MS NOW97%
The Trump administration is deporting ‘Dreamers.’ Their kids are paying for it. 34%
By Laura Barrón-López79%
6/17/2026, 2:00:00 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 32 faulty reasoning types, including Appeal to Emotion, Anecdotal, and Confirmation Bias, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 48.5% saturation with 432 hits. Analysis detected 1,933 faulty-reasoning hits from 890 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 38% and a BS Rank of 34% (15,851 of 23,848 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 66.50% of the article peer group.
Jessica Treviño Villegas’ protected status as a “Dreamer” doesn’t expire until spring 2027.
But earlier this year, U.S.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported her anyway, sending her to Mexico and separating her from her three children, all of whom are U.S. citizens.
Treviño, 34, has lived in Alamo, Texas, since she was 7.
She worked in an elementary school cafeteria and held protected status under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA.
She thought she was safe.
She said she “never thought” ICE would come for her.
The officers came when the family was on its way to church.
Last December, ICE agents had been following the family and rammed its car after Treviño’s husband, Juan, pulled into a Home Depot parking lot in Alamo, Treviño said.
The agents struck Juan with a baton even as he raised his hands, she said, and shoved their 14-year-old daughter, Sarah, against the car hard enough to bruise her.
“They treated us like criminals when we are not,” Treviño told MS NOW in an interview from Matamoros, Mexico, where she is now living.
Sharing the story of her deportation for the first time, she told MS NOW that being separated from her three children “truly hurts.”
“They need me,” Treviño said of her children.
“It’s very painful for them, because they look at other families who have their parents, and unfortunately they don’t have their parents right now.
Like, my youngest daughter just had her [seventh grade] graduation and I couldn’t be there with her.”
As the Trump administration presses its deportation campaign, immigration attorneys and DACA recipients say the government is increasingly detaining people who hold protected or legal status and have no criminal record.
Lawyers say the administration is slow-walking DACA renewals, then moving to detain recipients once their status lapses.
Treviño’s status had not lapsed.
And though an immigration judge issued a voluntary departure order for her in February 2026, that decision didn’t make Treviño deportable, argues Stacy Tolchin, Treviño’s attorney.
“You cannot physically deport or send anybody with DACA outside of the United States,” Tolchin said.
The Department of Homeland Security has taken the opposite view.
When asked about similar cases this year, DHS told MS NOW that DACA recipients “may be subject to arrest and deportation for a number of reasons,” and that “DACA does NOT confer any form of legal status in this country.”
Federal courts, however, have held that the program shields recipients from detention and removal while their status is active, and judges have recently ordered the release or return of several DACA recipients.
DHS did not respond to questions about Treviño’s case or her family’s account of her arrest and deportation.
After her arrest in December, Treviño spent roughly three months in a Texas detention facility where, she said, detainees sometimes went days without receiving drinking water and guards accused them of faking illness.
Treviño decided to share her story when she saw that ICE returned another “Dreamer,” José Contreras Diaz, to the U.S. months after the Trump administration deported him.
Tolchin is now demanding that DHS follow suit with Treviño, arguing in a letter that the department removed her client unlawfully, and pointing to a recent ruling by a federal judge in California ordering the return of Maria Estrada Juárez, another DACA recipient Tolchin represents.
“There’s so many levels of emotional harm,” Tolchin said of clients like Treviño.
“How will this impact U.S.-citizen kids in the future?
Will they trust the government?”
Back in Alamo, Treviño’s 16-year-old son, Santiago, took a job at a fast food drive-in to help pay the bills.
Sarah, the middle child, who was in the car when her parents were arrested, is receiving therapy through her school.
During the arrest, Sarah said, an ICE agent “hit me against the car” and one screamed at her younger sister.
“I was crying, saying that ‘why, why were they doing this?’”
she said.
“My parents don’t have a bad background, they never, like, had any criminal records.”
“Every night, I would wake up in the middle of night crying,” Sarah told MS NOW through tears, recalling the days after immigration agents took her mother.
“It was just really wrong and bad, because it wasn’t fair.
My parents didn’t do anything, and they still took them.”
Sarah and her siblings are still in Alamo, living with a relative and struggling to pay the bills.
Sarah’s father, who is undocumented, was deported as well and is in Mexico with her mother.
The kids visit on weekends, carrying their birth certificates when they cross the border.
But in the U.S., she described life without her parents as “super lonely” and cried as she recalled her parents missing her school events — especially her completion of a military camp through her school’s Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps program, known as JROTC.
Despite her mother’s deportation, Sarah said she’s still considering enlisting in the U.S. military after high school, and she remains active in her JROTC’s honor guard and drill team.
Sarah isn’t mad at the country, she said.
She’s “more mad at the president.”
“Why is he just separating families, like, is that what he likes to see?
Does that make him, like, happy?”
Kayla McCormick contributed to this report.
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