Since her father was detained and deported, Abigail Lopez struggles to concentrate in class. The 14-year-old attends Stilwell Junior High School in West Des Moines, Iowa.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrested her father, Juan Lopez, on his way to work in September. ICE and the Department of Homeland Security told The Midwest Newsroom that Juan has a felony record, including aggravated assault with a weapon and burglary.
Abigail is the youngest of Juan’s seven children. Her sister, Stephanie Lopez, 32, thought school would keep her sister’s mind off their father being separated from the family.
“But she just would text my mom, ‘Can you pick me up? I’m worried about you. I’m scared of what’s gonna happen,’” Stephanie said, surrounded by her siblings at their parents’ home in Des Moines, Iowa.
Abigail has missed four days of school due to the stress of her father’s detention and later deportation to Mexico. She is one of more than 200,000 children, including at least 145,000 U.S. citizen children, who have had a parent detained by immigration authorities since the second Trump administration began, according to estimates from the nonpartisan think tank Brookings Institution.
Adverse childhood experiences, commonly referred to as ACES, can predispose a child to chronic stress, poor health outcomes, academic struggles, criminal behavior, unemployment, addiction, cancer, heart disease, diabetes, obesity and psychiatric disorders in adulthood, according to the CDC.
Children from immigrant families undergo trauma that can be unique to their experiences — deportation of a parent and long-term family separation. Advocates and experts said they believe the Trump administration’s practices could negatively affect these children for decades.
Across the region, more children are missing school due to fear of — or in response to — immigration enforcement, according to research from Brookings.
During a September ICE operation targeting meat processing plants and surrounding communities in southwest Kansas, 221 students at Meadowlark Elementary School in Liberal, Kansas, missed school, according to the USD 480 district communications coordinator Tyler Parks.
In Nebraska, the Center for Immigrant and Refugee Advancement has seen an uptick in calls to its hotline regarding family separations since the start of the school year. The legal and advocacy group has received around three to five calls a week since then, said Monica Meier, director of social work at the CIRA.
The Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services has placed 10 children in foster care after a parent was detained or deported since January 2025, the agency confirmed in an email responding to a public records request.
Meier said she believes that many children from mixed-status families attending schools in Nebraska and across the region have either been separated from a parent or are “walking around everyday in fear that that is going to be their experience.”
Teacher as guardian
Denise Meyer, a teacher and English language specialist in Springfield, Missouri, temporarily brought a 5-year-old student of hers into her home after immigration authorities detained the child’s mother, she said.
In October 2025, Meyer was with students when she received a call from the mother of a kindergartner who was pulled over by ICE agents. Fearing she would not be released and no one would be able to pick up her child from the bus stop, the mom asked Meyer for help.
“The little girl would have gone home to nobody, and so that felt very heavy and weighty and wrong to me,” Meyer said.
She said she did not hesitate to take in the student, who had previously been in her class.
“When you care about people and their well-being, then a lot of those fears fly out the window,” Meyer said.
Meyer took care of the child for nearly two months, until she could be reunited with her mother. The Department of Homeland Security later deported them both to Honduras.
Meyer works with students who are learning English. Most go to school in “survival mode” each day and are “hypervigilant to everything around them,” she said.
“Not knowing if their parents will be there when they get home, not being sure of what will happen to their families. It’s a very real reality to the students that I work with, and it’s definitely a fear that’s grown within them and within their families,” Meyer said.
The ongoing enforcement activity across the region will continue to worsen mental health and general health outcomes in immigrant communities for “years to come,” said Mitra Naseh, a professor and director of the Forced Migration Initiative at Washington University in St. Louis.
“This will just widen an already disproportionate health burden that these communities are carrying,” Naseh said.
Naseh said the stress of immigration enforcement activity among non-white communities limits economic opportunity by creating fear that being out in the community can put people at risk for arrest, family separation, deportation and other consequences.
Impact of separation
Madie Perez, 22, and Bryan Perez, 26, lived in a compact three-bedroom house with a fenced-in backyard for their golden retriever. They thought the Springfield, Missouri, home was the perfect setting as they welcomed their now 1-year-old son.
Bryan came to the United States with his parents as a teenager and was in the country for almost a decade before ICE detained him on March 23, Madie said. He was in the process of getting a green card, and on Easter Sunday the agency deported him to Guatemala, where he was born. The Midwest Newsroom confirmed that Bryan had a minor traffic violation from 2024 on his record.
Madie, a stay-at-home mother, said her husband’s last pay check didn’t go very far.
“If it wasn’t for the giving hearts of our community and the people praying for us, I don’t know what I would do due to me not having an education background, except for my high school diploma, and not much of a work background,” she said.
Madie and her son had to move in with relatives in Springfield because she could no longer afford the three-bedroom house.
She found a temporary preschool job and is also cleaning houses to make ends meet. She’s saving money so that she and her son can visit Bryan in Guatemala. The emotions that parents in cases like Madie’s and Bryan’s experience can trickle down to their kids, no matter the age, said Monica Meier, director of social work at the CIRA.
“As a parent, if I’m super anxious about something and I can’t control that myself, my kids are going to feel that anxiety,” she said.
Nicole Novak, a research assistant professor at the University of Iowa’s College of Public Health who focuses on immigrant health outcomes, told The Midwest Newsroom that even unborn children can be negatively affected by immigration enforcement.
In 2008, ICE arrested 390 people at an Agriprocessors Inc. meat processing plant in Postville, Iowa. Then-U.S. Attorney Matt M. Dummermuth called it the largest worksite enforcement operation in American history at the time.
Novak and her colleagues studied the effects of the raid on health outcomes for Latina mothers across Postville and the surrounding areas.
They found that the stress Latina mothers experienced the year after the raid affected the growth of infants in utero. Babies born to these mothers had a 24% greater risk of having a low birth weight than babies born to white moms in the same area. The results included American-born Latinas and immigrant Latina moms.
“This is kind of a similar thing as you see after an earthquake or another kind of mass mass violence, another stressful event,” Novak said.
In Iowa, Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska, most enforcement is not like the Postville raid, Novak said. It happens in everyday interactions — often not involving federal agents, but using local police agencies or county sheriff departments.
This is allowed through 287(g) agreements, which give local officers authority to act as immigration agents and detain individuals for ICE. The Missouri State Highway Patrol, Kansas Bureau of Investigation, Nebraska State Patrol, and Iowa Department of Public Safety also have contracts with ICE, according to the agency’s records.
Novak said these ICE agreements with states and municipalities allow the federal government to enforce immigration law on a wider — and quieter — scale than worksite raids, which are high profile because of social media and news coverage. She said the fear from Postville is similar to the stress a child can encounter during a traffic stop or hearing about immigration enforcement on the news.
Still reeling
Juan Lopez has seven children and fourteen grandchildren, all of whom are U.S. citizens. Before deportation, he had lived in the United States for nearly 40 years. Lopez moved to Iowa in 2017 from Los Angeles, California. His family members said he spent most of his time working at an irrigation company, fixing cars for friends or watching television.
He was just a few minutes into his drive to work in Des Moines, and on the phone with his long-term partner, Laura Becerra, when five unmarked vehicles stopped and surrounded his truck, his children told The Midwest Newsroom.
They said Becerra heard ICE agents smash the truck’s windows before the phone cut off. Photos of Juan’s vehicle after the interaction show shattered glass on the driver’s seat, across the car floor and inside the doorway. ICE said that Lopez “refused multiple lawful orders to roll down his window and provide identification, requiring officers to use the minimum amount of force necessary to make the arrest.”
One month later, his family is reeling after losing their patriarch. His children said they could not eat for days when their dad was first detained. When Abigail Lopez went back to school, a lot of people asked her what happened, she said through tears.
“My dad was so afraid for this to happen to him. So we wouldn’t even go out to parks or anything. We didn’t want to go out to restaurants. My dad just came straight home, and that’s it,” Tiffany Lopez said.
Tiffany and her family said they believe that Juan had a green card and permanent residency status. She said her father was deported in 1998 for stealing a bicycle and came back to the states without permission. Lopez said she believes this is why Juan Lopez’s deportation process moved so quickly.
The Midwest Newsroom could confirm the deportation but not the prior theft.
Once in Mexico, Juan Lopez proposed selling the Des Moines house. Instead, his twin sons Jonathan Lopez and Juan Lopez Jr., 25, are now helping to pay the mortgage.
The Lopez family is close-knit, usually spending Saturdays at their family home for a backyard cookout. The family is doing their best to start anew. But the Lopez children said until they get their dad back, the house won’t feel like home.
The Midwest Newsroom is an enterprise journalism collaboration that includes Iowa Public Radio, KCUR, Nebraska Public Media, St. Louis Public Radio and NPR. There are many ways you can contact us with story ideas and leads, and you can find that information here. The Midwest Newsroom is a partner of The Trust Project. We invite you to review our ethics and practices here.
METHODOLOGY
Steph Conquest-Ware interviewed immigrant advocates, lawyers and experts in trauma, mental health and public health. They traveled to Des Moines, Iowa, to interview the family of Juan Lopez. Conquest-Ware also spoke over the phone with others personally affected by the trauma of family separation.
REFERENCES
The administration has detained 400,000 immigrants: What do we know about their children? (Brookings | May 2026)
Change in birth outcomes among infants born to Latina mothers after a major immigration raid (International Journal of Epidemiology | January 2017)
Adverse Childhood Experiences and Pathways to Violent Behavior for Women and Men (Journal of Interpersonal Violence | August 2022)
How immigration enforcement is harming US schools and students (Brookings | April 2026)
TYPE OF ARTICLE News — Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.
