendered to U.S. authorities. However, they never saw the United States, never setting foot beyond the Texas prison where they remained for more than a year.
According to the grandmother, the baby ‘was taken away from them,’ and they were never released. They only left prison to be deported: he to El Salvador, and she back to her native Maracaibo.
Like dozens of other people, the two were accused of being members of the Tren de Aragua criminal gang. The charges were based on their body tattoos of stars, comic book drawings, the names of close relatives, and a crown. Neither has a criminal record in the countries where they have resided.
However, U.S. authorities insist the father was a “lieutenant” for the Aragua Train.
Meanwhile, they claim 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, but that never happened. DHS, for its part, insists they are keeping the girl 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 state.
During their time in detention, the parents were only able to find out about the girl through photos and videos 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 in the country, 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 home, where she belongs.