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Downer Elementary third-grade teacher Diana Ortega was sitting in her school’s lunchroom, scrolling through social media in March when she saw a video of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents forcibly detaining and handcuffing a mother at San Francisco International Airport. Nearby, a young girl with her hair tied with colorful rubber bands watched, crying in anguish.
Ortega watched the video a second time. The mother and daughter looked familiar. She paused and zoomed in.
“I was in disbelief,” Ortega said. “I didn’t want to believe that could be what I was seeing.”
It was not until another teacher sent her a still picture from the video that it sank in — the child was one of her students, 9-year-old Wendy Godinez-Lopez.
More than 650 children have been detained by ICE in California — mostly in the state’s interior — since the Trump administration launched its deportation crackdown last year, according to an EdSource analysis of data obtained by the Deportation Data Project at UC Berkeley and UCLA. More than 400 children who were detained in the state have been deported, the data show.
Godinez-Lopez’s March 22 detainment and subsequent deportation triggered a wave of grief and anger among students at her school in San Pablo, where she attended second and third grade. Some told their teachers they were afraid to leave their homes. Others wanted to stage a protest to bring back their deported classmate.
How one deportation impacted a whole classroom
Godinez-Lopez had been a shy and quiet student in Ortega’s Spanish-English dual-language immersion classroom who worked hard to learn her timestables, Ortega said. She would write sweet notes for her teacher saying “Te amo maestra” (“I love you, teacher.”) Her first language was Mam, a Mayan language from Guatemala. She was learning both Spanish and English.
“She didn’t let the language become an issue for her. She did her best. She did not let it stump her or stop her from trying to participate,” Ortega said. “I was impressed by that. I thought, ‘Wow, she is not going to be boxed in as somebody who doesn’t know.’ ”
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A few days before the SFO incident, Ortega had given Godinez-Lopez a homework packet to work on while visiting a relative in Florida. She told her it was too bad she would miss an upcoming field trip, but hopefully she could go on the next one after she came back.
But as she and her mother, Angelina Lopez-Jimenez, walked to their gate in SFO to board their flight to Miami, TSA agents alerted ICE, according to The New York Times. They were held at the airport that night and flown to Texas the next day, where they were checked into a hotel in McAllen and then deported to Guatemala.
According to the Department of Homeland Security, the two had first been detained near the border in Arizona in 2018, when Godinez-Lopez was not yet 2, and then released with an order to appear in court. They attended some hearings, but not others, and were ordered deported in 2019 at a hearing they did not attend.
Attempts to reach Lopez-Jimenez were unsuccessful.
When families have final orders of removal, there are ways to deport them with more notice, some experts said.
Previous presidential administrations sometimes gave notice to families before their deportation so they could wrap up their affairs — sell their house, for example, or close out their bank accounts. In some cases, the government would schedule deportations after the school year to avoid disrupting the children’s education, according to Michelle Brané, who led the Department of Homeland Security’s Family Reunification Task Force and was immigration detention ombudsman under the Biden administration.
“We’re seeing that even in cases where removal may be the legal, right procedural step, the process is particularly cruel and harsh,” said Brané, who now leads the nonprofit Together and Free, which supports asylum-seeking families.
Students at Downer Elementary organized a rally to protest the deportation of a classmate
Godinez-Lopez’s classmates grieved her disappearance for the rest of the spring semester.
Following her detention, one of her classmates came up to Ortega at lunchtime to tell her that other students had said Godinez-Lopez “was taken by ICE.”
Back in the classroom that day, Ortega asked how many children had heard about Godinez-Lopez or seen it on the news. Almost every hand went up. When a district social worker came to speak with the children a few days later about how they felt, they shared sadness, fear, anger and grief.
Over the next few days, some of the children made cards for Godinez-Lopez and left them on her desk. Then they added homemade paper flowers and Jolly Ranchers hard candy. One little girl picked flowers from the school garden and placed them in a water bottle.
Even children who did not know Godinez-Lopez personally were upset by the news.
“My students were really angry, they were upset, they wanted to protest, they wanted to walk out,” said fourth-grade teacher Joy Diaz-Noriega.
One student, who is a U.S. citizen, told Diaz-Noriega, “I’m not going nowhere — I’m not going to school, not going to the store, not going to the park.”
Ortega said Godinez-Lopez’s absence hit her classmates much harder than when a classmate moves away or changes schools by choice. In some ways, she said, it felt like a death, and like her students were in mourning. She had to remind them to use the present tense when speaking about Godinez-Lopez.
“I had to say, ‘Well, you know, she’s still out there, and she’s still our friend, and we can still think about her and never forget her,’ ” she said.
In April, students organized an assembly to protest Wendy’s deportation. They designed posters and wrote speeches. Ortega’s class wrote a haiku and an acrostic poem, in which the first letter in each line spelled out their classmate’s name:
“”
Wendy
El color azul es su favorito (Blue is her favorite color)
No hablaba mucho (She was quiet)
Daba felicidad (She brought happiness)
Yo soy su amigo (I am her friend)
El color azul es su favorito (Blue is her favorite color)
No hablaba mucho (She was quiet)
Daba felicidad (She brought happiness)
Yo soy su amigo (I am her friend)
— A poem by the classmates of a San Pablo elementary school student who was deported in March
The last week of school in June, Ortega projected a slideshow of photos from throughout the year of her students. And there was Godinez-Lopez, in a picture from a dance to La Bamba for Hispanic Heritage Month and one shot during the school’s Halloween celebration.
Months after the deportation, Ortega’s students reminded her of Godinez-Lopez’s absence each morning as she took attendance.
“And Wendy!” they said. “Wendy isn’t here.”
EdSource Reporter Emma Gallegos and Data Journalist Daniel J. Willis contributed to this story.
