“I feel like I’m grieving my mother”

On Tuesday, now-former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem testified for hours in a Senate Judiciary Committee oversight hearing about her department’s immigration enforcement actions. At one point, Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois turned the questioning to the issue of DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the Obama-era program intended to shield from deportation undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children.

He pointed to a February DHS letter signed by Noem that disclosed the scope of the Trump administration’s targeting of DACA recipients: 261 arrested and 86 deported between January 1 and November 19, 2025. Sen. Durbin then highlighted the case of a 42-year-old mother with DACA who had lived in the United States for more than 25 years before being detained at her green card interview last month and deported to Mexico within 24 hours. “In tears, she hugged her daughter goodbye,” he said.

Sitting in the audience was the woman’s 22-year-old daughter Damaris Bello. When I met her after the hearing at a Latin American food hall in Union Market, she was still processing watching Noem dodge the question of why DHS had deported dozens of active DACA recipients like her mother, Maria de Jesus Estrada Juarez. “There’s no straight answers given by the Secretary,” Bello told me. “It feels like it’s purposely dismissed and gone over.”

Since its creation in 2012, DACA has allowed hundreds of thousands of young undocumented immigrants to live and work in the United States without being subject to deportation. DACA recipients have generally been spared from immigration enforcement—until now. In a betrayal of the program’s intent, the second Trump administration has publicly taken the position—not reflected in the existing regulation—that DACA no longer protects people from deportation and started detaining and removing beneficiaries with permission to be in the country.

The data DHS has reported to members of Congress on the number of DACA recipients who have been arrested and deported since January 2025 has been inconsistent. In a January letter in response to a request for information from Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-IL) and other lawmakers, the department stated that 270 DACA recipients had been arrested between January 1 and September 28, 2025—more than the 261 figure shared with the Senate. DHS claims most people arrested have criminal convictions or pending charges, even though DACA recipients have to undergo regular background checks to keep their status.

The letter also disclosed that 174 DACA applicants were deported during the same period. “None of these applicants had been granted protected status at the time of their removal,” the letter said. (Mother Jones has reached out to DHS for comment on the discrepancies.)

The events of February 18 are still fresh in Bello’s mind. That morning, she helped her mother get ready for what they had thought would be the final step in Estrada Juarez’s process of becoming a lawful permanent resident as the relative of a US citizen over the age of 21. “We definitely didn’t think that she wouldn’t be coming home that day,” Bello said. The duo, residents of Natomas in northwestern Sacramento, California, had even made plans to eat at Estrada Juarez’s favorite breakfast restaurant.

Mother and daughter went in for the scheduled 10:30 a.m. interview, prepared with all the documentation—tax forms, vaccination records—and evidence of the life Estrada Juarez, who worked as a regional manager for Motel 6 and has no criminal history, had built for herself in California for more than two decades. They were so confident about the strength of her case that they didn’t think to bring a lawyer. During the interview, Bello and Estrada Juarez told the US Citizenship and Immigration Services officer that Estrada Juarez had DACA status and that in 2014 she had been granted permission to travel to Mexico, which she did, and experienced no issues when returning to the US.

As they neared the end of the interview, the dynamic shifted. The USCIS officer gave Estrada Juarez a piece of paper stating her case couldn’t be completed, according to the Sacramento Bee. He explained that her record showed a previous removal order from when she first came to the United States in 1998 at the age of 15. Estrada Juarez said she didn’t know about the alleged removal order. (In a statement to the newspaper, then–DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin reportedly said Estrada Juarez had “illegally re-entered” the United States.)

Bello recalled that after a brief period of time, someone knocked on the interview room’s door and asked for Maria Estrada. When she answered, Bello said agents without uniform or name identification came in and said she was going to be detained and deported to Mexico. Before the officers could handcuff her, Estrada Juarez asked if she could hug her daughter one last time. She held Bello’s face and told her to be strong, that God would guide them to the right place.

“It was so sudden and unexpected,” Bello said. “It felt like she never really had a chance.”

After the officers took Estrada Juarez away, Bello called her mother’s boss and close family friend for help. The immigration officers had told her to go home and collect some clothes and diabetes medication. Once at the home they shared, she went upstairs and stared at her mother’s big closet. She packed some shirts, pants, underwear, socks, a toothbrush, and toothpaste. “I felt like I had a timer,” Bello said. “It was so horrible because I knew that I only had a certain amount of time where I could see my mom.”

Later, Bello said she was taken to what appeared to be a visitation room where she could talk to her mother through a glass window. She said Estrada Juarez had asked to see an immigration judge to fight her case and that she didn’t want to be deported. The next morning, Bello received a text from her mother, who had been sent to Mexico. “She says she’s fine,” Bello said, “but I know she’s devastated because her life is here.”

For Bello, an only child, returning alone to the house she had shared with her mother was heartbreaking. Everywhere she looked, she saw reminders of Estrada Juarez, including the makeup she had used that morning. In the fridge, Bello found the ingredients for the pupusas they were going to make the following weekend. “Now I just feel like I’m staring at a house,” she said. “It’s no longer a home. It’s like a broken home.”

As a nursing school student, Bello said she will have to move out because she can’t afford the rent or the electricity bill. Two weeks after her mother’s deportation, she has already started packing. “My whole life has to change because she’s not here,” she said. “I feel like I’m grieving my mother.” But Bello hasn’t given up hope yet. “I want to fight for my mom because I know what they did was illegal and it was unjust,” she added.

Speaking from Mexico in a press call with reporters on Thursday, Estrada Juarez expressed her wish to return to the United States. “In a single moment, nearly 30 years of my life were taken away from me,” she said. “My home, my work, my community. The place where my memories and my future were.” She said the greatest pain in this moment is losing time with her daughter. “My family should not have to be torn apart.”