Denisse Parra Vargas and her husband, Omar, had just dropped their three children—aged 9, 5, and 4—at school in Austin last Thursday morning when their car was pulled over by Texas state troopers, at least ostensibly because the license plate was expired.
The younger two children—both boys—are U.S. citizens, but that did not dissuade the troopers from turning Parra Vargas and her husband over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as suspected undocumented immigrants. Families and their kids are fair game these days, as Trump‘s “border czar” Tom Homan has repeatedly made clear.
“Having a U.S. citizen child after you enter this country illegally is not a get out jail free card,” Homan told CBS News’ Face the Nation last month.
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The father was sent to an ICE detention center then deported to Nuevo Laredo in Mexico, just across the border from Laredo, Texas.
The mother was released after being fitted with an electronic monitoring ankle bracelet by the ICE Intensive Supervision Appearance Program (ISAP). She was instructed to check in at the new Pflugerville processing center on Tuesday.
“She was told that if she showed up, then she would be eligible for asylum as well as a work permit,” a spokesperson for Grassroots Leadership, an Austin-based criminal justice and immigration advocacy group, told the Daily Beast.
The 39-year-old mother complied on the appointed day, bringing her kids along.
“Her understanding was that this was supposed to be a routine appointment,” the spokesperson said. “It was not a threat.”
But the mother and her kids then became the latest people to vanish into the immigration system and be held incommunicado. Grassroots Leadership and its legal team began an around-the-clock effort to locate them.
“We were just trying to figure out where she was,” the spokesperson said. “ICE was not giving us information.”
Grassroots Leadership repeatedly entered the woman’s alien registration number into the online ICE detainee locator.
“She wasn’t showing up,” the spokesperson said.
Early Wednesday afternoon, Parra Vargas telephoned the Grassroots folks to say she had been deported and was in Reynosa, just across the border in her native Mexico, 15 miles from where her husband ended up. Their three kids were with her—two of them citizens.
“When she called from the other side of the border, she said that she signed a paper, but she wasn’t sure exactly what it was,” the spokesperson told the Daily Beast. “She did not understand what she was signing.”
The legal team would no doubt have advised her that, as U.S. citizens, her younger two children could not be deported if she chose to place them with a responsible caretaker. But she does not seem to have been given the opportunity for an informed choice.
“She never had a chance to consult with anybody,” the spokesperson said. “Any efforts from our end to be able to advocate for her release, or even for our legal team to be able to work on her release, none of that was possible because we weren’t even able to locate her.”
Much the same happened in two other instances in April involving a total of three children who were deported despite being U.S. citizens.
In both cases, the kids were detained along with the mother during what had been presented as a routine check-in.
A 4-year-old U.S. citizen with metastatic cancer was deported to Honduras along with a 7-year-old citizen sibling. The third U.S. citizen deportee last month was just 2.
When calling for mass deportations, President Donald Trump and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and Homan speak of an invasion of killers and rapists, a horde a Homeland Security Department spokesperson called ”the worst of the worst.”
The only violation of the law in this week’s case involving the Parra Vargas family was one so minor it is usually used simply as a pretext to pull people over.
“Their mistake was not having their tags renewed,” the Grassroots Leadership spokesperson said. “Both of them are loving parents. They have their three kids, and they’re just trying to live their lives here in Austin.”
Were it not for that car stop, their kids would have been in school on Tuesday. The younger two, who are as American as Trump or Miller or Homan or anyone else born in this country, would have been in kindergarten.
“Learning their numbers, learning how to spell,” the spokesperson said. “It’s May, so I’m assuming right now there’s a lot of end-of-school celebrations... And instead of doing that right now, they are currently on the other side of the border, not sure what their new reality is.”
The children had been hastily deported before their mother had an opportunity to understand their rights and make a terrible choice that could only be worse if you are cheated of an opportunity to make it.
“They were taken from their home, without the chance for them to even grab any of their belongings, like any toys, any clothes, anything that they might need for their day-to-day lives,” the spokesperson said. “They don’t have any of that, and that’s just including the material possessions. There’s also the long term psychological damage.”
The spokesperson said the Grassroots Leadership legal team will continue to seek a remedy.
She added, “The reality is that this is not the first time that ICE has done this.”
Miller has said that if you do not deport the kids they grow up to become adult immigrants. The Parra Vargas brothers will not be the last.
