Whenever someone opens the door of a basement apartment in Brentwood, some of Nuvia Martinez Ventura’s five children rush to it, thinking she is finally coming home and walking in.
But she never does.
Martinez Ventura, 30, has been sitting in an immigration jail in Texas some 1,700 miles from home for more than a month. The Salvadoran immigrant is one of thousands of people caught up in President Donald Trump’s push to carry out the largest mass deportation campaign in U.S. history.
The campaign, which Trump says is targeting dangerous criminals, also is sweeping up many people with no criminal records and tearing apart families, according to advocates and immigration lawyers.
WHAT NEWSDAY FOUNDPresident Donald Trump says his push to carry out the largest mass deportation campaign in U.S. history is targeting dangerous criminals.Immigration advocates and lawyers say it is also sweeping up many people with no criminal records and tearing apart families.Children’s separation from their parents is causing trauma that may impact the children for decades, according to mental health experts. “I think we’re setting ourselves up to have a generation of traumatized children and adults,” one expert said.
The separation of parents from their children is causing widespread trauma that may impact the children for decades, mental health experts said.
Nuvia Martinez Ventura, 30, has been sitting in an immigration jail in Texas, 1,700 miles from her Brentwood home, for more than a month. Credit: Courtesy of Family
“I’m horrified,” said Miriam Denmark, a Colorado-based licensed clinical social worker who has treated immigrant children separated from their families. “I think we’re setting ourselves up to have a generation of traumatized children and adults.”
Cheryl Keshner, of the Long Island Immigrant Justice Alliance, says the roundups are “just tearing our communities apart. These are families that are just trying to survive, to move forward, to make a better life.”
Martinez Ventura, a single mother, was arrested on June 11 after she showed up for what she thought was a routine check-in at immigration offices in Manhattan. She was transferred to Houston and has been waiting there to learn her fate.
Phone calls from jail
Her 10-year-old daughter is waiting, too. She bought roses to welcome her mother back, thinking it would be soon. But the roses died and now the girl is saving money to buy a fresh bouquet.
“Since they took my mom I feel sad,” the girl said during an interview at the office of her mother’s attorney in East Islip. “I miss my mom.”
Later that afternoon, she got on the phone with her mother, who called from the jail.
“When are you coming home?” the girl said in Spanish.
“I don’t know,” Martinez Ventura answered.
“I miss you,” the girl said. “I want you to come home already. I want to be with you.”
“I want to be with you guys as well,” Martinez Ventura said. “I miss you guys so much.”
In an interview outside the girl’s presence, Martinez Ventura said, “This sadness is killing me.”
“I miss them a lot. There are days that I cry all day because the anxiety is killing me, the anxiety of not knowing” when she will come back to Long Island, if ever, she said.
“I’m not asking for anything else but to be with my kids because I haven’t done anything,” she said. “I haven’t committed any crime. I’m not a criminal.”
Immigration lawyer Ala Amoachi speaks to Nuvia Martinez Ventura, mother of five arrested by ICE and being held in Houston, by phone in Brentwood on Wednesday. Credit: Newsday/Steve Pfost
Martinez Ventura fled El Salvador a decade ago after gangs killed her husband, according to Ala Amoachi, her attorney. She has been seeking political asylum and has no criminal record — her being here without authorization is a civil offense, Amoachi said.
Three of her children, ages 3, 4 and 7, were born in the United States and are citizens, Amoachi said. The other two, ages 10 and 11, have a special immigrant legal status because they are juveniles and their father was killed, Amoachi said.
In Martinez Ventura’s absence, the children’s grandparents are caring for them mainly, and Martinez Ventura’s sister, Maria, is pitching in. But it is a struggle, the family said. Two of the children are autistic. The 11-year-old has Type 1 diabetes and landed in the hospital after Martinez Ventura’s detention because she was the one managing his medications.
‘Miss their mother a lot’
“It’s affected them because for them, she was both the mother and the father,” the grandmother, who like other relatives did not want her name used because of her immigration status, said in Spanish. “They need the support from their mother. You can see that they miss their mother a lot.”
She said she didn’t know what to tell the youngest children when they asked where their mother was and when was she coming back. Only the oldest children know she is being held by immigration authorities.
“I tell them she is coming soon, God willing,” the grandmother said.
When a Newsday reporter walked into their apartment last week, the 7-year-old immediately said, “Why did she move to Texas? She didn’t do anything wrong.”
The day Martinez Ventura was arrested, the grandparents picked up some of the children at school because their mother was being held. The grandparents were both crying but didn’t tell the 10-year-old girl why.
She kept asking where her mother was, and a week later they finally told her.
Martinez Ventura tries to call her children every day, but “sometimes she just gets into a depression, and she doesn’t feel like calling,” her sister said in Spanish. “I say call us to at least let us know you are OK.”
“It’s already been a month they haven’t been with their mother,” she said. “It feels like it’s been an eternity, especially for them.”
Expert: Long-term fallout
The immigration crackdown has escalated since late May, when Stephen Miller, a White House deputy chief of staff, said the administration wanted to increase daily arrests from about 600 to at least 3,000 a day.
Trump contends illegal immigration is out of control and that he is making the country safer by deporting murderers, drug dealers and other dangerous criminals. Advocates say the only offense most people arrested in the sweeps have committed is entering the country without documentation, and that they are mostly landscapers, restaurant dishwashers, factory workers and the like.
Denmark, who specializes in trauma and family relationships, said children separated from their parents in a traumatic way are likely to be permanently scarred. Researchers have documented the impact of family separations throughout history, including during slavery and the Holocaust, she said.
Separated children typically have higher rates of addiction and abusive relationships as adults and end up in prison more often than the norm, she said.
“Traumatized people have a really hard time having stable relationships. They have a really hard time parenting. They’re going to have very, very difficult lives,” she said. “And we’re all going to pay the price for that.”
In Mastic, a native of Ecuador who did not want to be identified out of fear of retribution due to her immigration status, said she was riding on a public bus with her 6-year-old autistic daughter the day her husband called in early June to say he’d been arrested by ICE. She burst into tears.
“He told us they were taking him and to take care of ourselves and that he loved us a lot,” she said in Spanish.
He was arrested at his soldering job in East Hampton, she said. The family had been checking in regularly with ICE as they sought to legalize their status, she said.
Now, she waits for him to call their four children from immigration jail in Houston.
“Every day when they speak with their dad they cry,” she said.
The 6-year-old cries constantly and calls out her father’s name, one of the few words she says, the mother said.
In their basement apartment, a large color photo of him looks out over the small living room, a reminder of his absence.
In Houston, Martinez Ventura said she was missing milestones in her children’s lives, such as graduations. Her 10-year-old daughter’s sweetness makes the pain even sharper, she said.
“Every time she talks to me,” Martinez Ventura said, “she tells me she has a surprise for me.”
Bart Jones has covered religion, immigration and major breaking news at Newsday since 2000. A former foreign correspondent for The Associated Press in Venezuela, he is the author of “HUGO! The Hugo Chavez Story from Mud Hut to Perpetual Revolution.”