ICE took her mother. Now, a 6-year-old is left without a guardian or legal path back to reunite in Honduras.

Chicago Tribune

22-06-2025

As Gabriela crossed the stage at her kindergarten graduation in Chicago, she scanned the audience, desperately searching for a familiar face. But her mother was nowhere to be found.
Still, wearing a pink dress and ballerina flats, Gabriela, 6, smiled and twirled around holding a bouquet on her way home. An older neighbor who sometimes cares for her walked by her side.
Just a week earlier, on June 4, her mother, Wendy Sarai Pineda, 39, was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement outside an office in downtown Chicago during what was supposed to be a routine check-in, while Gabriela was at school. The little girl doesn't understand why her mother vanished and had hoped her mother would be at her graduation, said Camerino Gomez, Pineda's fiance.
'I told her that she went to get some paperwork ready so that they can be together in Honduras,' Gomez, 55, said. 'And that I will take her to be with her soon.'
But Gomez doesn't know if that's even possible. He has no legal guardianship over Gaby, as he calls her. The girl, who is a Honduran citizen, has an asylum case pending. And with Pineda being held at the Kenton County Detention Center in Kentucky before being deported to Honduras, there's no clear way to secure a power of attorney for Gomez to travel with the girl. ICE, he said, has not been responsive to him or the lawyer for the mother and daughter.
'She is afraid that the state or the government will take (Gaby) away from her,' Gomez said. 'She's afraid she'll never see her ever again.'
When parents are detained or deported by immigration authorities, their children — many of them U.S. citizens, others, like Gaby, in the U.S. without legal permission — are often left behind to navigate the fallout alone. Some are placed in the care of relatives, while others may end up in foster care. All face the emotional trauma of sudden separation, sometimes compounded by economic instability and legal uncertainty. Reunification is often blocked by bureaucratic hurdles, Chicago advocates say.
Despite life-altering consequences, there is currently no federal protocol to ensure that children are reunited with their deported parents. Their well-being is left to chance, in a system that wasn't built to protect them.'An infrastructure for children left behind when their parents are deported does not exist,' said Erendira Rendon, vice president of immigrant justice at The Resurrection Project, an organization that offers legal help for immigrants. 'It makes this heartbreaking situation even harder for families.'
Advocates estimate about 20 people, including Pineda, were detained by immigration officers on June 4 following a confrontation involving local officials and ICE agents in the South Loop.
According to Gomez, Pineda had received a message to attend an appointment that morning at an office housing the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program, an ICE-run alternative to detention that ensures compliance with immigration processes.
The mother, who came from Honduras with Gaby in May 2023 to seek asylum, was not aware that she had a prior deportation order from entering the United States without authorization years before. Still, the Biden administration allowed her into the country with her daughter because she did not pose a threat to the country and had no criminal record, her attorney Elisa Drew said.
For the last few years, Pineda had been checking in with ICE. That's what she intended to do June 4.
'She wanted to get to the office early so she could come home early,' Gomez said. 'Instead, she wasn't allowed to leave.'Masked federal agents pulled Pineda and more than a dozen others from the ICE office and loaded them into unmarked white vans as relatives watched, many in tears. She is now being held in Kentucky, awaiting deportation.
Many of the detained that day were parents who had been complying with check-ins for years, said Antonio Gutierrez, co-founder of Organized Communities Against Deportations.
The parents, he said, are desperate to know how their children are doing. Most have been sleeping on the floor at the detention center because of overcrowding, according to Gladis Yolanda Chavez, another immigrant mother who was detained June 4.
There is no clear data on the number of children who have been left behind. Their ages range from newborns to high schoolers.
In past administrations, immigrants would be given some time to purchase plane tickets back to their home countries and then escorted to the airport, Drew said. And though that is what Pineda would have wanted to do, she couldn't.
'They were thinking maybe they could leave as a family unit. I thought they would be safer,' Drew said.
At home, Gaby keeps asking where her mother went.'She told me that when she sees her mom's clothes, she remembers her and gets more sad,' Gomez said.
In recent weeks, immigration attorneys have told the Tribune that ICE has ramped up the visibility of enforcement across Chicago and other sanctuary cities, targeting people at court hearings and during check-ins.'To have a parent taken away suddenly like that … can have lifelong implications for their development and for their socialization — night terrors, screaming, crying uncontrollably,' said Caitlin Patler, an associate professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley.Gomez, who met Gaby after getting engaged to her mother in November, said he would like to take Gaby back to Honduras, but ICE has the child's passport and the power of attorney. After more than two weeks, ICE has been unresponsive, Drew said.
Though Gomez has tried to reach out to the Honduran Consulate in Chicago and other organizations, he has gotten little to no response.
'What do I do if Gaby gets sick, if she needs something that requires her parents to be here?' he said.
The Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, which intervenes only in cases of abuse or neglect, said in a statement that it works with families regardless of immigration status. If a child is found to be neglected and a parent is detained or deported, the agency aims to place them with relatives and reunify them with their parents, sometimes with the help of foreign consulates.
The Mexican Consulate visits each detainee at the immigration processing center in Broadview before they are transferred to a detention center to provide a power of attorney or custody letter if they have a child in the country.
Other countries, however, do not have that type of structure. Due to the political turmoil, Venezuela, for example, does not have a consulate in the United States.Rendon, from the Resurrection Project, urges families to create an emergency family plan that includes discussing with a loved one who can care for the children if the caregiver is detained, and having the necessary documents ready for family reunification.
The situation can be even more complicated when parents in the country without legal permission have U.S.-born children, said Jacqueline Stevens, a political science professor at Northwestern University who studies deportation enforcement. Some parents may choose to leave the child in the U.S., even if they are sent to another country, for safety, stability or the promise of a better future. Every situation is different, Stevens added.
'Nobody chooses their country of birth. Nobody chooses their parents,' she said.
Gaby didn't choose to be in the U.S. with someone she had only known for a year, said Gomez. Pineda is afraid that in the midst of it all, Gaby will be lost in the system.
'But there's no way she can stay here without her mother,' Drew said. 'She needs to be reunited with her.'
Different community groups have collaborated with Chicago Public Schools to create 'sanctuary teams' to help alleviate the anxiety and stress experienced by kids by providing essential resources for families, including medical assistance, clothing, food and mental health support. Some educators expressed concern to the Tribune about that support being cut off during the summer months.
Other groups use school buildings as spaces to meet even through the summer, said Vanessa Trejo, a school-based clinician with the Brighton Park Neighborhood Council.
During the school year, Trejo worked with a boy whose mom was also detained and deported by ICE. She said it directly affected his ability to focus in class. Trejo met with the student twice a day. He would cry and they would play games.
'I try to sit with him. Just having a physical being around is huge,' Trejo said.That student, who was born in the U.S., was in the process of obtaining his passport so he could be with his mother, she said.
As for Gaby, her future is uncertain, Gomez said.
Her mother is still in detention, and there is no timeline for when or where she'll be deported. Let alone when she'll see Gaby again.
In the meantime, Gaby spends her days with an elderly neighbor, Maria Ofelia Ponce, 74, while Gomez is at work. Other times, Gomez's older daughter and his brother's family help take care of her.
'It breaks my heart to see her alone. To not know what will happen to her,' Ponce said.
At Gaby's graduation, as mothers in dresses held their children in their graduation gowns, Gaby's family had a small gathering to celebrate her, hoping to help her feel loved.