Five-year-old Génesis Ester Gutiérrez Castellanos misses her cousins, classmates and kindergarten teachers in Austin, Texas. Despite being a US citizen, she was deported on 11 January alongside her mother, Karen Guadalupe Gutiérrez Castellanos, to Honduras, a country Génesis had never known.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents were acting on an administrative deportation order against Gutiérrez, 26, issued in 2019, before Génesis was born.
“I kept telling them ‘the girl was born here’. They didn’t care, they picked up the child, just put a jumper on her and told me to get into the car with her,” Gutiérrez told the Guardian.
The two were held for almost a week in a hotel 80 miles from their home, without access to a lawyer or a hearing before a judge, before being deported to the Central American country.
Activists and analysts point to a string of procedural violations in the case and note similarities with other recent detentions of children, such as that of five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos in Minneapolis. They see it as a chilling indication of what may lie ahead as Donald Trump’s administration continues with mass deportations.
Gutiérrez had been living in the US since 2018 after leaving Puerto Cortés, a Honduran port city of about 130,000 people, to “escape poverty and build a prosperous future”, she said. She received a deportation order a year later but remained in the country and in 2020 Génesis was born.
Gutiérrez said she separated from the girl’s father after suffering repeated abuse and applied for a U visa, designed to assist non-citizen victims of qualifying crimes such as domestic violence and sexual assault. There is a severe backlog in processing such applications and, like tens of thousands of others, Karen’s case was still pending.
Despite what she described as a “beautiful and stable life” in which Génesis was growing up surrounded by uncles and cousins, Gutiérrez, who worked as a cleaner, said she was living in constant fear amid an increase in ICE raids. “I would get into my car to go to work and I felt afraid that someone was behind me and would stop and arrest me,” she said.
In early January, Gutiérrez was hosting a friend who had also been a victim of domestic violence when the alleged perpetrator turned up, and the former couple had a heated argument.
They went back inside and Gutiérrez said she was asleep in another room when officers from the Austin police department knocked on the door responding to the disturbance. According to a statement, police said they “discovered an active ICE warrant” and notified the agency.
Mother and daughter were taken by ICE to the neighbouring city of San Antonio and held in a hotel, where Gutiérrez said she was not allowed to call her family until three days after being detained. According to the Texas-based NGO Grassroots Leadership, which first reported the case, she was reportedly instructed not to share her location.
An immigration attorney tried to intervene but ICE agents reportedly said they could not locate the pair in the agency’s database, which some believe may have been a deliberate consequence of holding them in a hotel rather than a detention centre.
Kathleen Bush-Joseph, an analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, said: “The inability to locate people in the system, and the fact that lawyers cannot reach them to provide proper representation, is unfortunately happening more and more, and it directly undermines immigrants’ rights.”
ICE did not respond to a request for comment.
Gutiérrez’s next call to her family came days later after she and Génesis had landed in Honduras. Since then, the two have been staying with Gutiérrez’s mother. Because Génesis is a US citizen, Gutiérrez said she had taken the “painful” decision to send the girl back to the US soon, accompanied by another relative.
“She has her school there, her uncles, her cousins, her whole life, because she was born there and she doesn’t want to be here,” Gutiérrez said, adding that they had never been apart before. “The day I separate from my daughter will be the most painful of my life but I will do it for her future.”
She vowed not to give up on returning to the US to reunite with her daughter. “I will seek help, lawyers, everything. I will fight until God tells me ‘that’s enough, Karen’.”
Last May, also in Austin, a mother and her three children, two of whom were US citizens, were arrested by ICE agents and deported to Mexico.
On inauguration day, Trump signed an executive order seeking to end the 150-year-old policy of birthright citizenship, but judges across the US issued injunctions blocking it, saying it violated the constitution, federal law and supreme court precedent. The court is expected to hear the case this year.
The Migration Policy Institute estimates that of the 6.3 million children under the age of 18 living with at least one unauthorised immigrant parent in the US, 5.3 million are US citizens.
“Families are facing extremely difficult choices over whether or not to stay together,” Bush-Joseph said. She said that given Trump’s focus on mass deportations, “I do unfortunately anticipate that there will be more of these very difficult situations where parents are being deported and their children are either left behind or removed from the lives they knew in the US”.
