A Venezuelan family is calling for a 2-year-old to be returned to her mother after the U.S. authorities deported the mother to Venezuela on Friday without the child.
The girl’s father was sent to a prison in El Salvador in March.
The toddler, Maikelys Antonella Espinoza Bernal, remains in foster care in the United States, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Officials said in a statement that the child was removed from her parents and from the manifest of her mother’s deportation plane for her own “safety and welfare.”
The Trump administration claims the girl’s parents are members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang, but it has not offered evidence to back this up.
The girl, known to many in her family as Antonella, is one of several children who have been swept up in President Trump’s immigration crackdown in recent days. At least three children who are U.S. citizens were sent to Honduras this month with their mothers, decisions protested by the families’ lawyers.
In the case of the Venezuelan toddler, the girl’s mother, Yorely Bernal, 20, had entered the United States with her partner, Maiker Espinoza, and their child in May 2024, while President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was still in office.
There, according to the couple’s relatives, the authorities told them their tattoos looked suspicious, took them into custody and sent the girl to foster care.
During Mr. Trump’s first administration, family separations at the border drew anger and legal challenges, and eventually ceased to be used as a blanket policy. But separations continued to take place in limited instances during the Biden administration when officials believed there was a threat to the child.
It is unclear why officials separated the family members last year. Record searches indicate that neither parent has a criminal record in Venezuela or Peru, where they lived for several years, or in the United States, beyond their immigration offenses. In the United States the couple has lived only in immigration detention.
In 2022, Mr. Espinoza, now 25, was arrested in Peru on an allegation of domestic violence, but the case was closed and he never faced trial, according to records.
U.S. officials sent Mr. Espinoza to El Salvador on March 30 on one of five planes carrying Venezuelan men to a maximum-security prison. The Trump administration claims that all the Venezuelan men on those flights are members of Tren de Aragua, but it has provided little proof of this.
In late April, Ms. Bernal called her mother, Raida Inciarte, to tell her that she was going to be deported back to Venezuela, Ms. Inciarte said in an interview. American officials had told Ms. Bernal that Antonella would be coming with her, Ms. Inciarte said.
On the video call, Ms. Bernal showed her mother a document from immigration authorities bearing Antonella’s name, which she claimed indicated the child would be leaving the United States with her.
But when Ms. Bernal boarded the deportation flight to Caracas, the Venezuelan capital, on April 25, her child was not there.
From her home in Maracaibo, Venezuela, Ms. Inciarte called on the American government to release the child, who she said has lived in four foster homes while her parents were in immigration detention over the past year. (Ms. Inciarte has been in touch with a case worker and the foster parents, she said.)
Her daughter, she said, had arrived home in Maracaibo on Sunday, and spent Monday morning crying in her bedroom.
“That little girl,” she said of the toddler, “has a family that has been suffering every day for a year.”
The toddler is under the supervision of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, according to the Department of Homeland Security, referring to a part of the Department of Health and Human Services. An official at that office referred all questions to the D.H.S.
The Trump administration did not say when, or if, the child would be reunited with her family.
In its statement, Homeland Security said Mr. Espinoza was a “lieutenant” of Tren de Aragua who oversees criminal operations, including a “torture house,” and that Ms. Bernal directed the “recruitment of young women for drug smuggling and prostitution.”
“President Trump and Secretary Noem take their responsibility to protect children seriously,” said the statement, referring to the department’s secretary, Kristi Noem. “We will not allow this child to be abused and continue to be exposed to criminal activity that endangers her safety.”
María Alejandra Fernández, 31, Mr. Espinoza’s sister, said: “My brother is not a criminal. He left Venezuela like many young people, looking for an opportunity to get ahead.”
The department did not respond to a request for more details about the allegations of gang connections.
Ms. Inciarte said the toddler’s first foster homes were in the El Paso area. But Antonella was place in a new home in recent days, Ms. Inciarte said a foster mother told her, and now she wasn’t sure where that home was located.
The new foster mother did not respond to messages from The New York Times.
The Trump administration has said that Tren de Aragua has “invaded” the United States, which the president is using to justify the rapid deportations of hundreds of Venezuelans and to fulfill a campaign promise to take a hard line against undocumented immigrants.
Ms. Bernal and Mr. Espinoza fled economic and political crises at home in Venezuela, their families said, and met while living in Peru. She worked at a fast food stand. He worked as a bricklayer and in ironwork, until opening a business as a barber, said his sister, Ms. Fernández, who lives in Venezuela.
Antonella was born in Lima on Feb. 8, 2023, according to her birth certificate, which lists the couple as her parents. When the girl was 1, Ms. Bernal and Mr. Espinoza decided to follow a growing flow of migrants to the United States, said their families.
Salaries in Peru were low, said Ms. Inciarte, and the situation wasn’t improving in Venezuela.
“They got excited,” she said, “and set out to pursue the American dream.”
The couple left Peru, and — with their child in tow — crossed Ecuador, Colombia, the Darién jungle, which connects South America with Panama and Central America. In Mexico, they were briefly kidnapped by what Mr. Espinoza’s sister described as “coyotes,” or migrant traffickers.
Last May, the families said, the two turned themselves in at the U.S. border.
From detention, Ms. Bernal told her mother in a call that the authorities believed her tattoos — she has many — made her a “gang member.”
But it wasn’t until Mr. Trump took office, said the families, that the accusations became more specific: The government believed that they were members of Tren de Aragua.
Ms. Bernal’s tattoos include her parents’ birth years inscribed on her neck, as well as a lightning bolt, a small flame and a serpent, her mother said. Mr. Espinoza’s tattoos include the cartoon characters Yosemite Sam and Marvin the Martian, according to a statement he gave to the authorities, as well as a cross, a crown and a compass with a plane.
Internal government documents indicate that the U.S. authorities are citing tattoos to label people as members of Tren de Aragua, though there is little evidence that the gang uses tattoos as markers of membership.
In her conversations with the foster parents over the last year, Ms. Inciarte, said the parents described Antonella as “sweet” and “independent” for a toddler. But they also noted that the girl cried when she moved among families and seemed confused about who she belonged to.
This anguished the grandmother, who worried about “psychological damage,” she said.
“Today she wakes up with one mother,” she said, “tomorrow she has another.”
Mitra Taj contributed reporting from Lima, Peru and Hamed Aleaziz contributed reporting from Washington. Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.