Bay Area Family Torn Apart by Deportation

Here are the morning’s top stories on Monday, March 9, 2026

• Over the past year, we’ve watched the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown unfold violently in places like Minneapolis and Chicago. But even in Northern California, immigration arrests have more than doubled. And one of them, early last year, left a Silicon Valley carpenter gravely disabled. His family – like thousands of others – is now coping with trauma, upheaval and financial strain. 
• California’s state superintendent of schools is joining calls for the return of a 6-year-old deaf student from the Bay Area, who was deported to Colombia last week without his hearing aids.
• Longtime San Diego Republican Congressman Darrel Issa says he will not seek re-election.

A year after ICE detained South Bay immigrant, family trauma lingers

Sitting on the sofa in her Sunnyvale apartment, Aby Peña blew a kiss into her pink cellphone as she said goodbye to her husband, Ulises Peña López, 2,000 miles away in Uruapan, Mexico. It wasn’t their first call of the day, and it wouldn’t be their last. They’ve talked often since Ulises, 31, was deported in October. It’s been a year since the couple woke up together in this apartment and began what they thought would be a mundane morning of family errands. Ulises, a carpenter, went downstairs to warm up the car, while Aby got their then-3-year-old daughter Emily ready.

An hour later, Ulises would be in the emergency room at El Camino Health in Mountain View, barely conscious, with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers stationed near his bed. His lawyers would later tell a court that ICE agents had beaten Ulises so severely he suffered a heart attack and a stroke, allegations the agency has denied. Meanwhile, Aby would be on the phone with the local Rapid Response Network, frantically trying to locate her husband while soothing her wailing daughter, who had watched from the window as the agents forced her father from the car at gunpoint, wrestled him into handcuffs and drove away.

What happened that February day, in the early weeks of President Donald Trump’s second term, prefigured the often-violent immigration arrests that have unfolded across the country over the past year. And the lasting trauma, upheaval and financial strain for this one Bay Area family is an early example of how Trump’s campaign of mass deportation has upended life for countless American children and families in the months that followed. Nearly 400,000 people were arrested by ICE last year, more than four times the number in 2024. Public attention has focused on the crackdown in cities like Los Angeles and Minneapolis, where federal agents have killed at least two people and observers have documented their use of aggressive tactics. But even in Northern California, where a planned Border Patrol surge was called off at the last minute last fall, immigration arrests have more than doubled. Ulises’ detention was just one of them. “Today, the right side of my body is paralyzed. I’ve lost vision and hearing and sensation,” Ulises said by phone from Mexico. “Before that day, I was a normal person working in construction.”

With the help of pro bono lawyers, Ulises has appealed his deportation and the family has filed personal injury claims against ICE. KQED reviewed legal filings in those cases, as well as government documents, and interviewed Ulises, Aby, their lawyers and outside experts about what the last year has been like for the family and how it illustrates what is now unfolding for tens of thousands of other families across the country. Under previous administrations, ICE sometimes violated the civil rights of immigrants — and its own policies — said Elena Hodges, an immigration attorney with Pangea Legal Services who’s part of the team representing Ulises. But now the intensity is escalating, she said. “This level of violence is becoming more common and is increasingly embraced as just the routine course of operations,” she said. “High-profile harms to people, where they end up in the hospital, their car window is smashed … that tracks with a new level of political acceptance and encouragement that we’re seeing from the Trump administration.”

Over the past year, the administration has dismantled many of the internal watchdog offices at the Department of Homeland Security, enabling agents to act with impunity, said Doris Meissner, a senior fellow at the non-partisan Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. “So we are seeing them be more aggressive and less likely to be called to account,” Meissner said.

California officials demand ICE return family to US after arrest and deportation

California officials and immigration attorneys are calling on the U.S. government to return a Bay Area mother and her two young children, one of whom has severe disabilities, after they were detained in San Francisco and deported last week. Lesly Rodriguez Gutierrez, 28, and her two sons, who are 4 and 6 years old, were arrested on Tuesday as she attended a routine asylum check-in appointment in the city, state Superintendent Tony Thurmond said during a news conference on Friday. He said at the time of their detention, the 6-year-old, who is deaf, did not have his hearing aids and remains without access to necessary medical devices. “We are calling for the immediate return of this young man and his family,” Thurmond said. “This is a student who needs access to medical devices, hearing aids, and he needs to be in a program where he can receive support and care — not in some detention center, not in some cell living in squalor and poor conditions.”

Nikolas De Bremaeker, an attorney with Centro Legal De La Raza, said that in the days since their arrest, advocates have been trying to locate the family and have been misled about their whereabouts by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials. “We were told at every point that the family was at a different location, and even up to last night when I spoke with ICE, they told me a different location than where they actually were,” he told reporters. “This is no way for a democracy to work. This is a complete obstruction of access to council.”

De Bremaeker said he was able to speak with Rodriguez Gutierrez and confirm that she and her sons were deported to Colombia. Gutierrez migrated to the U.S from Colombia four years ago. She had no criminal record, according to De Bremaeker. De Bremaeker said that when they were arrested, another family member was located outside of the ICE office on 478 Tehama St. in San Francisco with the medical equipment that Rodriguez Gutierrez’s son needed, but was prevented from delivering it.

“It’s inhumane, it’s illegal, and it’s unconstitutional for this to happen,” he said Friday, adding that sign language in Colombia is different from the American Sign Language that the young student had been learning here. The child attends the California School for the Deaf in Fremont, and had been home sick on Tuesday. “It’s incredibly cruel to rip a child, as they are thriving and not only using the assistive devices that they need … out of this incredibly brave and strong progress that he has made,” De Bremaeker said.

Issa to retire, endorses Desmond to succeed him in 48th Congressional District

Congressman Darrell Issa (R-Alpine) announced late Friday he will retire at the end of this term. “This decision has been on my mind for a while and I didn’t make it lightly,” Issa said in a statement. “Today I’m announcing my enthusiastic endorsement of Supervisor Jim Desmond for Congress – to represent California’s new 48th district.”

Earlier on Friday, San Diego County Supervisor Jim Desmond withdrew as a candidate from the race for the 49th Congressional District seat. The district is currently held by Democrat Mike Levin, Instead, Desmond began the filing process to run in the 48th District. That seat is currently held by Issa.

These last minute changes come following the November passage of Proposition 50, which redrew California’s congressional district boundaries to be more favorable toward Democratic candidates.