Before choir practice on a Saturday morning, Marina Lopez rushed her three children to get ready. They were running late.
“Andenles, ya apaguen la tele y ponganse la chamarra. Hurry, turn off the TV, put on your jacket,” she told them.
Her youngest daughter, Sofia, ran toward her mother so that she could tie her hair into a braid. Lopez smiled. She had dreamed of mornings like this. There was a time she worried she would never be able to braid her daughter’s long, brown hair again. Or even see her again.
Seven months earlier, Lopez had been detained after receiving a sudden notice from immigration authorities summoning her to an appointment in Chicago’s South Loop. The mother had been in the United States more than 10 years under supervision as she sought asylum. Long enough to believe there was no reason to suspect that the June 4 check-in would end with her being led away in handcuffs.
While she was in detention in Grayson County Detention Center in Kentucky, Lopez would hide under her covers to cry and pray. She was desperately worried about her husband and children. They have no one else in this country. They left everyone behind in their native Guatemala, fleeing from gang violence and poverty.
Then came help. The choir director at their church began to quietly rally the community. Parishioners dropped off food at the family home almost daily. They helped her husband pay rent and bills. Parents took turns taking care of the children, who, every Sunday, sat with the youth choir, praying that their mother would return home.
Lopez felt the support, the shared weight, carried by hymns of praise, week by week. It helped her endure sleepless nights and hungry days for the seven months she spent in detention.
“They are the family that I don’t have here,” Lopez said. “It gave me peace knowing that we were so loved. That my children were safe. That kept me going day by day.”
Then, more than 200 days after her arrest, her prayers were seemingly answered. Authorities released her on Dec. 23.
As President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown continues its march across Chicago and the country, countless families have been shattered in its wake. Federal agents often seize breadwinners and family caretakers. Some, like Lopez’s husband and children, have no other relatives in the country for support.
But amid the upheaval, a new sense of community has been born, as neighbors, teachers and parishioners step in to fill the gaps of broken families navigating their new reality.
“An arrest doesn’t affect just one person,” said Jose Verduzco, the church choir director, “It ripples through a whole community.”
When Lopez and her family finally arrived at the church on that Saturday morning, a little late and Sofia’s hair tied in a neat braid, the choir group welcomed Lopez and her children with hugs and some cheers.
Rudy, her older son, took out his guitar. Aaron, the middle child, and Sofia sat next to each other and took out their music notes. The church filled with the sounds their mother dreamt of all those sleepless nights: her children singing, as if she had never left them at all.
“Gracias a Dios por traer a mi mama. I want to thank God for bringing back my mom.” Aaron, 8, said when Verduzco went around the group asking to say something they were grateful for.
“Yo le quiero pedir a Dios que nunca se la lleven otra vez. I want to ask God that they never take her away again,” Sofia answered. Meanwhile, Lopez went around the room, hugging other children and their parents.
Then Carolina Morales arrived with her children to practice. The two mothers wrapped each other in a long, quiet embrace.
Before Lopez’s detention, they had only known each other in passing and through brief conversations.
But during her detention, it was Morales who took care of Lopez’s children nearly every day while their father was at work, taking them to school, cooking for them, taking care of doctor appointments, sometimes washing their clothes and, of course, driving them to choir practice.
The support extended beyond emotional care. Morales and the other parents in the choir group also took notice of the financial strain on the children’s father. He had to pay rent, bills and attorney fees while also sending money to Lopez in detention. Each phone call to her family was at least $15 for five minutes. She also needed money for food and sometimes even for warm clothing and personal hygiene products.
So some choir parents and other parishioners organized food sales, raising nearly $10,000 for the family.
“As a mother, it felt like a calling. I could see the pain through (the children’s) eyes and the desperation their father felt,” said Morales, who has three children of her own. “It was a lot of work, and we never imagined it would take more than seven months until Marina returned home, but we never lost hope.”
When the children would cry, asking about their mom, Morales would take them to the park, to the movies or play games with them. The children now see Morales, her husband and their three daughters as their extended family. Earlier this month, Rudy asked Morales to be his sponsor for his confirmation in May.
“Ya hasta vamos a ser comadres,” Morales said with a smile, agreeing to become Rudy’s godmother. They would officially become family.
Rudy at 13, is the oldest of the three kids. When he missed his mother or when he started to have doubts that she would be released, he found solace in his guitar and would write songs or play music.
Just about 10 years ago, when Rudy was only 3, Lopez arrived in the United States seeking asylum from an indigenous town in Guatemala. At the time, the mother was allowed in the country and given permission by immigration authorities to stay under supervision as Rudy’s asylum case unfolded.
Since then, Lopez had not heard from immigration authorities until June 4, when she became part of the first large group of immigrants arrested during check-in with immigration authorities, sparking angry protests from advocates, city aldermen and community members.
Lopez spent three days at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement processing center in Broadview before she was taken to Grayson County Detention Center in Kentucky. She was among several migrants who later described the conditions in Broadview as the beginning of what she called “endless days of agony.” Detainees slept on the floor under lights that remained on around the clock, she said, with limited food and, at times, no access to water.
Her arrest could not be explained, attorney Cynthia Fernandez, who said Lopez had received no prior notices from immigration authorities regarding her case. Her release on Dec. 23, one day before Christmas Eve, was also sudden and without explanation.
“It was the most beautiful blessing, the best gift God has given us,” said Lopez’s husband. When she arrived around 5 a.m., their children were sleepy but eagerly waiting to see their mother.
According to the habeas corpus filed on Lopez’s behalf in Kentucky, the federal government did not provide a reason or evidence for which Lopez was still detained.
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security did not return a request for comment.
But in Lopez’s case, attorneys representing the federal government argued that they planned to reinstate Lopez’s order of removal and deport her, but they couldn’t provide a copy showing that they actually did, Fernandez said.
In directing her release from ICE custody, U.S. District Judge Benjamin Beaton wrote that “the government admits it has no record of why (Marina’s) supervision was revoked and makes no effort to explain why she is now detained.”
Beaton continued that while the government acknowledged Lopez had an outstanding removal order and had been under supervision that deferred her removal while her application for asylum was pending, “it couldn’t find a copy of any notice that the order had been revoked … or any documents memorializing the decision to revoke it and detain her.”
Fernandez also noted the ways the immigration system itself had failed Lopez and her family. “If the asylum and immigration process weren’t broken, this family wouldn’t be living through this,” she said.
That’s because Lopez first arrived seeking asylum in 2014 but was not given an interview in her native language. When she tried again in 2015, carrying then-3-year-old Rudy in her arms, she was allowed to seek asylum for him and not herself. So she was only granted a work permit and permission to remain in the United States under supervision.
Although she has now been released, she is still not safe from deportation. She also does not have a clear path to continue her immigration case, Fernandez said. “In fact, we have not received any information from immigration authorities that can give us any direction about her case,” Fernandez added.
Last September, the administration expanded the use of expedited removal without judicial review, orchestrating maneuvers to use it on individuals previously covered by various temporary protections as well as those with asylum cases pending at immigration courts and asylum offices. Lopez’s situation is far from unique, Fernandez said.
Lopez’s work permit was nullified during her detention and authorities took most of the documents she had taken with her to that appointment on June 4.
“I don’t want to ever go through that again, and I don’t want my children to go through that again,” she said. If immigration authorities were to detain her again, Lopez said, she would rather return to her hometown in Guatemala. “But God has done this for me, and I’m faithful that he will provide.”
For now, her safety and that of her family is measured in moments, day by day. The yapping to get the children ready for practice. Braiding her daughter’s hair. The sound of her children singing in the choir.
The embrace of the church community that carried her through the darkest months.
