'Outrageous': Furor grows over ICE's arrest, deportation of 6-year-old deaf California child

Jakob Rodgers, The Mercury News on Mar 9, 2026

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SAN JOSE, Calif. — The 6-year-old deaf Hayward boy who was deported to Colombia last week alongside his mother and brother has finally received the devices he needs to hear and communicate with those around him, though the child appears no closer to returning to the U.S. anytime soon.

The delivery — announced Monday by Democratic Bay Area Rep. Eric Swalwell, whose staffers traveled to Colombia to deliver the devices — came as outrage over the child’s deportation continued to build among the raft of Democratic candidates running to be California’s next governor. The uproar follows allegations that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers misled the family’s attorney and separated the child, a student at the California School for the Deaf in Fremont, from vital assistive equipment he needs to properly hear.

Flanked by multiple East Bay elected officials, Swalwell called the expulsion “outrageous,” while suggesting that “the horror stories from this White House continue, from ICE they continue, and they continue to stagger.” His staff continued to strategize Monday with the child’s attorney on whether the boy could be returned via humanitarian parole, which allows admission into the U.S. for “an emergency and urgent humanitarian reason or significant public benefit,” according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

“They promised that they would deport violent criminals. Now they’re deporting kids with disabilities,” said Swalwell, adding that “no sane human, no beating heart, would allow this to go on, and yet it does.”

Swalwell’s comments came days after another gubernatorial candidate, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond, decried the deportation as “unacceptable” on Friday while publicly calling for the child’s return to California. On Monday, they were joined by Alameda County Supervisor Elisa Márquez, who vowed a “relentless” push to help the child back to the Bay Area.

“We can’t allow it to continue to happen,” Márquez said. “We will not live in fear or panic. We’re going to be united together until Leslie and her boys return home, back to Hayward, where they belong.”

“When a government is kidnapping children and denying them mental care, medical care, that, to me, is an act of domestic terrorism, and it must be stopped,” added George Syrop, Hayward’s mayor pro tempore.

The furor comes after Joseph Rodriguez, his 5-year-old brother and their mother, 28-year-old Lesley Rodriguez Gutierrez, were suddenly detained during what was supposed to be a check-in visit Tuesday at a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in San Francisco, said the family’s attorney, Niko De Bremaeker, with the Oakland-based nonprofit Centro Legal de la Raza.

The child’s mother — a childcare worker, cleaner and manicurist — and her children reportedly fled from Colombia with her children four years ago to escape an abusive relationship involving a man with gang ties in that country, according to television station KTVU.

De Bremaeker said the family was under asylum protection and had been following a supervision order that grants certain deportation protections for people who comply with it. Those protections “were not followed,” the attorney said last week, while he and his colleagues “were consistently misled … were told at every point that the family was at a different location.”

A statement from ICE claimed the family entered the country illegally in 2022, and an immigration judge issued a final removal order for the mother on November 25, 2024. It added that the family “received full due process,” and that “ICE does not separate families.

“Parents are given a choice: They can be removed with their children or place them with a safe person they designate,” the statement read. “This is consistent with past administration’s immigration enforcement. Gutierrez chose to be removed with her children, and they returned to their home on March 5.”

The move comes as arrests by ICE agents of immigrants without criminal records surge across Northern California under President Donald Trump’s widescale immigration crackdown.

A recent Bay Area News Group analysis of federal data found five times as many people without apparent criminal records during the first nine months of Trump’s second term as in the entire year prior. The trend comes despite previous vows by federal officials to remove the “worst of the worst” criminals from the U.S., stoking fear among migrant families across Northern California, many of whom are seeking legal pathways to remain in the United States.

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