Family Separation 2.0: An Update

Hey. It's Michael. All this week, The Daily is revisiting some of our favorite episodes of the year, listening back and hearing what's happened in the time since they first ran. Today, we return to the subject of president Trump's broad and historic crackdown on immigration. To reach his promised deportation numbers, Trump increasingly sought to deport those without a criminal record. Those who came to The US decades ago and who have established lives, careers, and family in this country. Daily producer Jessica Chung told the story of one such man who was detained this year through the eyes of his daughter. It's Tuesday, December 30. So I was in class. I was about to turn in all my work to the teacher, so I was already starting to pack up my things slowly. And I got a call from my mom. She seemed very down, and she was like it's like when you hear somebody, they're trying not to cry, but, like, they're really, like, holding it in. And I could hear in her voice, and that's when I started to get a little bit worried. And she told me that, like, your father got detained. It is just like you just start envisioning the worst. Like, he's in this terrible place. This is a hardworking man. No criminal record. Like, you guys just took him. I first spoke to Ayla back in February. This was a month into the Trump administration, which had promised quick and mass deportations. I was calling immigration lawyers around the country, trying to get a sense of who exactly was getting targeted for deportation, and how ICE was finding them. That's when a lawyer called me back, saying you gotta talk to Ayla. Hello? Hi. Hi. Hi. So this is Jessica. This is Ayla. She's Fabrisso's 20 year old daughter. Okay. Great. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you too. My name is Ayla Gomez. I'm Right now, Ayla is a sophomore at Wentworth Institute of Technology in Massachusetts, where she's studying architecture and interior design. She was raised in a town called Saugus, just outside Boston, where days before we had talked, her dad was detained by ICE officers. Tell me a little bit about your dad. What is his name? How old is he? And what does he do? My dad, he's Fabricio Gomez. He is 47 years old, and he works at a construction company of his own. Isla told me in 2001, her dad had settled here in Massachusetts as an undocumented immigrant. He'd come here from Brazil. This was three years before Ayla was born. Tell me about why he left Brazil. Sorry. I'm just asking, like, these questions for my mom. American. So, my mom said it was due to the violence down there, and, like, he couldn't make a living for himself, let alone have a family down there. When he first got here, he lived with his aunt who was already here. But …