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A 6-year-old Ecuadorian girl and her mother who had been living in Queens, New York, and were detained after a routine immigration hearing earlier this month have been deported.
Dayra is one of at least four New York City public school students to be detained by ICE this year. She’s also believed to be the youngest the agency has detained in the five boroughs.
The fate of the girl’s teenage brother, who had been with them and was separated when federal agents took the family, is expected to be the same, federal officials confirmed Wednesday. He had been held at a detention center in New Jersey, nearly 2,000 miles from where his mother and sister were sent for holding in Texas.
Assemblymember Catalina Cruz confirmed the deportation with congressional liaisons in Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez’s office. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul also confirmed the deportation in a message posted to social media.
Hochul called Jackson Heights, a neighborhood in Queens, where the 6-year-old lived and went to school, the only home the child had ever known. She won’t return there.
“Instead, today, they were sent on a plane to a country — to a foreign country, for this little girl,” Hochul said in her post Tuesday night. “This is cruel, and I say to those who did this, ‘Where is your humanity?’”
Six-year-old Dayra is a student at PS 89, the Jose Peralta School of Dreamers in Queens. She had been preparing to return there in the fall.
Councilmember Shekar Krishnan, a Democrat representing Jackson Heights, says the family showed up to 26 Federal Plaza on Aug. 12 for a scheduled immigrant check-in. Krishnan says they were detained at the hearing.
“Family separation is cruel it is unnecessary it is not making our community safer. What it is doing is spreading horror and terror in neighborhoods like my own in Jackson Heights and Elmhurst,” he said.
A spokesperson for NYC Schools shared the following statement:
“When we hear about a family that is being detained, we have – with their permission – connected them with community and agency partners who can offer legal support and other resources.”
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said Dayra, her mother Martha and her older brother all entered the country “illegally” in December 2022.
“They have all received final orders of removal from an immigration judge,” the spokesperson said.
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Melissa Colorado
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