It was a typical weekday before dawn when Miguel Garcia Pazaran drove his wife, Dulce Maria Trejo Segura, from their apartment in Hillsboro to her job at a snack production plant in Forest Grove. Lea este artículo en español: Una pareja de Oregón fue deportada y obligada a dejar atrás a su hija pequeñaThat’s when immigration agents pulled them over – Garcia Pazaran still in his pajamas and house slippers – and detained them both. The two were swiftly taken to a detention center in Tacoma then deported to Mexico, their home country, all within eight days. Left behind in Oregon: their 2-year-old daughter, Sofía, a U.S. citizen. The parents had lived in Oregon without authorization for four years, said Maggie Garcia, the man’s older sister. Garcia shared an apartment with the family and occasionally helped with child care. She was home when her sister-in-law made a desperate phone call on Dec. 8. “‘We’re being detained,’ she told me. ‘Take care of Sofía,’” Garcia told The Oregonian/OregonLive in Spanish. She overheard her brother telling the ICE officers that they had a small child at home and begging them to let his wife go. Then the call dropped. Garcia immediately quit her job at a building materials warehouse to care for the toddler full time. Her brother, 26, and sister-in-law, 27, have no other close relatives in the state, she said. Since then, in between changing diapers, cooking and playing with Sofía, Garcia has tried to figure out how to reunite the girl with her parents. The separation is one of dozens happening in Oregon, with ICE detaining both parents or single parents, leaving small children in the care of relatives, family friends or babysitters, said Elizabeth Aguilera, a spokesperson with Adelante Mujeres. The Washington County nonprofit is helping families separated by detention access legal aid, health and mental health services and pay for basic needs such as food and clothes.“Prolonged family separation causes massive emotional distress. It causes lasting trauma for everyone who experiences it, especially the children,” Aguilera said. Immigration enforcement also has led to a small number of children being placed in foster care, according to the Oregon Department of Human Services.In October and November, three children in Oregon experienced at least one day of foster care because their parents or guardians were detained by immigration agents, said agency spokesperson Jake Sunderland. The data, the latest available, does not measure how many days the children were in foster care, Sunderland said.It’s unclear whether those children have been reunited with their parents. Earlier this year, Oregon explored allocating state money to cover travel and reunification costs for children separated due to deportations. The agency said this week that the number of children coming to its attention has been low enough that it has been able to cover those costs within its current foster care budget and statutory authority.U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not immediately respond to a request for comment about why ICE agents arrested the Hillsboro couple and why they did not release one of the parents to care for the toddler. Garcia said her brother and sister-in-law called last week from Mexico telling her they had been deported and were planning to go to her brother’s hometown in the state of Veracruz, more than 1,400 miles away from the border. They had never been separated from their daughter before, she said. “It’s like a living nightmare, we are devastated,” Garcia said. “We need to find a solution to reunite them as soon as possible. In the meantime, we have to endure what’s happening.” Sofía wakes in the middle of the night crying out for her mother and “takes her mom’s photo and hugs it,” Garcia said. “She knows they are not here. She knows something is wrong.” Garcia said she doesn’t understand why immigration agents detained the two parents. Neither has a criminal record, she said. They worked hard in Oregon and her brother, employed in construction, paid taxes every year, she said. A review of court records by The Oregonian/OregonLive confirmed the couple have no criminal history in Oregon. This aligns with federal data indicating that a significant share of immigration arrests in the state have involved people without criminal records.“They did not come here to take anything from anyone,” Garcia said. “They never did anything bad. They just went to work, came home and took care of their daughter.” They were saving money to build a small house in Huayacocotla, the remote village in the mountains of Veracruz where the family was planning to eventually return, she said. After they were detained, Garcia contacted immigration lawyers to help them, she said, but the couple were already in Mexico by the time a lawyer called her back. Garcia said she talked to her brother and sister-in-law after federal officers bused them to the U.S.-Mexico border and dropped them off in Nogales in the state of Sonora. The couple told her that they had no money or identification documents because federal agents confiscated both and hadn’t eaten in two days, she said. They had found a migrant shelter to spend the night. After getting food, clothes and money for a bus ticket from the shelter, the two arrived in their village on Friday, she said. A friend who was born in Mexico but lives in Oregon and is a legal permanent U.S. resident will take the couple’s daughter back to them, Garcia said. She can’t do it herself because she doesn’t have documents and both her brother and officials at the Mexican Consulate counseled against it. Garcia said she and Sofía could get separated if she tried to self-deport given that immigration agents are now arresting immigrants as they are voluntarily leaving the U.S. by bus or airplane and placing them in formal deportation proceedings, according to recent news reports. Sofía has a U.S. passport, she said, but Garcia needs to secure a notarized permission letter from the parents for the family friend to travel with the baby. In the meantime, Garcia is getting help from Adelante Mujeres to pay for food and other basics. Community members have offered help with diapers and food. She has also started a fundraiser to collect money to pay for rent and for the air tickets to send their daughter home with the family friend. Garcia, too, is thinking of returning to Veracruz where she has two daughters, 10 and 12. It’s for them that she came to Oregon. In Huayacocotla, where roads are unpaved and electricity unreliable, it’s impossible to find work to sustain a family, she said. “I have cried so much,” Garcia said. Judge orders immediate release of Albany mom arrested after buying socks for son‘We do not live in an authoritarian regime:’ Plan to ID, unmask federal agents remains aliveMayor asks Portland councilor to drop plan to ID and unmask federal agents. Here’s why