As federal agents target families, teens are left to care for siblings – from accessing bank accounts to medical records
Vilma Cruz, a mother of two, had just arrived at her newly leased Louisiana home when federal agents surrounded her vehicle in the driveway. She had just enough time to call her oldest son before they smashed the passenger window and detained her.
The 38-year-old Honduran house painter was swept up in an immigration crackdown that has largely targeted Kenner, a New Orleans suburb with a large Hispanic population, where some parents at risk of deportation had rushed to arrange emergency custody plans for their children in case they were arrested.
Federal agents have made more than 250 arrests across south-east Louisiana in December, according to the Department of Homeland Security, the latest in a series of enforcement operations that have also unfolded in Los Angeles, Chicago and Charlotte, North Carolina. In some homes, the arrests have taken away parents who were caretakers and breadwinners, leaving some teenagers to grow up fast and fill in at home for absent mothers and fathers.
Cruz’s detention forced her son, Jonathan Escalante, an 18-year-old US citizen who finished high school this year, to care for his nine-year-old sister, who has a physical disability. Escalante is now trying to access his mother’s bank account, locate his sister’s medical records and doctors, and figure out how to pay bills in his mother’s name.
