06/02/2026
The funeral home in Atlanta could give them only one hour for Orlin's hastily arranged funeral last week. His mother, Wendy Hernandez Reyes, had landed from Honduras the night before, and when the doors opened she had to be held upright as she crossed the room to the small white coffin where the 3-year-old lay. Orlin had been dressed in a tan outfit and a matching cap, chosen to hide his injuries. A new teddy bear nestled beside him. An ankle monitor blinked red above her black shoes. She fell to her knees. "My God, why?" she cried. "Orlinsito, my son."
The Department of Homeland Security had done something it almost never does: it let a woman it had deported come back. Most people removed from the United States cannot return for years, if at all. But after a public outcry, ICE granted Hernandez three days -- later quietly extended -- to bury the child who ICE had handed over to the abuser who murdered him.
It began on an ordinary morning in January, on her way to work. Hernandez and her sister were riding to a construction job in Alabama when a Baldwin County sheriff's deputy stopped their car for an alleged traffic violation. Under a state law and a federal program called 287(g), which deputizes local police to act as immigration agents and has grown from roughly 135 agreements when President Biden left office to more than 1,800 today, the deputy checked the passengers' status and handed the two sisters to ICE.
Handcuffed on the side of the highway, Hernandez told the officers she was a single mother and begged them to release her -- or, if they would not, to deport her together with Orlin, her American-born son. They refused. On January 26, she was shackled and put on a plane to Honduras -- without her son, and, she says, without even the passport she would need to prove she was his mother and bring him to her. She was not alone on that flight. Other mothers were loaded on beside her, including one who had just given birth whose breasts were heavy with milk.
Orlin was 2. With his mother gone, he was left with the only relative who could take him that morning -- his aunt's estranged former partner, a man police say beat the children with a wire and saved the worst of it for Orlin. On March 4, the little boy, who had just turned 3, collapsed and was declared dead at a Pensacola hospital, the city where he had been born an American citizen. The medical examiner ruled it a homicide: multiple blunt force traumas. The man has been charged with murder and has pleaded not guilty.
A week after Orlin died, the acting director of ICE, Todd Lyons, put out a statement. It carried no condolences. It blamed his mother. Hernandez had "abandoned" her child, Lyons said -- she "chose to leave her son here with a violent murderer who took his life" -- and he took the occasion to encourage parents to self-deport with their children. He said this about a woman who had pleaded to take her son with her and been refused.
"How could I abandon my son, if my son was the love of my life?" Hernandez said. "I am not a bad mother who left my child with a killer."
Hernandez is 29, a survivor of domestic violence, with no criminal record. She does not resemble in any way the "worst of the worst" -- the killers and rapists and gang members -- the Trump administration insists it is removing from the country. As of April 4, of the 60,311 people held in ICE detention, 70.8% have no criminal conviction at all. According to ICE's own internal figures, leaked to the Cato Institute, just 5% of those in custody had a violent criminal conviction. As for the rest with records, most were convicted of traffic violations, immigration offenses, or other low-level crimes.
Arrests of people with no criminal record like Hernandez surged 2,450% in Trump's first year, according to the American Immigration Council -- driven by roving patrols, worksite raids, re-arrests of people who showed up to their own court hearings, and traffic stops by local police deputized to work with ICE.
Orlin and his mother's story is unbearable on its own. It is also not unique. Since President Trump began his second term, 146,635 American children -- U.S. citizens -- have had a parent detained by immigration authorities, according to the Brookings Institution. More than 22,000 had both parents taken. More than a third are under the age of six.
The federal government is not tracking what becomes of them. Of the children left with no parent at home, Brookings found that only about 5 percent received any services from the child welfare system at all. The rest are with relatives, with neighbors, with whoever happened to be nearby when their parents disappeared -- or, like Orlin, with someone no one thought to check on. Nothing in federal law requires ICE to follow up on the children left behind.
The parents being removed were, overwhelmingly, working and raising families and showing up to every appointment. Hernandez carried a deportation order from a hearing she missed in 2023; under the previous administration, a domestic violence survivor with a small child was not a priority for removal. Under this one, she was just a number to help hit Stephen Miller's quotas.
The damage this does to children is not a matter of opinion. The American Academy of Pediatrics, along with every major pediatric organization in the Western world, has condemned family separation as a cause of lasting harm to children's health and development. Among U.S.-born children studied after a parent's detention or deportation, 29 percent met the clinical threshold for PTSD. And the machinery is only being built larger: an estimated 4.6 million American children live with at least one parent at risk of deportation, and Congress has set aside $45 billion to expand detention.
Orlin's death has begun to force a reckoning, however small and late. Escambia County's Republican sheriff endorsed a visa application that would let Hernandez remain in the U.S. as the victim of a crime. Representatives Ro Khanna and Delia Ramirez have demanded a full accounting from DHS of how the case was handled. "A three-year-old American is dead, and his mother was deported as she begged to keep him at her side," Khanna wrote. Representative Pramila Jayapal says she will introduce "Orlin's law," to bar ICE from separating parents from their children. Even some of the Florida sheriffs who signed up to help with enforcement now say it should be aimed at serious criminals -- not at mothers on their way to work.
None of it brings Orlin back. At the funeral home, the single hour the family had been given ran short. Hernandez stood over the coffin and stroked her son's face. "I never wanted to leave you," she whispered. "I wanted to bring you with me." Her sister, whose own children are now in foster care, leaned close to the boy she had loved like her own. "Forgive me," she said. "I'm sorry I couldn't protect you."
The administration's answer to all of it was the same words it repeats endlessly in its press releases -- the same lie over and over again: "ICE does not separate families."
It had nothing to say about the three-year-old lying dead in a coffin last week.
At Orlin's funeral, Pastor Amilcar Morales said of the little boy who will never have a chance to grow up: "We don't know what talents and skills this little boy would have had. We don't know what impact he would have had on the world. But we know he was a baby, and that his life was sacred."
“We know that Orlin Josue Hernandez was marvelous."
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--> To help support Wendy during this horrific time, there is a GoFundMe campaign at https://www.gofundme.com/f/justice-for-baby-orlin-and-wendy-justicia-para-orlin-y-wendy
--> To support a nonprofit that trains volunteers to advocate for immigrant children separated from their parents -- or to volunteer to become a child advocate yourself -- visit the Young Center for Immigrant Children's Rights at https://www.theyoungcenter.org
To read more about Orlin's death and funeral last week, visit https://wapo.st/4wZTblT
For a detailed Washington Post investigation into his mother's deportation and his subsequent murder, visit https://wapo.st/4vpz7HX
For more about the mass separation of US children from their immigrant parents, visit https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/18/children-parents-detained-trump-mass-deportation-push
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For children's books that encourage empathy and understanding of Mighty Girl immigrants of the past and present, visit our blog post, "A New Land, A New Life: 25 Mighty Girl Books About the Immigrant Experience" at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=12855
For books for children and teens about the importance of standing up for truth, decency, and justice, even in dark times, visit our blog post, "Dissent Is Patriotic: 50 Books About Women Who Fought for Change," at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=14364
For books for tweens and teens about girls living under real-life authoritarian regimes throughout history that will help them appreciate how precious democracy truly is, visit our blog post "The Fragility of Freedom: Mighty Girl Books About Life Under Authoritarianism" at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=32426
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