Early the morning of Feb. 9, Ana, a 45-year-old mother of four, woke up in the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center outside Abilene. Bluebonnet, it’s called, so named for the toxic state flower. She was hustled from bunk to bus for a ride to Del Rio. By noon, she was standing in the middle of the International Bridge that connects Del Rio with Ciudad Acuña across the Mexican border.

Ana was told only: You’re free to go – back to Monterrey, which she left in 2006 and where her parents still lived. She did not know how she was going to get there. Or when she would see her girls again.

Only five weeks earlier, Ana had a job at an ice cream shop at Lombardy Lane and Brockbank Drive in northwest Dallas, where she’d worked for six years. A single mother, she alone cared for her daughters, two of whom are in elementary school – fifth and sixth grades – and struggle with dyslexia. Her 12-year-old, diagnosed with severe depression, had twice tried to harm herself just last year. Her eldest, a 17-year-old senior at Thomas Jefferson High School, is set to begin college in the fall.

Ana crossed the Rio Grande on an inflatable raft near Laredo 20 years ago for a life she couldn’t find in Mexico. She met a man in Lewisville with whom she had four children. He abused her, she said, so she left again, to start over in northwest Dallas.

Immigration officials gave her a preliminary court hearing: Aug. 24, 2027. Ana, who has no criminal record, went to the ICE offices on Stemmons Freeway around New Year’s Eve for her annual check-in.

And every time she returned home to her girls. Until Dec. 30, 2025, when she was detained by officers, then shuffled around the state – Dallas to Alvarado to Abilene – before being sent back to Mexico, leaving behind daughters, all born in Dallas, to whom she did not get to say goodbye.

“I was so scared,” said Ana, who, with her eldest, agreed to talk to me if I did not use her full name or her children’s names.

“And I was in shock,” she said. “The whole morning I was just praying thinking about what to do next. I thought I would see my lawyer or talk to someone about what was going on, but the way they took us, no one explained anything to us. I know I did something wrong when I came over without my paperwork, as I should have. But I wasn’t stealing or hurting someone; I was working for my family, providing.”

Ana spoke by phone from Monterrey, where, last week, she buried her father, whose heart failed him days after she was left on that bridge. She began to cry.

“The fact that they just took apart my family, it’s breaking my heart,” Ana said, trying to catch her breath. “There are a lot of people who are doing bad things. We’re just trying to provide for our kids. Why us?”

But she knows why. Everyone does. Because there have been so many stories like this in recent months it’s impossible to keep track.

Just last week, María de Jesus Estrada Juarez of California, who came to the U.S. when she was 15 and was a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipient, was arrested during her regular check-in and sent back to Mexico. In Alaska, a mother and her three children were sent to Tijuana within 36 hours of being detained by ICE. NBC News also recounted the story of an 11-year-old girl, a U.S. citizen, whose brain-tumor treatment was interrupted when her parents were deported to Mexico.

The Texas Civil Rights Project has been trying to reunite the parents with their 11-year-old girl so she can get the care she needs. I asked the Austin-based organization if they kept track of the number of parents without criminal records deported to Mexico while their children are left behind. A spokesperson said they do not maintain a database tracking such cases, but that “it happens very often under this administration.”

Which is more or less what other immigration advocacy and legal nonprofits told me: We don’t track that data. But it’s, you know, a lot. ICE didn’t respond to emails asking for that information, either.

But just because we’re inundated with these stories doesn’t mean we should turn a deaf ear to them, especially when they involve our neighbors. This feels especially personal, as Ana’s eldest will graduate from my alma mater – if she can survive the next few months of waking her sisters each morning, getting them to school, working late hours at her fast-food job, dealing with grown-up responsibilities suddenly thrust upon her and trying, somehow, to fit in homework.

“It wasn’t really a choice for me,” the 17-year-old told me. “If I don’t do it, who will? The hardest part is getting up every morning, because there’s no break for the rest of the day – it’s the same thing every day, the same loop. And if there is, I have to do laundry or get these girls to their Girl Scouts things.”

I never would have known of Ana’s story, and that of the children left behind, had I not been forwarded a newsletter from Now>Forward, the nonprofit once known as North Dallas Shared Ministries. In the newsletter was a brief telling of the tale, along with a plea for assistance, as the girls need food, rent, uniforms.

I was told to call Lynn Wilbur, a Girl Scout troop leader since 1983, when her own daughter turned 5, and, for the last decade, leader of an outreach program that provides financial assistance for girls who want to be Girl Scouts but can’t afford dues, uniforms, supplies, field trips. “Anything that has to be paid for,” Wilbur said.

There are some 60 girls in the program, most spread across Dallas ISD elementary schools, including Ana’s three youngest daughters. Where once the program was funded by a foundation, though, the troop is having to depend on private donations – begging and scrounging, Wilbur said.

“Now, we’re just trying to help the girls pick up the pieces, along with their lives,” the 80-year-old said. When I called, she was with Ana’s daughters.

Most of the girls in Wilbur’s troop are from Spanish-speaking homes. This is the first time one of their parents has been deported. But, she fears, it will not be the last. One mother recently asked Wilbur if she would take her daughter if she, too, is deported.

“The amount of fear is unbelievable,” Wilbur said. “My house is one place they let them come because they know they’d have to kill me before I let them in the door. This has got to stop. Unless good people step up and let their voices be heard nothing is going to change. That’s why I am talking to you. We can’t let this keep happening, especially to children.”

Wilbur taught Ana’s eldest how to pay bills, how to buy a car when her mother’s recently broke down, how to deal with insurance, how to be a grown-up at 17. The TJ student was never a Girl Scout. But Wilbur, the living embodiment of a slogan that demands a Girl Scout do a good deed daily, has surely taught her how to be prepared.

“Miss Lynn has always made us feel like we’re important, that we’re loved,” Ana said. Another small sob. “That we’re human.”