The Trump administration is deporting ‘Dreamers.’ Their kids are paying for it.

Jessica Treviño Villegas’s protected status as a “Dreamer” doesn’t expire until spring 2027. But earlier this year, ICE deported her anyway, sending her to Mexico and separating her from her three children, all of whom are U.S. citizens.

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Treviño, 34, has lived in Alamo, Texas, since she was 7. She worked in an elementary school cafeteria and held protected status under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA. 

She thought she was safe. She said she “never thought” ICE would come for her. 

They came when the family was on its way to church. Last December, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents had been following the family and rammed their car after her husband, Juan, pulled into a Home Depot parking lot in Alamo, Treviño said. The agents struck Juan with a baton even as he raised his hands, she said, and shoved their 14-year-old daughter, Sarah, against the car hard enough to bruise her.

“They treated us like criminals when we are not,” Treviño told MS NOW in an interview from Matamoros, Mexico, where she is now living. Sharing her story of her deportation for the first time, Treviño told MS NOW that being separated from her three children “truly hurts.” 

“They need me,” Treviño said of her children. “It’s very painful for them, because they look at other families who have their parents, and unfortunately they don’t have their parents right now. Like, my youngest daughter just had her [7th grade] graduation and I couldn’t be there with her.”

As the Trump administration presses its deportation campaign, immigration attorneys and DACA recipients say the government is increasingly detaining people who hold protected or legal status and have no criminal record. Lawyers say the administration is slow-walking DACA renewals, then moving to detain recipients once their status lapses.

Treviño’s status had not lapsed. And though an immigration judge issued a voluntary departure order for her in February 2026, that decision didn’t make Treviño deportable, argues Stacy Tolchin, Treviño’s attorney. 

“You cannot physically deport or send anybody with DACA outside of the United States,” Tolchin said. 

The Department of Homeland Security has taken the opposite view. When asked about similar cases this year, DHS told MS NOW that DACA recipients “may be subject to arrest and deportation for a number of reasons,” and that “DACA does NOT confer any form of legal status in this country.” Federal courts, however, have held that the program shields recipients from detention and removal while their status is active, and judges have recently ordered the release or return of several DACA recipients. 

DHS did not respond to questions about Treviño’s case, or her family’s account of her arrest and deportation. 

After her arrest in December, Treviño spent roughly three months in a Texas detention facility where, she said, detainees sometimes went days without receiving drinking water and guards accused them of faking illness. Treviño decided to share her story when she saw that ICE returned another “Dreamer,” Jose Contreras Diaz, to the U.S. months after the Trump administration deported him.  

Tolchin is now demanding that DHS follow suit with Treviño, arguing in a letter that they removed her client unlawfully, and pointing to a recent ruling by a federal judge in California ordering the return of Maria Estrada Juárez, another DACA recipient Tolchin represents.