Two Fort Worth teenagers, suddenly on their own. For nearly a year, 19-year-old Dulce Zepeda has been raising her 13-year-old sister, Maria, in the months since their parents were arrested by ICE and then deported.
When NBC 5 Investigates first met Dulce and Maria in April, they were living in a Fort Worth apartment complex. Dulce, cooking, driving her sister to middle school, working at a local McDonald’s, and selling her mother’s jewelry, she said, to help pay bills.
“You never know whenever is the last hug that you’re going to have from your parents. You don’t know, you’ll never know how stressful and hard life is without them,” Dulce told NBC 5 Investigates.
The girls are U.S. citizens and legally entitled to remain in the country. But some immigration advocates say their case is a stark example of the precarious situations facing thousands of U.S. citizen children whose parents have been detained during the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
The cruelty is the point. They want to punish the children for having the audacity to be born in the US (which is course makes them legal citizens).
They want to bully them into leaving and following their parents to another country (assuming the parents aren’t still rotting in an ICE concentration camp).
We need to do more to help these kids cope in these horrible situations. And of course, we need to do more to prevent these families from being split up in the first place.