In Trump’s Crackdown on Immigrants, Cuban Mother Is Separated From Her Infant Daughter

HAVANA, Cuba — Heidy Sánchez lived in Florida for five years after immigrating from Cuba. She worked in Tampa as a nursing assistant, paid her taxes and had no criminal record.

None of this would stop her world from being torn to pieces. On April 22, Heidy was detained while attending a routine check-in at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) offices in Tampa. She was separated from Kailyn, her 17-month-old, U.S.-born daughter whom she was still nursing.

“My husband said he heard my screams from the other side of the door. ‘Please don't take her away! Please!'” said Heidy, her voice breaking.

Two days later, Heidy was deported.

The separation was abrupt. She wasn’t allowed to pack any clothes or other belongings or say goodbye to her family. Her purse was left in her husband’s car.

Two weeks later, Heidy is back in Cuba, desperately hoping she will somehow be reunited with her daughter.

“My life is there in Tampa,” she said. “I breathe for that little girl in Tampa. I have nothing here.”

"SHE WAS MY MIRACLE"

Kailyn is Heidy's only child.

Heidy and her husband Carlos went through a long fertility treatment before finally giving birth to Kailyn.

“She was my miracle,” Heidy said through tears. “She was the child we had longed for.”

Heidy and Kailyn were inseparable.

"I woke up each day to take care of my baby girl," said Heidy. "She’d wait for me to breastfeed her, bathe her, take care of her. All my attention was focused on her."

Heidy says that since she was deported, her husband has struggled to get Kailyn to eat. Kailyn looks for her all over the house, grabs her shoes, and keeps asking where her mother is.

"She's awake until the middle of the night," she said. “I had to record myself singing lullabies to get her to sleep."

Heidy describes Kailyn as an active, happy, and playful child. However, she is undergoing treatment for epileptic seizures.

“Just yesterday she had a scan, and I’m not there,” said Heidy. “They say that she shouted: ‘Mom mom, mom!’ for me to defend her, to hold her, to support her.”

FAMILIES RIPPED APART

Immigrant families have been ripped apart by the Trump administration’s deportation policy. Trump officials have said that immigrants who are detained can decide whether to take their U.S.-born children with them when they are deported.

“That’s up to their family to decide where the children go,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently ​told NBC​.

But Heidy said she was given no choice: “The [ICE] officer saw my phone, which had a photo of my daughter, her father and me. He said: ‘Oh, she has a family photo. Call the father and have him come and get her.'"

Heidy is not the only immigrant who has been unwillingly separated from their children since Trump assumed office.

“There's a Venezuelan mom who was deported to Venezuela and the child was left here in foster care,” said Claudia Cañizares, Heidy’s lawyer. “In the same flight that we had Heidy, there was actually one of our clients that was a dad. He was the main provider of his family and he was removed to Cuba."

Heidy immigrated to the U.S. in 2019 through the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), an immigration program implemented by Trump. Also known as the “Remain in Mexico” program, the MPP allowed certain non-Mexican individuals to request asylum at the southern U.S. border. They would be given a date for a future hearing in the United States and then sent back to Mexico, where they would have to wait for weeks or months.

Heidy said she couldn’t attend the hearing because she feared for her life.

“People [trying to cross the border] were being kidnapped, were being robbed over the documents and they would lose them,” said Cañizares. “We kept pleading for the program to be cancelled because of this, because people could not show up to the hearings…Heidy was one of those people.”

When Heidy was finally able to cross the border, she was detained because she had missed the hearing. She spent nine months in detention centers before being released. She was allowed to stay in the United States as long as she attended regular check-ins at ICE offices.

“They would give me an appointment for another date, within six months, or a year, and everything stayed the same,” she said. “I could go on with my normal life, and go to my appointments with ICE, and that's what I did.”

Heidy says she became apprehensive after Trump's election.

"When he said he was going to do mass deportations, you always tense up 

a little bit, and say, 'Wow, I could be on that list, it could happen to me,'" she said. "We always had the fear that it could happen. And it did."

CUBANS NO LONGER THE EXCEPTION

During his first term, Trump adopted a “zero tolerance” policy toward undocumented immigrants, which led to children being stripped from their parents at the U.S. border. 

Cuban immigrants, who had long enjoyed a relatively privileged status compared to people coming from other countries, were largely exempt from Trump’s crackdown.

That may be changing.

Heidy was one of 82 Cubans deported in handcuffs to Havana last month. Other Cuban immigrants report being detained while attending regular check-in interviews at ICE offices.

Cañizares said that she hopes that Heidy’s case will create more awareness of the suffering caused by the Trump administration’s migration policies.

“We want the public to turn out to bring awareness about what is going on currently in the U.S.," she said.