Ruptured Families: The U.S. Citizen Children Left Behind by Deportations
More than 800,000 Texan kids with citizenship depend on an undocumented parent. Trump’s immigration crackdown is tearing their households apart.
Since 1954

Jesús Jank Curbelo is a special investigative correspondent for the Observer covering immigration and immigrant communities. He is a freelance Cuban journalist based in Texas, and he has written for High Country News, El País, and Letras Libres.
More than 800,000 Texan kids with citizenship depend on an undocumented parent. Trump’s immigration crackdown is tearing their households apart.
Refugees from Cuba have always had to struggle for success in America. In Trump’s second term, they’ve been plunged into legal chaos.
The Cuban government has been blaming the United States for its problems since 1959—sometimes rightly, sometimes not. At this point, my only position comes from seeing a grandmother's coffee contraption and a 12-year-old rationing his phone battery.
My life as an immigrant is summarized as paying for a car to go to work and working to pay for that car.
After unprecedented protests swept Cuba, a huge wave of people fled. A journalist shares his saga of being smuggled to the U.S.-Mexico border.