A 6-year-old girl and her mother — whose arrests by ICE last week sparked widespread condemnation — were deported to Ecuador Tuesday, local elected officials said. 

Martha and her 6-year-old daughter were flown to Ecuador early Tuesday morning, according to Assemblymember Catalina Cruz, who confirmed the deportation with congressional liaisons in Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez’s office. Cruz and Councilmember Shekar Krishnan issued a joint statement saying they were heartbroken by the development. Ocasio-Cortez’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment immediately.

ICE’s detainee locator, which had previously shown Martha at one of the nation’s few family detention centers, in Texas, said that she was in Washington, D.C., late Monday evening, according to advocates. By Tuesday morning, the system no longer had any record of her whereabouts. 

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security didn’t immediately return a request for comment. The agency had previously confirmed the family’s arrest and detention, saying they had removal orders in place. 

“We encourage every person here illegally to take advantage of this offer and reserve the chance to come back to the U.S. the right legal way to live American dream [sic],” Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin wrote in a prior statement. “If not, you will be arrested and deported without a chance to return.”

The child had attended P.S. 89 in Queens. Its principal had pleaded with ICE agents to release her in a letter reported on by THE CITY. The student, the principal wrote, is “a kind, respectful, and dedicated young lady” whose “unexpected removal will cause significant disruption to her learning and will likely have a deep emotional impact on her classmates and our entire school community.” The girl’s name is also being withheld at the family’s request.

The 6-year-old’s arrest with her mother and 19-year-old siblingg, first reported by THE CITY, drew widespread uproar, with New York Gov. Kathy Hochul condemning it as “cruel and unjust” to break up a family this way as two other siblings remain here. Martha’s 16-year-old public high school student is now in the care of her 21-year-old brother.

“President Trump promised only to target ‘the worst of the worst,’’’ Hochul wrote in a statement Monday. “If a seven-year-old is who President Trump considers the ‘worst of the worst,’ then the promise was a lie from the start.”

But the child was hardly the first elementary school student in New York City to be arrested and then deported as part of President Donald Trump’s  mass deportation agenda. 

In June and July, the New York City field office, which covers parts of Long Island and several counties north of the city, arrested 48 children, of whom 32 had already been deported, according to ICE data shared by the Deportation Data Project. 

‘We Have Allowed for This To Happen’

As THE CITY previously reported, Martha arrived from Ecuador with her daughter who was five at the time and her son Manuel, who is now 19, in 2022. She had her asylum claims denied last year. 

Martha’s two other children are a 16-year-old daughter, who arrived from Ecuador last year, and a 21-year-old son, who lives in Long Island and is now caring for his sister in Queens. Because those two arrived separately, they are in different deportation proceedings.

“I’m so angry that we have allowed for this to happen. The whole world was watching,” said Mariposa Benitez, one of two volunteer social workers behind the group Mitlalli, which has created an ad-hoc, volunteer detention support network that collects the information of families who attend immigration court appointments and ICE check-ins to monitor whether they’re detained. 

Make the Road New York is now representing Manuel, who was separated from his mother and younger sister upon their arrest, the organization confirmed. Avedissian said Paige Austin, an attorney with Make the Road had worked to file emergency motions on Martha’s behalf to an immigration judge who had yet to weigh in.

“Everyone made statements and for what?” Benitez said, adding that it was even more urgent to support Martha’s 19-year-old brother Manuel who is still in ICE detention at Delaney Hall in Newark as of Tuesday afternoon, according to ICE’s detainee locator. 

“We cannot let Manuel down,” Benitez said.

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