I’ve experienced some sleepless nights in my life, caring for family members with physical and mental health issues, but the other night was the worst.
You don’t want a phone call at 2 a.m. In a trembling voice, my daughter’s boyfriend said that my adult-ish daughter hadn’t arrived on her expected flight back to Logan International Airport. As a young working person with a decent salary, she took an end-of-summer jaunt to France. Coming home, she left a friend’s workplace heading to the airport, and that’s the last time anyone heard or saw her. There were no texts, and calls went straight to voicemail. No, she did not have a tracker on her phone.
My spouse and I went into fixer mode. We’re fortunate to know systems and the importance of speaking with supervisors. We called the airlines to see if she had been rebooked. We checked whether credit cards had been used or bank accounts accessed. We contacted Uber to see about recent rides. We examined when the latest data downloads were on her electronics. We contacted the U.S. embassy and got in touch with consular services. As they instructed, we filed missing-person reports at French and U.S. police stations. The Paris friend began checking public hospitals. Hours crept by. Too many episodes of “Law & Order” made us wonder if she was lying unconscious in a ditch. Had she been kidnapped and were we waiting for a ransom note for payment in cryptocurrency? Were her recent good spirits covering warning signs of severe depression? We discussed at what time we would tell our other children that their sister had gone missing.
Our story ends well. As typical, my daughter was running late. She had a poor interaction with the wrong French federal agent and was detained for 20 hours in Charles de Gaulle. Her phone was taken, and she wasn’t allowed calls. It wasn’t until 7 a.m., agonizing hours later, that a text arrived in our WhatsApp search committee chain saying, “She was in jail. She’s okay.” She had not been arrested or charged, just detained; as a result, her name didn’t come up in any of the police searches. We had sighs of relief, heart emojis, emails to the various agencies looking for her, and questions about new flights.
In this day, people generally don’t disappear. Well, at least not upper-class, white Americans. With these awful five hours in the past, I began thinking about how too many of our neighbors live with this constant fear and pain.
Since January 2025 and the beginning of the second Trump administration, the Department of Homeland Security has removed over 600,000 people from the United States. Setting a new monthly high, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested approximately 51,000 individuals in July. It is more common than we realize that ICE will stake out immigrant neighborhoods and round up mostly brown and Black men, loading them into unmarked white vans. There is an online ICE detainee locator; however, there are delays and significant cracks in the system. It can take 24 to 72 hours for system updates, leaving loved ones unaware and anguished during the initial detention period. Interestingly, minors under 18 and individuals transferred across jurisdictions may not immediately appear in the online public system, or at all. U.S. citizens and noncitizens alike have a constitutional right to due process, although access varies drastically.
We had the resources and knew who to contact. For most, this is not the case. The Brookings Institution estimates around 205,000 children (including close to 150,000 who are U.S. citizens) have had parents detained or deported. Over a third of these children are under the age of 6.
I am not getting into the intense debate over the human-rights violations, systemic cruelty, and racial bias involved in our current immigration policies and practices. I am suggesting that we avoid traumatizing people whose loved ones have gone missing, even for just a few hours.
Dina Borzekowski is director of the Global Health Initiative in the University of Maryland School of Public Health.
