When Maribis Beleño boarded the chartered deportation flight in El Paso, Texas, on August 8, 2025, she remembers frantically scanning the rows of seats. During her month in the detention facility, she says, she had reminded the guards and immigration officers—anyone who would listen—that if she was going to be deported, she couldn’t leave without her three young children, who had entered the United States with her.
“Each day, I gave them the address of my cousin who was looking after my children,” Maribis, 27, told me, through an interpreter. She says she’d write directions to the small apartment in Dallas on any scrap of paper she could find. “Each time the guards told me, ‘Don’t worry! When you are deported, your children will meet you at the airport.’”
She told me the immigration judge at her final hearing had told her the same thing.
But when she got to the airport, her children—who are 5, 10, and 12—weren’t there. And they weren’t on the plane, either.
