The phone rings, it’s dad, who has become as small as a cell phone screen, and who is far away, in a place called Lima, Peru. “Ashley, my baby!” the father greets his daughter, with a voice that sounds distant in the Miami Gardens apartment where they lived together for years. The girl is focused on the music coming from her tablet, ignoring him. “Ashley, my pretty little Chinese girl!” the father says again, but the girl acts as if she doesn’t hear him, while she starts hitting herself. “Chinita, don’t hit yourself like that!” the father pleads, who seems, for the moment, not only to have lost all authority, but to pass as a stranger to his daughter. The mother bursts into tears. The father too. They imagine that Ashley, accustomed to Walter Marcelino Chao taking her to school, or hugging her before bed, now doesn’t recognize him. If they show her a video of Walter showering her with affection, Ashley turns her face away. If he calls her to see how she woke up, she turns her back. “We don’t know now how she processes her ideas,” says the father. In reality, no one has yet assimilated that he was deported by the United States Government, after imploring the authorities not to allow him to leave his family alone.
María Choque, Ashley’s 56-year-old mother, was 39 when she was confirmed not only to be pregnant, but that the baby would be born with Down syndrome. The doctors recommended terminating the pregnancy. María resisted. “If God blessed me with a child, at my age, I was going to continue with my process,” she says. But the doctors insisted on an abortion, until Walter confronted them. “I told a doctor: look, this doesn’t concern you, you’re not going to support her, and if that being on the way comes out with five arms and eight heads, it’s not your problem, it’s my daughter.”
Ashley was born in 2008 with a diagnosis of Down syndrome and autism. “It’s been 17 years dedicated to her,” says the mother. The girl doesn’t speak and also suffers from seizures, which have worsened since her father is not home. It is Mrs. María who picks her up from the floor if she falls, who takes her to the bathroom, dresses her, and accompanies her on the school bus to a special school, tasks she previously shared with Walter. Once, a long time ago, María entered her room and saw Ashley hugging her father tightly on the bed. “I said, Lord, if someday you have to take me, take me, but keep them together.”
The immigration authorities took the husband, leaving an bottomless void in the house. When Walter, 60, arrived after his shift as an Uber or Lyft driver on Miami’s major avenues, Ashley would rush to jump on him. It was, they say, pure kisses, pure hugs. The girl couldn’t translate into words the fact that her father wasn’t there, but María has found her sitting at the foot of the stairs with a lost look, as if waiting eternally for someone. “She looks at me as if to say: when will my dad arrive?” Sometimes María comforts her: “You know what?” she tells her. “At some point, dad will come back. And she keeps looking at me.”
Every day, at five in the morning, Walter religiously calls his wife and asks her how she woke up and how the girl slept. At times Walter breaks down and confesses to María that it’s too much for him: “I miss the life I had there.” It was 25 years in Miami, more than enough time to become the stranger he now is in his own country. Peru received him as a stranger. “Lima has grown so much commercially, before there weren’t so many businesses, so many people, the routes have changed, the streets have been widened, even today I can’t get used to it, I don’t recognize it. Except for a few friends, very few people remember me.”
Sometimes he looks out the window of the family home he returned to and reviews his fears one by one: María and Ashley’s expenses, which now depend on government aid; the monthly rent payment; how much the mother has to work cleaning houses; the care of the girl and the cancer. María was diagnosed with stage four metastatic cancer in her femur, after ICE locked him in a detention center.
“María is the human being I have lived with for thirty years. We had the three of us. It’s as if my arms had been cut off,” says Walter, almost apologizing for bursting into tears. “I try to feel good, but I can’t. I know what my wife is facing and I’m here. It’s awful. It’s like they tie your hands and leave you only your neck to look.”
“I love you, take care”
On December 30, 2025, while Walter was spending his days detained at the Alligator Alcatraz detention center, under the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), María entered the operating room of Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami. Three years earlier, her breasts had been removed due to breast cancer, which had now appeared in her right femur. María kept it quiet, saying she didn’t want to worry Walter, who was already stressed by the confinement and the psoriasis that was breaking out on his body.
Although the doctor recommended her to stay hospitalized for two days after the operation, the mother refused to remain hospitalized. With fevers and chills, she returned home, without anyone who could spend the night with Ashley. The husband only learned of her illness after he had already been deported, almost a month later. “Why didn’t you tell me anything?” he asked her. “Because we didn’t want to worry you. Because we had the hope that you would return.”
Walter had always returned. María, a devout believer in God, dreamed during those days that she was strolling through Bayside Mall and that ICE agents passed by her without seeing her. The interpretation for her was clear: God had made them invisible to the eyes of immigration agents. But the morning of November 17, 2025, was the last one with her husband. “We had breakfast and he told me he would be back for lunch. And he never came back.”
Walter appeared that day, as every year, before the immigration authorities at the Miramar offices. They had arrived in the United States from Lima with tourist visas: he in 2000; she a year later. They had settled in Miami and opted for another life: she cleaning houses; he in a fish sales company. In 2007, while checking the trunk of his car outside his work, ICE officers pointed a gun at his back. They were looking for someone, it wasn’t him, but the authorities took several of the undocumented workers from the place.
Walter was in detention for 15 days, until the company paid $15,000 for him to be released on bail. “They loved him, they esteemed him very much,” María assures. In 2011, after Ashley was born, the father was given a deportation order after losing his political asylum case. Since then, he went every year to present himself to the Miramar authorities. On one occasion, he explained to the officials that he was the father of a disabled child, and that, please, they should consider not expelling him from the country. The officers granted him a supervision order. “They did everything to help me,” Walter assures.
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Year after year, he showed authorities documents proving he was responsible for a child with Down syndrome and autism. “They always reviewed the case, checked it, and let me go because I was dedicated to my daughter,” he recounts. Until now. The rules over the last year and a half, under the Donald Trump Administration, have been devastating. The order was to capture as many migrants as possible, so much so that in fiscal year 2025, the total number of expulsions from the country was 442,637, according to official government figures.
This time he arrived in Miramar and an officer told him he couldn’t leave. “Madam, please, I’ve been presenting myself for years without any problem, you can check the records, my tax payments, I have a disabled child, she doesn’t speak, she has Down syndrome and her mother is in remission from breast cancer, don’t deport me,” he told her. The officer asked a question: “Is the child an American citizen?” The father replied yes. “And that was the last time I spoke with an immigration officer, until they put me on a plane three months later.”
U.S. authorities have labeled every migrant they could capture as a criminal, without stopping to evaluate individual cases. Attorney Liudmila Marcelo, who works in South Florida, explained to EL PAÍS that people with a deportation order under ICE supervision who also have immediate citizen or resident family members with serious health problems can appeal using Form 246 called “Application for Stay of Deportation or Removal.” “This form must be accompanied by evidence such as medical records, a declaration from the citizen or resident family member explaining in detail how the absence of this person would affect them if the deportation order is carried out, evidence of tax payments, letters of recommendation, police records, and a valid passport, among others.”
The lawyer explains that, in previous years, ICE granted these stays of deportation “for a period of one year, after which the person had to submit another and thus remained under their supervision order, with their work permit and supporting their family.” However, in recent months the situation has been different. “It has been observed that ICE denies these requests more frequently, or simply does not respond. If the person is detained, it is much less likely that they will respond before being deported, although legally they should respond before carrying out the deportation.”
Walter, with a pending court date, didn’t even have time to appear before a judge. On January 28, 2026, he was put on a plane in Texas, which landed hours later in Guayaquil, Ecuador. There were about fifty Peruvian citizens who, after a two-hour stopover, handcuffed, arrived at a military airport in Lima. His country had no objections to receiving them. According to figures from the National Institute of Statistics and Informatics (INEI), 1,060,000 Peruvian citizens reside in the United States, of whom about 300,000 live in an irregular migratory situation. Although there are no figures on how many Peruvian migrants the Donald Trump government has deported in the last fiscal year, Peruvian authorities speak of about 12,000 undocumented people returned to the country since 2022.
In María’s ears, Walter’s phrase still resonates from the day they took him away. “They took me prisoner,” she heard her husband say in a quick call. “I love you, take care. He said nothing else.”
“I didn’t commit any crime”
The cell phone rings in the Miami Gardens house, and this time it’s not Walter, but the doctor, who has warned María that she must go to the hospital urgently due to an increase in liver enzymes. She may have an inflamed or damaged liver. María tells him she’s sorry, but she can’t leave like that and leave the girl without anyone to care for her.
María and Walter are among those who believe that people are scared by other people’s misfortunes. The few acquaintances have distanced themselves. “They think you’re going to call them to ask for money,” says María. A cousin disappeared the day they asked her to leave a power of attorney to transfer parental authority over Ashley, in case something happened to her mother. “We understand that it is difficult to assume the guardianship of a human being with a disability. But in reality, that is the human condition. When you are not needed, or you are useless, they turn their backs on you,” says Walter.
It was a friend from decades ago who was willing to take on the responsibility of sending the girl to Peru in the mother’s absence. Walter wanted to get ahead: “If María was detained or something happened, my daughter would practically be at the mercy of the State, in an orphanage. That is our fear. I don’t want my daughter to go to any detention center.”
The other possibility, a definitive return of the entire family to Peru, is not an option they are considering. Walter himself has not been able to find work since he came to live with his sick mother in the Chorrillos district. “I am 60 years old and I have arrived in a place where they don’t know me, where it is difficult for a young man to find work, imagine for a person like me.” Nor, he says, is there a life for a disabled child in his country, nor help like they receive in the United States.
Against all logic, a faith continues to sustain the family. “I trust that something will happen with Walter, because this girl needs her dad,” says María. He still can’t find an explanation for the fact that he was separated from his family like this. “I didn’t commit any crime, the only thing I did in 25 years in that country was support my family,” says Walter. María still keeps the last pajamas her husband wore and took off the morning he ended up in ICE’s hands. “I haven’t washed them, I have them there, I want to see my husband in Miami wearing those pajamas.” María thinks he will come back, it has been a whole life together. She believes it cannot be any other way.
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