This story was reported in partnership with Belly of the Beast
A woman deported to Cuba says Immigration and Customs Enforcement forcibly separated her from her infant daughter, who has a medical condition and was being breastfed.
Heidy Sanchez Tejeda came to the U.S. in 2019 from Cuba as an undocumented immigrant and settled in Florida. ICE permitted her to stay in the country on the condition that she check in annually with immigration officials. She found work in Tampa and married a U.S. citizen. Together, she and her husband had a baby girl whom Sanchez Tejeda was nursing. She brought her baby to what she thought would be another routine ICE appointment on April 22.
Instead, an officer informed her she was no longer authorized to remain in the U.S. and would be detained and deported within 48 hours.
“I said, but why? And he said that decision has already been made,” said Sanchez Tejeda in an interview with Scripps News and Belly of the Beast, an American media outlet that covers Cuba. “He saw my phone, that I have a picture of my daughter, her dad and me, and he said to me, 'Ah, she has a family photo, call the dad and let him come and get the baby.'”
The separation of immigrant families created backlash for the first Trump administration. Trump border czar Tom Homan says now they are keeping families together by giving deportees the option of bringing their children when expelled.
“When a parent says I want my 2-year-old baby to go with me, we made that happen,” Homan said.
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But Sanchez Tejeda says ICE did not give her any choice in what would happen to her baby and instead, ordered the girl to stay behind in Florida with her father.
“My husband heard me screaming from outside of the room, ‘Please don’t take her away,’” Sanchez Tejeda said.
Two days later, Sanchez Tejeda was flown in handcuffs to Cuba.
The only way for Sanchez Tejeda to see her husband and daughter is through video calls.
“Now she's always like, 'Mom, come. Mom, come.' When I talk to her, she only says, 'Mom, come,” Sanchez Tejeda said. “She looks for me all over the house. I had to record my voice with songs to sleep because she can’t sleep. She’s awake until late hours at night. They don’t know what they’re going to do with her.”
Homan has said undocumented immigrants who give birth to children in the U.S. are responsible for their own fate.
“If you choose to have a U.S. citizen child knowing you’re in this country illegally, you put yourself in that position, you put your family in that position,” Homan said.
Sanchez Tejeda’s attorney Claudia Canizares is now fighting to bring her back to the states on a humanitarian visa to reunite with her husband and baby, who she says suffers from seizures.
“Most likely whatever medical treatment she is going to need, Cuba will not be able to provide it,” Canizares said. “Unfortunately, we're seeing a lot of people that have been separated. We're going to traumatize children. We're going to traumatize a U.S. citizen husband and a mother. We are creating chaos.”
ICE did not respond to questions about Sanchez Tejeda’s deportation.
