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A Honduran mother, her seven-year-old son and her four-year-old daughter, who is a U.S. citizen, were held by ICE agents in a series of hotel rooms for nearly three weeks while the Trump administration sought to deport them.
The ordeal started on Dec. 20, when the family, who live in Suffolk County, reported to an ICE check-in at 26 Federal Plaza.
ICE agents arrested them without warning, the family’s attorney Andrea Soto alleged in federal court filings.
The family was then taken to a hotel outside LaGuardia Airport, where they were detained overnight. They were then taken to Newark Airport and shuttled halfway across the country to a hotel in Alexandria, Louisiana, according to a court affidavit submitted by an ICE agent.
Altogether, the family spent 18 days — spanning Christmas, New Years and the boy’s 8th birthday – trapped in hotel rooms without any way to contact the outside world. They were finally released on Jan. 7 and flown back to New York.
Ingrid, the 37-year-old mother, told THE CITY in Spanish on a Zoom call on Monday that her children kept asking when they could return home. “Mami, when are we going to leave? I want to go to my house,” she recalled them imploring. THE CITY is withholding her full name and the names of her children while the family’s case continues.
“I had no response. I just kept saying, ‘Any moment now they’re going to take us out of here.’ We had no idea what was going to happen,” she said.
But even now that they are home, Ingrid and her children are not out of the woods. Judge LaShann DeArcy Hall, the federal judge weighing their case, found she has no jurisdiction to block the family’s deportation. The temporary restraining order that bars the family’s deportation expires Thursday.
The family is scheduled for another ICE check-in at 26 Federal Plaza in February, and Ingrid said she’s terrified she could be arrested again and then deported.
“The kids, they ask me, ‘Are we going back to that place? I tell them ‘yes.’ What else can I do?’” she said.
“I’m terrified, I look at the calendar and say ‘Oh God, it’s getting closer, the day we have to go back.’”
‘Offered a Choice’
With just one family detention center located in Texas that reopened last year, ICE has limited capacity to detain immigrant families with minor children. The government is also subject to strict rules about how children can be detained and is not supposed to keep them for more than 20 days in most settings, according to the terms of the Flores agreement.
The Washington Post has reported on ICE’s plan to open two more large-scale family detention centers in the coming months. But as of now, most ICE arrests of children are for those who already have deportation orders, with many of them deported within days.
That’s happened in several cases of ICE arrests in New York City reported on by THE CITY, including a 6-year-old Ecuadorean girl arrested and deported last summer and a 6-year-old Chinese boy who was first separated from his father and then deported with him.
The Intercept has reported on ICE using hotel rooms across the country to hold immigrant families with young children. The Guardian this week reported on a similar situation where a 5-year-old U.S. citizen child who was kept in a hotel room for days before they were deported to Honduras.
But Ingrid’s case is the first reported instance of ICE agents using a New York City hotel to detain migrants. The government confirmed the hotel detention in court filings, saying it held Ingrid and her kids at an unnamed hotel near LaGuardia Airport.
ICE hasn’t returned THE CITY’s request for comment on Ingrid’s case.
In legal filings, the agency stressed that Ingrid’s U.S. four-year-old daughter was not a target of their deportation efforts.
The daughter “has never been placed in removal proceedings, and remains with her family unit, Ingrid and [her brother] at her mother Ingrid’s request,” Kim Haynes, an ICE deportation officer wrote in a Dec. 24 affidavit to the court.
“Ingrid chose to keep [her daughter] with her, even though [her daughter] is not the subject of any order of removal. She was offered a choice and spoke to her family before making that decision on December 20, 2025.”
Ingrid, however, said she was never given that choice and was first hearing about it from THE CITY. She added that if she is deported, she would keep her daughter with her.
Ingrid and her son arrived in the United States in 2021, while she was about 30 weeks pregnant. An immigration judge ordered her and her infant child removed about a year later.
Working with a lawyer, she appealed, and that appeal was denied. Ingrid claims her lawyer at the time bungled the case.
In 2024, she sought to reopen her case with her new lawyer, Andrea Soto, finding she was likely eligible for a special kind of visa offered to victims of human trafficking. That request is still pending, as is the motion to an immigration judge to reopen their cases.
According to a timeline laid out by ICE in court documents, agents told Ingrid on March 6 of last year that she had until May 7 to leave the country on her own.
“Ingrid failed to comply with this opportunity to arrange her own departure,” Haynes wrote.
Ingrid said she was hopeful her new lawyer would be able to help her remain in the country.
“This is somebody who wants to remain here because despite anything that can be going on in this country she’s safer here than she would be in Honduras,” Soto said.
‘It Hurts Me So Much In My Heart’
At the time of the family’s arrest, Ingrid’s 4-year-old daughter had a fever and spent the first night at the hotel near LGA airport coughing uncontrollably.
“I cuddled the little girl, comforting her so she would calm down,” Ingrid recalled. “[My son] just watched us; fear, sadness, and confusion were visible on his face. I told him to go to sleep, that everything would be alright, that it would pass.”
Early the next morning the family was shuttled halfway across the country, in planes and vans before arriving at a Louisiana hotel early the following morning. The kids were allowed to sleep for just two hours before they were woken again and taken to the airport, shuffled onto a plane headed for Honduras.
“I couldn’t wake the children up. The little girl clung to the blanket on the bed, crying. and I couldn’t wake the boy either. They were so tired,” Ingrid said. “That part was the most heartbreaking for me, seeing my children confused and crying, and me being unable to do anything. We were experiencing a nightmare.”
Shortly after boarding the plane they were taken off it with no explanation. Unbeknownst to Ingrid, her attorney had sued over the family’s arrest, and a federal judge stepped in to block their deportation temporarily while the case was being reviewed.
As she got off the plane, Ingrid asked to make a phone call to her family.
“They said I could call, but I couldn’t say where I was,” she recalled, adding that no one told her where they were being taken as they flew and drove across the country.
An agent allowed her to use the phone for less than a minute. It was the last time she was able to contact her family for nearly three weeks while she and her kids were holed up inside a hotel room with a guard standing outside their door.
During her weeks in confinement Ingrid had no way to contact Soto, and her lawyer was unable to locate her in ICE’s detainee locator. Soto said she emailed ICE repeatedly trying to figure out where her client was.
“You’re dealing with a government agency that has no accountability to anyone,” Soto said.
Looking out the window offered Ingrid little insight as to the family’s whereabouts.
“There was a window, which looked at some trees and a desert. I couldn’t see a car, or a road,” she said.
Christmas passed, with her little girl anxious about being able to deliver the chocolates they’d bought for her teachers.
“I want to go give my teachers the gifts,” she’d begged her mother.
“It hurts me so much in my heart to see my children, for Christmas and New Years and the birthday of my son, trapped in there without anything,” she said.
Throughout, Ingrid had little idea what was happening to her and her family, or what was coming next.
“Every time an official would come, I’d ask them if they had any news about my case or what was happening,” she said.
In the federal filings, Haynes went on to say that ICE couldn’t send the family to Dilley Immigration Processing Center, ICE’s only family detention center, because Ingrid’s daughter is a citizen.
“Therefore, ICE has arranged for temporary accommodation at a hotel near the staging area so that the family unit can remain intact pending the outcome of this action.”
‘They Didn’t Say Anything Else’
On Jan. 6, 18 days after the family’s arrest, Joseph Nocella Jr., a lawyer for the US Attorney’s office in the Eastern District of New York, told Judge DeArcy Hall that ICE couldn’t hold Ingrid and her family for much longer and asked her to lift her restraining order to that they could be deported.
“ICE advised this Office that it cannot hold the minor Petitioners much longer, and intends to keep them with their mother, Petitioner Ingrid,” his letter read.
Nocella cited the 20-day limit children can be kept in detention put in place by a 1997 court settlement known as the Flores Settlement Agreement.
The Marshall Project reported last month that that 20-day limit was regularly ignored during Trump’s first year back in office, and that the Trump administration has made several attempts to end the decades-old settlement.
But as the family approached 20 days in confinement, agents told them it was time to go.
“One day came, where they told us, ‘You’re going to New York right now.’ That was it, they didn’t say anything else,” Ingrid said.
The agents gave her an ankle monitor and let the family go a few blocks from Federal Plaza on a frigid night with a dead cell phone. The family posted up in a bodega and waited for her phone to charge before she could call family members to come get them.
Now, Ingrid said her children are terrified of returning to 26 Federal Plaza next month for their next ICE check-in.
Her 8-year-old son wakes up crying at night. Her daughter is sent home each day with a new stuffed animal that teachers have given her to try to quell her meltdowns.
“Sometimes I think these might be our last days here, but I have faith,” Ingrid said. “Every day, my children and I, all three of us, we ask God for this to turn out ok, for this moment to pass, and for everything to be ok, and maybe one day it will be a story we all tell.”
