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‘I want my mom’: Kindergartener left without her mother as ICE detains parents in Maine
BIDDEFORD, Maine — Five-year-old Keyli Camila Espin Vaca expected her mother to come pick her up after school on Friday, just as she always did.
But her mother never came.
Mayra Vaca Latacunga, 25, had dropped Camila off at the Biddeford Primary School that morning, then went to get groceries. Soon after, ICE agents stopped her car and requested her documentation, her brother said. She didn’t have it. The agents handcuffed her and transferred her to Massachusetts.
Vaca Latacunga, a single mother from Ecuador, was Camila’s sole caretaker. On Friday, school officials escorted the kindergartener to her Uncle Javier’s house. She’s staying there for the time being and constantly pleading for her mom.
“Quiero mi mamá, tío,” Camila said in Spanish on Sunday. “Yo quiero estar con mi mamá.”
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“I want my mom, uncle ... I want to be with my mom.”
Camila is among a growing number of children who have been left without a parent as the Trump administration carries out a major immigration enforcement effort in Maine, according to local officials. “Operation Catch of the Day,” as the Department of Homeland Security calls it, is meant to arrest around 1,400 people. They have arrested more than 200 individuals so far, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement Monday to the Globe.
“Some of the arrests of the worst of the worst from the first day of operations include criminal illegal aliens charged and convicted of horrific crimes, including aggravated assault, false imprisonment, and endangering the welfare of a child,” McLaughlin said.
Maine leaders have pushed back against this characterization of those arrested, saying many are like Vaca Latacunga — people who are employed and appear to have no criminal record.
“They arrested a civil engineer who is working here in Maine. They arrested a mother of four children in front of her kids,” Maine Governor Janet Mills said on “Morning Joe” on Monday. “What the heck, what does that prove? ... These are people who are contributing to our society, to our community.”
Ben Goodman, a spokesperson for Mills, said on Monday the governor was “outraged by ICE’s conduct in communities across Maine — particularly the treatment of children.”
“The Governor rejects the idea that any policy goal ever justifies taking parents away from their children,” Goodman said in an email to the Globe.
Vaca Latacunga entered the United States about two years ago, fleeing domestic violence, and has been living in the country without legal status, her family said.
A search of the Maine criminal history record information request service returned no results for Vaca Latacunga. She is currently being held at the ICE field office in Burlington, Mass., said her brother, who spoke with her briefly Monday. The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment about her case.
“Many have been racially profiled and abducted from their cars off the street, and some have been targeted at home,” said Sue Roche, executive director of the Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project of Maine, which has received requests from some 60 people for emergency legal help. “ICE is stalking grocery stores and schools.”
The ICE operation has left a number of children in Maine without a parent, according to interviews, local news reports, and community leaders.
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In Biddeford, a city of about 22,000, approximately 18 miles south of Portland, school attendance has dropped sharply, said Superintendent Jeremy Ray, who is also the superintendent of the nearby Dayton and Saco school departments.
Ray said the schools have experienced several instances in which parents were detained. Students and their parents have become fearful of making the commute to school.
“This is a very trying time, as a leader of a school department that has great diversity,” Ray said. “You have a 5-year-old — you can’t even imagine what’s going on in her head right now. We’ve got a lot of people here who are willing to help this family, and other families.”
Biddeford’s foreign-born population is at about 3.7 percent, slightly lower than the state’s average of 3.9 percent, but has crept up from under 3 percent in 2022 as new groups of immigrants have settled in the area in recent years.
Javier and his wife, Mari, fear ICE will target them next, which could result in Camila being sent to family detention or state care. In Minnesota, where federal agents shot and killed two US citizens during operations there, immigration officials detained 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos last week and sent him to a detention facility in Texas with his father.
Javier and Mari have a 2-year-old of their own. They requested the Globe use only their middle names because they fear being targeted by ICE.
On Friday, the couple struggled to explain to their niece what had happened.
“She started asking a lot about her mother. So we had to tell her the truth,” Javier, 22, said. “She started crying a lot, she said that her mom wasn’t doing anything bad, and asked why she was taken. And that she needed her mom.”
The mayor of Biddeford, Liam LaFountain, said in an interview that the region has seen immigration enforcement for months, “but more sporadic, less dramatic, and less fear-inducing.”
“Biddeford is an immigrant city, and it has been for its entire existence. So that’s a proud part of our history, and continues to be so,” LaFountain said.
To support her daughter, Vaca Latacunga worked into the early pre-dawn hours packaging scallops, lobster, and other products from Maine’s seafood industry.
“All she did was work and try to give her daughter a better future,” Mari, 23, said. “She didn’t come to create any harm.”
On their way to the United States, Vaca Latacunga and her daughter crossed the treacherous Darién Gap, the dangerous jungle path between Colombia and Panama that tens of thousands of migrants passed through during the Biden administration. They crossed the border unlawfully, then turned themselves over to immigration officials and requested asylum, Javier said, settling at first in New York.
Records from the Executive Office for Immigration Review show an immigration judge in New York issued a deportation order against Vaca Latacunga last summer, when ICE agents were roaming the halls of immigration court there and apprehending immigrants. Vaca Latacunga was too scared to attend her proceedings after seeing the photos of masked agents detaining people, Javier said.
Vaca Latacunga was fleeing physical domestic violence, which Camila had witnessed, at home in the Cotopaxi region of Ecuador, where she and her family worked in agriculture in the highlands.
“She would run out at night with her daughter, crying, carrying her daughter,” Mari said. “She thought they [immigration authorities] were going to send her back to Ecuador, and that the same thing would happen to her again.”
So they stayed in the United States. There was no money for a lawyer.
Vaca Latacunga was driving a vehicle registered to her brother when she was arrested. Officers were banging on the window when she called Javier, who said Vaca Latacunga was in tears.
After a few seconds, someone who said they were an ICE agent got on the phone. “‘We know that you’re in this country, and you will have to take care of the girl,’” the agent told Javier, according to his recollection. Then the line went dead. The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a question about this.
In Maine, Camila had been happy. She was learning English. She had a best friend at school. She was energetic and playful — a little bit sassy — and loved going outside.
On Sunday afternoon, Camila gazed at a photo of herself with her mother under the flashing lights in Times Square, her mother’s hands on Camila’s shoulders.
“My mom is in jail,” she told a Globe reporter.
Nighttime is the hardest for Camila. Where is she? She asks her aunt and uncle, over and over.
“I was dreaming that my mom was hugging me,” she said on Sunday, wrapping her arms around herself as she remembered. But she woke up and realized that her dream was not real.
“And then, it was scary.”
Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio can be reached at giulia.mcdnr@globe.com. Follow her @giuliamcdnr.
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