Wings of a Bird

A Mother Deported, and a Child Left Behind [free for 7 days; registration required]
... But because an old deportation order had resurfaced, she was quickly clapped into handcuffs, and within hours placed on a plane to her native Honduras, unable to say goodbye to her husband and little girl. ...
No one keeps track of exactly how many American children were left behind by the record 186,000 noncitizens expelled from the United States last year, or the 887,000 others required to make a "voluntary departure." But immigration experts say there are tens of thousands of children every year who lose a parent to deportation. ...
By all reports Virginia Feliz had been a happy 6-year-old before her mother's expulsion. Two months later, doctors at the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Program of Bronx-Lebanon Hospital Center found that she had a major depressive disorder marked by hyperactivity, nightmares, bed-wetting, frequent crying and fights at school. Now, medical records show, she takes antidepressant drugs and sees a therapist, but the problems persist.
...
In a telephone interview from Honduras, Mrs. Feliz acknowledged entering the United States illegally in 1994. She said she made the dangerous journey through Mexico because she could no longer afford to buy clothes, food and school supplies for her son, then 13.
Caught within hours of crossing the border, she was soon released on bond and fled to New York. When she failed to show up in a Texas immigration court, she was ordered deported in absentia. But like the great majority of such orders, it was not pursued for years, and Mrs. Feliz went to work, first as a live-in housekeeper, then in low-wage factory jobs.
After her 1996 marriage, when she applied for a green card, federal immigration officials not only issued her an official work authorization several times, but also allowed her husband, as an American citizen and new stepfather, to sponsor the teenage son she had left in Honduras.
Now that son, Cesar, is 24 and a lawful permanent resident with his own American child, while his mother is back where she began, without a job or her children.
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In Brooklyn, similar cases cause concern for Birdette Gardiner-Parkinson, the clinical director at the Caribbean Community Mental Health program at Kingsbrook Jewish Medical Center. In one, she said, an outgoing, academically gifted 12-year-old began failing classes, mutilating herself and having suicidal thoughts after her Colombian father disappeared into removal proceedings. In another case, nightmares and school failure plague the youngest of six children whose father, a cabdriver with 20 years' residence in the United States, was deported to Nigeria six hours after he reported for a green card interview, seemingly for unpaid traffic fines ...
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When the visitor remarked that she was pretty, Virginia, a doe-eyed child with a caramel complexion, loudly disagreed. "I'm ugly!" she insisted. "I want to be white, white, white." ...