Rock Hill, United States – When Mónica del Cid and her husband began touring Latino neighborhoods with their car loaded with bags of food, many mothers preferred to stay behind the locked door, fearing that it was a Border Patrol (CBP) trick. The so-called Charlotte's Web, the immigration raid that swept through the main city of North Carolina for weeks, sought to meet the quotas of the "largest mass deportation in history."

First modification: 06/05/2026 - 00:55Last modification: 06/05/2026 - 01:03

In Donald Trump's USA, distrust and anxiety have settled where there once were dreams and projects.

"ICE should not detain, arrest, or take into custody for an administrative violation of immigration laws anyone known to be pregnant, postpartum, or lactating."

The rule is part of the official policy of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service, the fearsome arm of Donald Trump's anti-immigration offensive. It's a dead letter. The Center for Reproductive Rights, a nongovernmental organization, has documented at least 1,000 credible reports of abuse in migrant detention centers against women who are pregnant, have just given birth, or have had abortions in detention.

The list includes mothers who have been separated from their nursing children, such as Heidy Sánchez, who had her baby, a US citizen like her father, torn from her arms by ICE agents before handcuffing her. Two days later she was deported to Cuba and lost contact with the girl, whom she only sees through video calls from the island.

Others have stopped producing breast milk due to the malnutrition they suffered during confinement in detention centers. There are also those who have been handcuffed and chained while they have gone into labor or are in the midst of miscarriages, and others who have been denied medical care in any of these situations.

Being a mother in times of the “largest mass deportation in history”, the project to which the Trump Administration has dedicated great efforts, is to live in fear of being visible.

Life in the shadows

Adriana (not her real name) prays the same mantra every day before leaving her home in the suburbs of Omaha, Nebraska: “I look in the mirror and tell myself ‘I am brave, I am authentic, I am a good woman, today I am going to live the best day of my life.’ They are my magic words.”

Then she starts the engine of her car to begin a long day between food delivery services and online shopping, and a second job as a painter on a construction crew.

That routine used to be stress-free until not long ago. But in February 2025, Trump suspended Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Venezuelans, leaving her work permit automatically invalidated and her condemned to the shadows, to try, like many other mothers, to move without being noticed, to not speak Spanish in public, to change routes when she sees vans without license plates or officers who look like immigration agents.

He knows that returning to a Venezuela that remains as precarious as before the capture of Nicolás Maduro by elite United States forces is not an option. Neither for her, who helps many family members with her income, nor for her children, who are among the most outstanding students at their school.

"I leave everything in the hands of God to try to maintain peace of mind, because I have to transmit confidence to my children. And that has worked for me, I cannot allow them to live in fear," he says.

Mónica Del Cid, activist of the Latin community and founder of the Casa del Guatemalteco, which provides all kinds of assistance to migrants from that country residing in Charlotte, has legal status in the United States, where she arrived 24 years ago. Even so, she must answer the questions of her children, who cannot escape worry like Adriana's.

“Several times they have asked me ‘Mom, are they going to deport us?’, and I explain to them that no, we have papers,” she says.

Natalia Silva, a US citizen, vice president of the Charlotte Colombian Chamber of Commerce and also a community leader, said that during the Border Patrol operation in the city, a surveillance drone landed in the yard of her house. That and other shocks led her to ask her son, also a citizen, not to leave without taking his passport with him.

For other mothers, there are fewer alternatives. Eva worked with her husband Miguel at a second-hand goods market in Monroe, on the outskirts of Charlotte, when the warehouse complex closed in December 2023 by decision of its owners, three octogenarian brothers who preferred to retire from the business.

Along with other vendors, Eva and Miguel set up shop in a similar market shortly after, but in November 2025, when Operation Charlotte's Web arrived in the city, he was detained and deported to his native Guatemala. Now, she has put her part of the business up for sale, because she has decided to return to him.

“Our children are American citizens, but I don't feel capable of living with so much fear, that's why I prefer to sell and find a way to start over in Guatemala,” says Eva, who has preferred to reserve her real name and that of her husband.

His voice is barely audible and it's not just a vocal issue. The Guatemalan community in Charlotte has chosen silence to go unnoticed. According to data from the Migration Policy Institute, nearly 100,000 unauthorized migrants live in Mecklenburg County, where Charlotte is located. The figure includes undocumented immigrants, but also people who entered the United States legally and live with temporary or precarious statuses, such as TPS, humanitarian parole, asylum requests or DACA, the benefit approved in the Obama Administration for the so-called 'dreamers', who arrived in the country as children and have been protected from deportation by this figure.

About 9,000 of these migrants are Guatemalans and a third of them have lived in the United States for 20 years or more, which implies that they have more ties there than in their place of origin. For people like Eva, starting from scratch will have the added difficulty of doing so in a land that has become foreign to her.

Both Mónica and Natalia were active during the weeks of raids in Charlotte to take children to school or medical appointments, collect help for those who could not go to work for fear of being arrested, and distribute hundreds of door-to-door markets in Latino communities.

“My husband and I would go out at night shouting from the car asking if they had food, if they needed help, and incredibly many people didn't come out, for fear that it was some kind of trap,” Monica recalls. “I remember that once only a woman came out and told me ‘I'm afraid, but my children are hungry, I have to trust.’ Then many people in the community started calling me to ask for help.”

Until then, Charlotte had operated, unofficially, as a kind of sanctuary city. Nearly 10 sheriffs, of the 100 that operate in the same number of counties in North Carolina, had conspired, at the request of Mecklenburg Sheriff Garry McFadden, to refuse to collaborate with ICE and avoid applying detention orders with immigration motivations.

But in 2024, the state legislature passed an instrument making that cooperation mandatory, and Democratic Gov. Josh Stein's veto was overridden by the state General Assembly.

Barely four months later, Operation Charlotte's Web arrived, which lasted a few weeks and did not show the violence of the raids conducted in cities such as Los Angeles, Chicago or Minnesota, but the fear has not disappeared, because the operations, although more sporadic and selective, have not completely ceased.

“Even our businesses have suffered,” says Mónica. “My husband and I have a mechanical workshop and the clientele has been greatly reduced, just like in all Latino businesses, because people in the community avoid going out, avoid exposing themselves, and are avoiding expenses because they don't know if they will have to be without work again, as happened during the raids.”

Many Latin businesses closed so as not to expose their clientele and workers, causing losses that still threaten their survival today, and leaving those affected with a painful lesson: the need to live in the shadows.

Life torn from arms

The death of an American mother, Renee Good, at the hands of an ICE agent, was the trigger for the collective repudiation against the Minneapolis raids, but many anonymous children have been torn away from one of their parents by Trump's anti-immigration offensive.

The Brookings Institute think tank maintains that some 145,000 American children have been separated from at least one of their parents in immigration operations since Donald Trump returned to the White House. If the estimates are extended to children of any nationality, there are some 205,000 who have been torn from the arms of one or both of their parents, either by brief immigration arrests, confinement in detention centers or deportation.

The data, which are based on projections, do not allow us to distinguish the proportion of fathers and mothers, but it is known that there are 22,000 minors who have been left without both.

A study by the investigative journalism portal ProPublica allows us to establish two devastating conclusions for migrants: Trump is deporting four times more mothers of American children than his predecessor Joe Biden and 60% of the cases of mothers with immigration arrests end in deportation, double that of Biden's time.

Contrary to the slogan that the Trump Administration is ridding the United States of “the worst of the worst,” three out of four detained mothers had no criminal convictions in the country, except for traffic tickets or violations of immigration laws.

But not experiencing detention or confinement firsthand does not exempt mothers from suffering. Kimberlin Lemus, a 26-year-old Honduran immigrant, was left alone in March, with two daughters and experiencing a high-risk pregnancy when her husband, Elmer Flores, was detained by ICE agents and placed in a detention center in Georgia. Now, he receives help from the Siembra NC solidarity fund that has allowed him to pay the rent, but it is insufficient for other expenses.

Online fundraising platforms such as GoFundMe have been filled with requests from mothers who have been left alone to care for their children due to the arrest of fathers who were breadwinners, either in search of support for maintenance or to pay for the very high legal fees, because in immigration cases there is no option to resort to public lawyers as in criminal cases.

Family detention is another risk of the nightmare that the “American dream” has become for many migrants. According to data from the Marshall Project, a non-profit online newsroom that investigates the application of immigration law, 6,200 minors under the age of 18 have been detained by ICE agents since the beginning of Trump's second presidency, and that includes those who have gone with their mothers or fathers to family detention centers such as the one in Dilley, in Texas, and those who have had to face the system alone as unaccompanied minors, after being separated from their family at the southern border.

These detentions have broken historical records, both in the number of cases and in detention time. While the daily average of minors detained for immigration reasons in Biden's time was 24, during Trump's administration they have shot up to an average of 266 locked up each day.

Under the Flores Agreement (a consensus based on a Supreme Court ruling in 1993), it is imposed that children should not remain in immigration detention centers for more than 20 days, but since Trump returned to the White House, 1,600 cases have been documented in which minors exceeded that time of confinement. Four minor children of an Egyptian mother, ex-wife of a man convicted of an attack on a Jewish demonstration, spent 10 months in Dilley, a milestone of infamy that the woman is still trying to fight in court.

While activists and experts warn about the emotional consequences of any type of confinement for children, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), on which ICE depends, usually responds to queries on the subject by reminding that “being detained is a choice,” because migrants can decide to seek deportation.

The burden of detained children also weighs on mothers, whether they are with them or not. More than 3,600 of these minors have been deported, sometimes without notifying their parents, who have barely had time to arrange their departure (or arrival), or to settle them in the new destination. Toys, strollers and even medicines have been left behind, widening the void of broken homes.

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