ICE detains mother of US citizen baby in Florida crackdown

Florida mother detained by ICE, leaving her US-born baby in strangers' care

The baby needed somewhere to go. So in the frantic hours before officers took her parents away to immigration detention, her mom turned to their pastor and his wife. As squad cars waited outside the family's Lakeland, Florida, trailer home, she gave them a crash course in how to care for the 4-month-old.

Briany, with her plump cheeks and full head of dark hair, wasn't normally this fussy. But it was late that January night - around midnight - and she was still hungry. Her mom, Doris Flores, had tried nursing her to calm her down. It didn't work. When she brought Briany to her breast, the milk wouldn't come. Flores thought it had to do with the panic that set in after the officers arrested the baby's father and told her she was next.

The baby also drank formula. The pastor and his wife, who'd never had children of their own, should take her bottles and the yellow cans of formula, too, and follow the instructions on the label. They should use distilled water, never from the tap. Briany drank 5 ounces at each feeding. She needed to eat every two to two-and-a-half hours.

She was almost due for her next round of vaccinations. She was getting big enough for Size 3 diapers. What made her happiest was to be held in someone's arms.

The Rev. Israel Vázquez, 58, soft-spoken with close-cropped hair, had held Briany before, when he formally presented the baby to God in a ceremony at his Pentecostal church in Lakeland. If he and his wife, a fellow pastor at the church, didn't take the girls in, they would have to go into foster care. "What else could we do?" he said.

The baby's half-sister would be easier for the older couple to take care of. Eight-year-old Briana was quiet and humble. She preferred speaking in English rather than Spanish. Her favorite color was blue.

Deputies from the Polk County Sheriff's Office helped load a baby stroller and bouncy swing into the couple's car. Then the officers, employed by one of the hundreds of Florida agencies carrying out immigration enforcement for the Trump administration, handcuffed a sobbing Flores.

Incidents like this, involving the arrest and detention of immigrant parents with American citizen children, occurred twice as often after President Donald Trump returned to office, according to an analysis of a new nationwide Immigration and Customs Enforcement dataset shared exclusively with ProPublica. In the first seven months of his second term, authorities arrested and detained parents of at least 11,000 U.S. citizen children - a number that, if the pace held up, will have roughly doubled by now. That's an average of more than 50 U.S. citizen kids a day with a parent pulled into detention.

The data underlying this analysis was obtained by the University of Washington Center for Human Rights as part of an ongoing public records lawsuit. It covers the last three years of the Joe Biden administration and the Trump administration until mid-August 2025.

The differences between the fates of detained immigrant parents under the two presidents are stark, our analysis shows. The impact on mothers is particularly pronounced. Trump is deporting about four times as many moms of U.S. citizen children per day as Biden did.

Immigration authorities are arresting more of these moms in the first place, but that doesn't account for all of the surge in deportations. If arrested, they are seldom allowed to return home to their families anymore. About 30% of such arrests under Biden resulted in a deportation. Under Trump, almost 60% resulted in a deportation.

Compared with the Biden administration, Trump officials are detaining many more parents with only minor criminal histories or none at all. Under Trump, more than half of the detained fathers of American citizen kids, and about three quarters of the mothers, had no criminal convictions in the United States except for traffic- or immigration-related offenses.

Current and former officials from the Department of Homeland Security said such separations are not necessarily a violation of policy. Instead, guidelines on the way officers should exercise discretion have changed. Among the changes: A document once known as the Parental Interests Directive has been given a new name under Trump - the Detained Parents Directive. And its preamble, which once instructed agents to handle immigrant parents in a way that was 'humane,' has been stripped of the word.

John Sandweg, who oversaw ICE when the original directive was adopted under President Barack Obama, said, "Back then, we were operating from a lens that family unity is everything." Tom Homan, then a top ICE official and now Trump's border czar, introduced the directive to field offices around the country. If agents encountered parents, the directive would help them enforce immigration laws without 'unnecessarily undermining their parental rights,' according to his August 2013 talking points, which were obtained by ProPublica.

Now, Sandweg and the other former officials said, the second Trump administration has put aggressive enforcement goals like arresting 3,000 immigrants a day above concerns about the harms of hastily separating children from their parents.

ProPublica sent detailed questions about our findings to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE. DHS Acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis said in an emailed statement that the agency 'cannot verify the veracity of the data' that ProPublica analyzed. (We validated the data, which the agency provided via Freedom of Information Act requests, and our approach with outside experts.) Bis also said in the statement, "ICE does not separate families."

Immigrant parents can choose to leave the country with their children or to designate someone to care for them, Bis said, which 'is consistent with past administration's policies.' The revised directive 'simply standardizes the required forms.' She added that 'under President Trump, ICE will not ignore the rule of law.'

A White House spokesperson wrote in a statement that those in the country illegally 'who wish to avoid the deportation process should self-deport.'