This story was produced by The 19th and reprinted with permission.
The mother was just arriving to pick up her girls at their elementary school in Chicago when someone with a bullhorn at the nearby shopping center let everyone know: ICE is here.
The white van screeched to a halt right next to where she was parked, and three Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents piled out. They said something in English that she couldn’t decipher, then arrested her on the spot. Her family later said they never asked about her documentation.
She was only able to get one phone call out before she was taken away. “The girls,” was all she said to her sister. Her daughters, a third grader and a fourth grader, were still waiting for her inside the school.
Luckily, the girls’ child care provider had prepared for this very moment.
Sandra had been taking care of the girls since they were babies, and now watched them after school. She’d been encouraging the family to get American passports for the kids and signed documents detailing their wishes should the mother be detained.
When Sandra got the call that day in September, she headed straight to the school to pick up the girls.
Since President Donald Trump won a second term, Sandra has been prepping the 10 families at her home-based day care, including some who lack permanent legal status, for the possibility that they may be detained. (The 19th is only using Sandra’s first name and not naming the mother to protect their identities.)
She’s worked with families to get temporary guardianship papers sorted and put a plan in place in case they were detained and their kids were left behind. She even had a psychologist come and speak to the families about the events that had been unfolding across the country to help the children understand that there are certain situations their parents can’t control, and give them the opportunity to talk through their fears that, one day, mamá and papá might not be there to pick them up.
And for two elementary school kids, that day did come. Sandra met them outside the school.
“When they saw me, they knew something wasn’t right,” Sandra said in Spanish. “Are we never going to see our mom again?” they asked.
For all her planning, she was speechless.
“One prepares for these things, but still doesn’t have the words on what to say,” Sandra said.
Related: Young children have unique needs and providing the right care can be a challenge. Our free early childhood education newsletter tracks the issues.
After that day, Sandra worked with the mother’s sister to get the girls situated to fly to Texas, where their mother, who had full custody of them, was being detained, and then eventually to Mexico. She hasn’t heard from them in over a month. The girls were born in the United States and know nothing of Mexico.
“I think about them in a strange country,” Sandra said. “‘Who is going to care for them like I do?’ Now with this situation I get sad because I think they are the ones who are going to suffer.”
In this year of immigration raids, child care providers have stepped up to keep families unified amid incredible uncertainty. Some are agreeing to be temporary guardians for kids should something happen to their parents. The workers themselves are also under threat — 1 in 5 child care workers are immigrant women, most of them Latinas, who are also having to prepare in case they are detained, particularly while children are in their care. Already, child care workers across the country have been detained and deported.
“The immigration and the child care movements, they are one in the same now,” said Anali Alegria, the director of federal advocacy and media relations at the Child Care for Every Family Network, a national child care advocacy group. “Child care is not just something that keeps the economy going, while it does. It’s also really integral to people’s community and family lives. And so when you’re destabilizing it, you’re also destabilizing something much more fundamental and very tender to that child and that family’s life.”
A loose network of resistance has emerged, with detailed protection plans, ICE lookout patrols, and Signal or Whatsapp chats. Home-based providers like Sandra have been especially involved in that effort because their work often means their lives are even more intertwined with the families they care for.
“All the families we have in our program, I consider them family. We arrive in this country and we don’t have family, and when we get support, advice or the simple act of caring for kids, as child care providers we are essential in many of these families — even more in these times,” said Sandra, who has been caring for children in the United States for 25 years. All the families she cares for are Latinx, 70 percent without permanent legal status.
Related: 1 in 5 child care workers is an immigrant. Trump’s deportations and raids have many terrified
According to advocacy groups, child care providers are increasingly being asked to look after kids in case they are detained, typically because they are the only trusted person the family knows with U.S. citizenship or legal permanent residence. Parents are asking child care workers to be emergency contacts, short-term guardians and, in some cases, even long-term guardians.
“We heard this under the first Trump administration, and we’re hearing it much more now. It’s not so much a matter of if, but when, right now, and it used to be the other way around,” said Wendy Cervantes, the director of immigration and immigrant families at the Center for Law and Social Policy, an anti-poverty nonprofit. “It adds just additional stress and trauma because they deeply care about these kids. Many of them have kids of their own and obviously have modest incomes, so as much as they want to say, ‘yes’, they can’t in some cases.”
The question was posed to Claudia Pellecer a couple weeks ago. A home-based child care provider in Chicago for 17 years, Pellecer cares for numerous Latinx families, at least one of whom doesn’t have permanent legal status.
In October, one of those moms was due to appear before ICE for a regular check-in as part of her ongoing asylum case. But she knew that many have been detained at those appointments this year.
The mother asked Pellecer to be her 1-year-old son’s legal guardian should she be taken away.
“I couldn’t say no because I am human, I am a mother,” Pellecer said.
They got to work getting the baby a passport and filling out the necessary guardianship paperwork. Pellecer kept the originals and copies. The mother closed her bank account, cleaned out her apartment and prepped two bags, one for her and one for the baby. If the mother was deported, Pellecer would fly with him to meet her in Ecuador, they agreed.
The day of the appointment, she dropped the baby off with Pellecer and set the final plan. Her appointment was at 1 p.m. “If at 6 p.m. you haven’t heard from me, that means I was detained,” she told Pellecer, who cried and wished her luck.
At the appointment, the judge asked her three sets of questions:
“Why are you here?”
“Are you working? Do you have a family?”
“Do you have proof of what happened to you in your country?”
Related: Child care centers were off limit to immigration authorities. How that’s changed
The judge agreed to let her stay and told her to continue working. The mother won’t have a court date again until 2027.
“We learned our lesson,” Pellecer said. “We had to prepare for the worst and hope for the best.”
But their relief was short-lived. Recent events in Chicago have sent child care workers and families into panic, as the people who have tried to keep families together are now being targeted.
Resistance networks have sprung up rapidly in Chicago in recent weeks after a child care worker was followed to Spanish immersion day care Rayito de Sol on the city’s North Side and arrested in front of children and other teachers. The arrest was caught on camera and has sparked demonstrations across the city.
Erin Horetski, whose son, Harrison, was cared for by the worker who was arrested at Rayito de Sol in early November, said parents there had been worried ICE might one day target them because the center specifically hired Spanish-speaking staff.
The morning of the arrest, parents were texting each other once they heard ICE was in the shopping center where the day care is located.
Her husband was just arriving to drop off their boys as ICE was leaving. The first thing out of his mouth when he called her: “They took Miss Diana.”
Agents entered the school without a warrant to arrest infant class teacher Diana Patricia Santillana Galeano, an immigrant from Colombia. DHS said part of the reason for her arrest was because she helped bring her two teenage children across the southern U.S. border this year. “Facilitating human smuggling is a crime,” DHS said. Santillana Galeano fled Colombia fearing for her safety in 2023, filed for asylum and was given a work permit through November 2029, according to court documents. She has no known criminal record. After her arrest, a federal judge ruled that her detention without access to a bond hearing was illegal and she was released November 12.
Horetski said the incident, the first known ICE arrest inside a day care, has spurred the community to action. A GoFundMe account set up by Horetski to support Santillana Galeano, has raised more than $150,000.
Horetski said what’s been lost in the story of what happened at Rayito is the humanity of the person at the center of it, someone she said was “like a second mother” to her son.
“At the end of the day, she was a person and a friend and a mother and provider to our kids — I think we need to remember that,” Horetski said.
Related: They crossed the border for better schools. Now, some families are leaving the US
Now, the parents are the ones coming together to put in place a safety plan for the teachers, most of whom have continued to come to the school and care for their children.
They are working on establishing a safe passage patrol, setting up parents with whistles at the front of the school to stand guard during arrival and dismissal time to ensure teachers can come and go to their cars or to public transit safely. Parents are also establishing escorts for teachers who may need a ride to work or someone to accompany them on the bus or the train. A meal train set up by the parents is helping to send food to the teachers through Thanksgiving, and two local restaurants have pitched in with discounts. Some of the parents are also lawyers who are considering setting up a legal clinic to ensure workers know their rights, Horetski said.
Figuring out how to come together to support teachers and the children who now have questions about safety is something that “continues to circle in all of our minds and brains,” Horeski said. “It’s hard to not have the answers or know how to best move forward. We’re in such uncharted territory that you’re like, ‘Where do you go from here?’ So we’re kind of paving that because this is the first time that something like this has happened.”
Prep is top of mind now for organizers including at the Service Employees International Union, where Sandra and Pellecer are members, who are convening emergency child care worker trainings to set up procedures, such as posted signs that say ICE cannot enter without a warrant, showing them what the warrants must include to be binding, helping them set a designated person to speak to ICE should they enter and talking to their families to offer support.
Cervantes has been doing this work since Trump’s first term, when it was clear immigration was going to be a key focus for the president. This year has been different, though. Child care centers were previously protected under a “sensitive locations” directive that advised ICE to not conduct enforcement in places like schools and day cares. But Trump removed that protection on his first day in office this year, signaling a more aggressive approach to ICE enforcement was coming.
Cervantes and her team are currently in the midst of a research project about child care workers across the country, conversations that are also illuminating for them just how dire the situation has become for providers.
“We are asking providers to make protocols for what is basically a man-made disaster,” she said. “They shouldn’t have to worry about protecting children and staff from the government.”
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