Lesly Rodriguez Gutierrez with her two sons. Gutierrez was arrested by ICE, according to her attorneys, and her children were taken into custody with her. Their exact location was not known. Courtesy of the family of Lesly Rodriguez GutierrezImmigration attorneys were scrambling Thursday to find a Bay Area mother and her two young children, one of whom has severe disabilities, after she was arrested by federal immigration officers in San Francisco this week.Lesly Rodriguez Gutierrez was arrested Tuesday evening after reporting for her check-in at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office on Tehama Street, said Nikolas De Bremaeker, an immigration attorney with Centro Legal de la Raza. Article continues below this adA Colombian asylum-seeker, Gutierrez was with her two children, ages 5 and 7, when all three were detained, De Bremaeker said. The 7-year-old boy is deaf and did not have his hearing aids with him, according to De Bremaeker.San Francisco Chronicle LogoMake us a Preferred Source to get more of our news when you search.Add Preferred Source“This child is being sent around the country without the assistive equipment that he desperately needs,” De Bremaeker told the Chronicle on Thursday.Immigration attorneys have not been able to contact or locate Gutierrez and her children. ICE officials have given attorneys and Gutierrez’s family confusing and false information about which detention center Gutierrez was sent to, said De Bremaeker.Article continues below this adDe Bremaeker suspects ICE officials swiftly moved Gutierrez out of California to prevent attorneys from filing a habeas corpus petition, a legal procedure attorneys have used to free people like Gutierrez whose detention they believe was unlawful and arbitrary. Attorneys must know a detainee’s physical location in order to file the petition, he said.ICE spokespeople did not immediately respond to the Chronicle’s request about Gutierrez’s whereabouts and detainment. Gutierrez did not appear on the ICE Online Detainee Locator System on Thursday afternoon.One of Gutierrez’s family members told the Chronicle that Gutierrez contacted them on Thursday, saying she and her children were en route to Colombia, which attorneys were not aware of. “This obfuscation, this false information, these different stories for different people — it’s just chaos at best and intentional,” De Bremaeker said. “The fact that she has a severely disabled child … is very strong humanitarian grounds to not deport a 7-year-old.”Officials from the 7-year-old boy’s school wrote letters of support that would be included in Gutierrez’s immigration court paperwork, calling for the release of the boy and his family.Article continues below this ad“I respectfully and urgently urge all parties involved to consider the profound education and humanitarian stakes for this child. (He) belongs in a classroom where he can thrive, communicate and grow,” wrote Leeza Williams, a teacher at the California School for the Deaf in Fremont.California State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond condemned the incident in a statement Friday and called on the federal government to return him to the Bay Area.“No child should be ripped from their home community and hidden in a detention center, especially not a Deaf child who is being deprived of the ability to communicate and understand what is happening to him,” Thurmond said.March 5, 2026ReporterJessica Flores is a reporter on the breaking news team. Before joining the Chronicle in 2021, she worked for USA Today, LAist and Curbed LA. Born and raised in Los Angeles, she is a graduate of the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and Mount Saint Mary’s University in Los Angeles.