A 14-year-old girl in West Des Moines has missed four days of school since immigration officers arrested her father on his way to work in September, and some days she calls her mother in a panic, asking to be picked up early because she is scared of what might happen next. Abigail Lopez attends Stilwell Junior High, and her family says the house she shares with her siblings has not felt like home since her father, Juan Lopez, was deported to Mexico.
Juan Lopez had lived in the United States for nearly 40 years before Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained him in September 2026, according to reporting by Axios. He leaves behind seven children and 14 grandchildren, all U.S. citizens. Immigration officials told Iowa Public Radio, citing The Midwest Newsroom, that Lopez has a felony record that includes aggravated assault with a weapon and burglary.
Separately, the Quad-City Times reports that Lopez and his partner, Laura Becerra, live in Des Moines with their family, and that he was detained the morning of Wednesday, Sept. 9, in what advocates with Escucha Mi Voz called an aggressive traffic stop. The group said ICE agents smashed the windows of his truck while detaining him — an account the paper attributes to the advocacy group rather than to a verified record of the stop.
A Family Scrambling to Keep the House
With Lopez gone, the financial strain has fallen on his adult children. His twin sons, Jonathan Lopez and Juan Jr. — Juan Jr. is 25 — now help cover the mortgage on the family's Des Moines home, according to the Axios report. Before his arrest, Lopez spent his free time fixing cars in his garage and hosting Saturday cookouts with his children and grandchildren, routines the family says have gone quiet in his absence.
On Sept. 27, Abigail looked into her father's now-empty garage, a moment captured in a photograph credited to Madeleine Charis King of Iowa Public Radio and The Midwest Newsroom. Her siblings say the house will not feel like home again until their father returns.
Researchers Say the Toll Starts Before Birth
The stress rippling through the Lopez household mirrors patterns researchers have tracked for years. University of Iowa researchers found that immigration enforcement can affect children even before they are born, pointing to the 2008 federal raid in Postville, Iowa. Babies born to Latina mothers after that raid faced a 24% greater risk of low birth weight compared with the same period a year earlier, the researchers found, while no similar increase showed up among babies born to white mothers.
That May 2008 raid on a meatpacking plant in Postville was, at the time, the largest immigration raid in U.S. history, with 389 people detained and 287 ultimately deported, according to Axios's earlier reporting on the raid's legacy. Researchers say the findings suggest that stress from immigration enforcement can ripple through entire communities, not just the families directly targeted. Nicole Novak, a researcher cited in the reporting, said the effects resemble those seen after an earthquake, mass violence or another severely stressful event.
A Pattern Playing Out Nationwide
Brookings Institution estimates put the scale of the issue in national terms: more than 200,000 children nationwide have had a parent detained since President Trump's second term began in January 2025. A separate Brookings analysis estimated around 205,000 children, including about 145,000 U.S. citizen children, were affected by parental detention between Jan. 20, 2025, and April 9, 2026, while a related Brookings data appendix from May 2026 put the citizen-child figure at around 140,000 — the institution's estimates have varied somewhat depending on methodology and cutoff date. Brookings also estimates that 26.9% of people detained in interior immigration arrests are parents, and that roughly 22,000 U.S. citizen children have been left with no parent at all in the home because of detention.
Other Brookings figures show about 36% of affected U.S. citizen children are under age six, and nearly 54% have a detained parent from Mexico. The toll has shown up in classrooms elsewhere, too: a Brookings study found 221 students at Meadowlark Elementary School in Liberal, Kansas, missed school during a September 2026 ICE operation targeting meat-processing plants and surrounding communities, Iowa Public Radio reported. Nebraska, meanwhile, has placed 10 children in foster care after a parent was detained or deported since January 2025.
Mental Health Strain Documented Among Latino Students
Research cited by the Migration Policy Institute found that nearly six in 10 Latino high-school-age youths surveyed either knew someone who had been deported or feared that they or a relative could be. More than half of the Latino students in that research reported experiencing anxiety, PTSD or depression, underscoring how enforcement actions can reach well beyond the families directly affected.
Similar stories have surfaced elsewhere this year. In Missouri, a teacher temporarily cared for a five-year-old student for nearly two months after immigration authorities detained the child's mother, before both were deported to Honduras. In another case detailed by Iowa Public Radio, Bryan Perez was detained by ICE on March 23 and deported to Guatemala on Easter Sunday while he was in the process of obtaining a green card.
Family separation has also forced some older siblings into caregiving roles once reserved for parents. ABC News reported that Wendy Domingo began working at a hotel to support her three younger siblings after her parents were detained and deported, while Eliza Perez left college to take over her parents' landscaping business and care for her three younger siblings after both parents were deported. The outlet also noted that immigration officers detained the parents of four U.S. citizens in Florida after stopping the family's vehicle. In the Washington, D.C., area, teenagers told NBC4 that classmates have simply disappeared from school without explanation, fueling anxiety that has become part of daily life for many students regardless of their own immigration status.
For the Lopez family, those national patterns have a face: a father who fixed cars in his garage on weekends, a daughter who now sometimes can't make it through a school day, and two sons quietly covering a mortgage payment while they wait to see if their father ever comes home.
