Days after her dad was handcuffed and dragged off his landscaping job site by masked federal agents in November, 9-year-old Danna was visibly out of sorts at school.
When one of her favorite teachers at Eliza Chappell Elementary School in Lincoln Square on the North Side picked up on her sad demeanor and asked what was wrong, Danna said her dad hadn’t been home.
“I was worried. What’s he doing?” Danna told the Chicago Sun-Times. “Is he sleeping good? Is he making friends?”
Her dad, Brayan Plata, was detained and held in federal custody for 20 days. He spent a few days at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Broadview before being transferred to a detention center in Michigan. A search for him in Cook County records shows no results for a criminal record.
During that time, Danna developed nervous ticks and grew irritable. She scratched and picked at her skin and was easily frustrated — new behaviors her mom, Ingrid Guanume, says she’d never seen before.
“She wasn’t like that,” Guanume says.
Since the start of Operation Midway Blitz in September, President Donald Trump’s aggressive deportation campaign in the Chicago area, federal agents have targeted immigrant communities for arrest, and in many instances tear-gassed protesters opposing their tactics. The toll on community members has been profound, with many experiencing heightened anxiety and panic attacks in the wake of the assaults on their neighborhoods.
One thing is also becoming clear: Family separations are leaving visible and lasting marks on kids.
Families like Danna’s tell the Sun-Times they saw immediate changes in their children when their parents were detained, ranging from physical changes to emotional outbursts.
Although their parents are back home for now, many children continue to wrestle with the lasting effects of the separation.
A tremendous challenge for children
When detainees are taken into custody, they leave behind full lives: jobs, homes, spouses and communities.
Plata and Guanume, who live in Albany Park, are asylum-seekers from Colombia who have lived in Chicago for about six years. Though parents at Danna’s school raised money to help her, Guanume says she struggled to balance caring for her three kids, staying afloat financially without her husband’s income and battling his deportation in the courts.
At the time, she was forced to think about how life without their father could shape her kids’ future.
How would they learn to trust that he wouldn’t disappear again? Would the emotional toll fade, or would the trauma stick with them as they grew older?
“Family separation is considered one of the biggest adversities that kids can experience,” according to Colleen Cicchetti, a pediatric psychologist at Lurie Children’s Hospital.
The severity of the impact on kids often depends on the level of trauma the child experienced during the separation — whether they witnessed it firsthand, were exposed to violence or felt a sudden loss of safety.
At least 2,800 people were arrested in Illinois in Operation Midway Blitz between mid-September and mid-October, primarily in the Chicago area, according to ICE data obtained by the Data Deportation Project and statements about Border Patrol arrests made by the Justice Department in court. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson says officers arrested 4,500 people in the Chicago area since Sept. 16, but the agency does not make arrest data publicly available to back up its claims.
The department did not answer how many of those detained had children.
“ICE does not separate families or deport U.S. citizens,” Tricia McLaughlin, the DHS assistant secretary for public affairs, said in a statement. “Parents are asked if they want to be removed with their children, or, if they would like, ICE will place the children with a safe person the parent designates. This is consistent with past administrations’ immigration enforcement.”
Eli Valentina Vaca, 5, looks up at a federal agent behind the gates of an ICE detention facility in Broadview after being taken into custody alongside her parents, Nancy Guamangate and Milton Javier Otto Manzano, Sept. 27.
Candace Dane Chambers/Sun-Times file
Even without data on parents detained, Sun-Times reporting shows many were taken into custody during Operation Midway Blitz while simply going about their daily lives, including a day care teacher headed to work and a family visiting Millennium Park. One dad who was detained, Ruben Torres Maldonado, left behind his 4-year-old son and 16-year-old daughter, Ofelia, who was undergoing treatment for a rare form of cancer. Her chemotherapy was paused after her doctors raised concerns about her physical and emotional well-being without her dad.
Andrea, a mother who lives in Rogers Park and declined to give her last name to protect her privacy, says she saw her 5- and 7-year-old sons flounder without their dad, Jesus, who was detained while delivering packages in November. The family fled Venezuela for the U.S. three years ago and is seeking asylum in Chicago.
Her younger son’s behavior has shifted since his dad was taken, Andrea says.
“He’s been wetting the bed, something he’d never done before,” Andrea said in Spanish. “He also wakes up in the middle of the night crying.”
Developmental regression can happen when a child’s sense of stability is disrupted, child psychologists say. Cicchetti says it’s common to see changes in a child’s sleep and eating habits, shifts in behavior or a return to behaviors typical in younger kids.
Diego Castro’s 7-year-old daughter also began having accidents and needed to be comforted repeatedly after he was detained while picking up an Uber passenger in October, according to her mom, who shares custody.
The girl’s mother, who declined to share her name for fear of jeopardizing her immigration status, says she received repeated calls from her daughter’s school after Castro’s arrest saying her daughter had wet her pants.
“She had never done that before,” the mother says. “She’s very sensitive. She cries or gets overwhelmed very easily.”
Castro was held in federal custody for 20 days. The girl’s mother says she never told her daughter that Castro had been detained. She did it to protect her, she says, and didn’t believe the 7-year-old would understand the situation. Still, the girl would often ask when Castro was coming home.
Since Castro was released from custody last month, his daughter has hardly wanted to leave his side.
“She just wants to be with him all the time,” the girl’s mother says.
Another change parents often see is an increase in aggressive behavior, including aggression toward siblings or difficulty following directions.
“For kids, confusion and sadness and worry, it’s hard sometimes for them to differentiate those things, and what it often comes out with is more anger,” Cicchetti says.
After Danna began developing nervous ticks, a school counselor helped her talk through her feelings and gave her fidget toys to help minimize the urge to pick at her skin, she said.
Her brother Dereck, a 4-year-old with autism, also struggled. He would throw himself against the floor and hit himself, Guanume says. Children with autism can be especially sensitive to unpredictable changes in their lives, and they can have trouble communicating their thoughts and feelings, according to child experts.
Dereck has been in therapy for years, and his parents worried his social and emotional progress could be erased by the disruption to his routine and the trauma of losing his dad.
Even Dominick, just a month old when his dad was detained, cried more and took longer to stop without the comfort of his dad’s presence, Guanume says.
Andrea, a mother who lives in Rogers Park, says she saw her 5- and 7-year-old sons flounder without their dad, Jesus, who was detained while delivering packages in November.
Anthony Vazquez/Sun-Times
Andrea’s 5-year-old son also has autism, and she tried to maintain normalcy as much as she could for his sake. But while Jesus was in custody, the family stayed with friends they met at a church group for migrants, and the sudden shift in routine was a lot to handle.
“It was a tremendous challenge for him to change his routine,” Andrea says. “The first couple of weeks he kept saying ‘this isn’t my house.’ He just wanted to go home. I’ve been doing my best to reassure him he’s safe here.”
Reunited but afraid
Though Plata, Castro and Jesus are with their families for now, that may not be permanent. And the parents say their kids face the nagging thought that immigration agents could snatch their family members at any time.
“The fear of separation is almost as powerful as the separation itself,” says Dana Rusch, a clinical psychologist and director of the Immigrant Family Mental Health Advocacy Program at the Institute for Juvenile Research.
Child experts say children may recover more quickly if they are reunited with their family and have not experienced other major disruptions in their lives. However, when children are constantly exposed to environments where the threat of family separation exists, such as the deportation campaign in the Chicago area, it can cause chronic stress and anxiety.
“In moments like these, people might have a lot of ‘what if’ questions, but these children’s ‘what ifs’ are magnified a thousand times, because they can’t control the outcome,” Rusch said.
Castro and his daughter’s mother are in Chicago awaiting the outcome of an asylum case after fleeing Venezuela eight years ago. Now, their future is uncertain, and the girl’s mother says it may be time for her and Castro to sit down and discuss what happens if a judge orders his deportation.
Meanwhile, Andrea worries her sons will grow fearful of law enforcement.
“I’m worried that this has left them traumatized, and they’ll be afraid of the police because they say it was the police who took their father away,” she says. “In their mind they don’t know how to differentiate police from ICE.”
Here, child psychologists say communication is key.
While a parent’s instinct may be to avoid discussing the separation to protect their children, it’s important that they do, psychologists say. They recommend that parents talk about the situation in a way that is appropriate for the child’s age and level of understanding.
“Children look to parents and caregivers and adults to help them make sense of the world around them,” Rusch says.
Experts also say it’s up to the parent or caregiver to help reestablish a sense of safety in a child’s life, which may include seeking support for themselves.
“My hope is that the adults will allow themselves the grace to kind of think about what they’ve been through, to reestablish their sense of safety, and then, as they’re doing that, hopefully their children will feel safer too,” Cicchetti says.
4-year-old Dereck Plata plays with a tablet in his Albany Park apartment, Saturday, Dec. 6, 2025. Dereck has autism and struggled behaviorally when his father, Brayan Plata, was held in federal custody for weeks after being detained by ICE in November.
Candace Dane Chambers/Sun-Times
Guanume and Plata are now grappling with how to approach the possibility of deportation with their kids as Plata’s case works its way through the courts. If he’s deported, the couple has decided that the family will stay together and go back to Colombia.
“Despite what happened to us, even though we are not criminals and did things the right way, I want my kids to know that this isn’t a bad country,” Guanume says. “It’s just that there are laws and people in positions of authority who take advantage of us.”