Federal immigration authorities have deported a 9-year-old Torrance Elementary School student and his father to Honduras after the pair showed up for a routine immigration hearing last month.
Mártir García-Banegas, 50, and his son, Mártir García Lara, are in the capital of Honduras, reeling from their removal of their lives in the United States.
“I was scared to be here and I wanted to be with my sister,” García Lara told a Univision reporter in Tegucigalpa, Honduras.
His father arrived in the United States on July 10, 2021. He and his son were undocumented. An immigration judge ordered both the father and son to be deported to Honduras on Sept. 1, 2022, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The father appealed the decision to the Board of Immigration Appeals on Aug. 11, 2023, but the appeal was dismissed. The two did not leave the country as ordered by the immigration judge.
Before his last court hearing in the United States, García-Banegas said he got the impression that something was going to happen that day.
“I have a feeling they’re going to deport me. I can’t leave my son,” he told Univision. “I’m going to take him with me. I got up early that morning, took a shower and everything to get ready.”
On May 29, the boy and his father were detained at a federal courthouse in Los Angeles. The two were then transferred the following day to a federal immigration facility in Dilley, Texas, according to a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson.
“They are being cruel to people,” García-Banegas said about the treatment of undocumented people by the U.S. government. “Right now, people are behaving. If you look, you see things that are not [humane] things.”
Before it was clear what exactly happened to the boy and his father, the Torrance community scrambled to find answers. Members of the Torrance Elementary School PTA asked local officials for support to return the boy home.
García Lara has attended the school since he was in the first grade.
“I want to see my friends again, who are everything to me,” the boy told Univision.
For days, parents and community members only had partial information about the boy’s whereabouts.
“We’re all searching for answers,” Torrance Elementary PTA volunteer Ria Villanueva told The Times before it was revealed that García-Banegas and his son would be deported. “When something like this happens, it shakes all of us in the community. There’s not a child at our school that we don’t treat as our own.”
García-Banegas has an older son, who is about to graduate from high school in Los Angeles. His son Kevin arrived in California from Honduras about nine months after his father and younger brother.
García-Banegas and his younger son will remain in Honduras, but Kevin remains in the United States with his aunt, according to reporting from Univision. He recently applied for a juvenile visa with the help from an immigration attorney.
“It hurts that Kevin stayed there and he’s already grown up, but it hurts all of me,” the father said.
