Trump’s CBP Disappears Portland Mom and U.S. Citizen Kids

Jackie and her kids had been missing for four days. 

When Mimi Lettunich, a family friend with powerful social connections in Portland, Oregon, learned of their disappearance, she spared no effort to locate the immigrant mother and her four U.S. citizen children. 

It would take another eight days — and an unorthodox road trip by a hands-on member of Congress — before the Trump administration would even disclose where it was holding the family. And it would be four days after that before the children were released to Lettunich and set free from conditions likened in a congressional hearing to “psychological torture.”

The story of Jackie Merlos is singular and conscience-shocking. “They literally disappeared her — kept her from due process in the presence of her four U.S. citizen children,” Rep. Maxine Dexter, who serves Portland in Congress, tells Rolling Stone. But her experience is also emblematic of the full-throttle mass-deportation machinery put into motion by the Trump administration. “Our government is kidnapping people,” Dexter says, “and holding them in incredibly inhumane situations.”

The Merlos family nightmare began, ironically, with a hug, at Peace Arch Park.

Kenia Jackeline “Jackie” Merlos is the mother of four children under the age of 10. Although she arrived undocumented from Honduras more than two decades ago, Jackie was a model non-citizen, with a pending U-visa, a work permit, and no criminal record. She and her husband Carlos own a small business in Portland. Jackie had been the worship director in her church. 

For the Merlos family, early summer was a season of reunion: Jackie’s parents had flown to the United States on valid tourist visas. With her mom, Juana, and her four kids, Jackie drove from Portland to the U.S.-Canada border for the afternoon of June 28 to have a picnic with Jackie’s sister, Flor, and her family, legal residents of Canada.

Peace Arch Park sits astride the border, near Vancouver. Maintained by both British Columbia and Washington state, the park doesn’t have a clearly delineated boundary between the two countries, and it has long functioned as a neutral space for cross-border reunions and international exchange. (During the pandemic, cross-border lovers canoodled in the park without attending to international quarantine controls.)

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The Merlos family picnic took a devastating turn when Flor was giving goodbye hugs to her relatives. The family was intercepted by Customs and Border Patrol agents, who claimed Flor had crossed illegally into the United States. The CPB agents took the whole clan into custody. A spokesperson for CBP told Rolling Stone in a statement that its agents “arrested Kenia Jackeline Merlos at Peace Arch Park as she attempted to smuggle illegal aliens into the United States.”

To Jackie’s advocates, this notion is nonsense. Jackie’s father and her husband, Carlos, had remained in Portland because there wasn’t room in the family car for more passengers. “If you’re smuggling somebody, you’re certainly not bringing your four young children and your elderly mother,” Lettunich tells Rolling Stone. 

The government never brought smuggling charges against anyone. Flor and her kids were soon released back to Canada. Jackie’s mother Juana, despite her tourist visa, was transferred to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility. But Jackie and her four children disappeared into off-the-grid federal custody, while the Trump administration attempted to speed-run their removal from the United States. 

The family remained hidden from friends, a lawyer hired on their behalf, and even Rep. Dexter, who made it a mission to physically track down her missing constituents. In the meantime, Carlos, the children’s father, was also seized and detained by ICE. This story has been pieced together from congressional and court documents, interviews with Dexter and Lettunich, as well as comment from CPB.

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The mistreatment of the Merlos family — and in particular the citizen children — offers context for why the ICE building in Portland has become a hotspot of local protest, and a focal point for Donald Trump’s militarized crackdown on dissent.

At a moment when anti-immigrant hysteria affects the highest levels of our national government, likely hundreds if not thousands of similar stories are unfolding outside of public scrutiny, as law abiding immigrants and even their citizen children are being torn from the fabric of their communities and unjustly exiled from America. 

Mimi Lettunich runs a creative agency and lives in a wooded, modernist home in Portland’s prosperous West Hills, where she invited Rolling Stone for an interview in late September. She had known Jackie and Carlos for nearly 20 years; the couple’s firm had done work on a remodel of Lettunich’s home, and the two women became fast friends. “Jackie and I are like sisters,” she says.

When Jackie and her children were first detained, Lettunich had been out of town attending to a death in the family. She returned home July 2 to news that her friends were missing. “I talked to Carlos that evening,” Lettunich recalls. For the Merlos family, the nightmare was about to widen. “By the next morning he was taken,” she says of Carlos, by federal immigration agents.

The following days, encompassing the 4th of July holiday, were a blur. “We started calling everybody we could. We got an attorney. We got some national groups involved. And we started navigating the chaos of the immigration system,” Lettunich says. “Make a phone call. Somebody tells you to call somebody else. You call — it’s a dead end. It’s very challenging. I feel horrible for people that don’t have other resources,” she says. “How they’re finding their loved ones has gotta be just a nightmare.”

The days ticked by. Jackie and her children didn’t turn up through any of the online locator tools maintained by the Department of Homeland Security. Lettunich reached out to Rep. Dexter through a mutual friend to see if the congresswoman — newly elected in 2024 — could help. 

Dexter was all in. The freshman legislator is a medical doctor who has carved out a lane in Congress fighting for the due process rights of immigrants. Earlier this year she joined a congressional delegation that traveled to El Salvador demanding the release of Kilmar Abrego Garcia from that nation’s foul gulag.

But even a member of Congress couldn’t get a straight answer from the Trump administration. “Nothing from CBP or ICE was helpful,” Dexter tells Rolling Stone. “They’re like, ‘We don’t know where they are. Maybe they’re in Blaine or Ferndale,’” she says, naming Washington state cities with immigrant detention facilities. 

On Thursday, July 10, Dexter decided to take matters into her own hands. “Carrie, my chief, and I just got in the car, and we’re like, ‘We’re gonna go try to find them.’” As the congresswoman headed north, she and her staff were still gathering information, and leading a loose caravan up the interstate. “Mimi was a couple hours behind us.” 

Dexter zeroed in on CPB lockups, because few ICE centers can hold children and they’re not supposed to hold U.S. citizens. By policy, CPB facilities are only supposed to hold detainees for 12 hours. “But it’s not illegal to do longer than that,” Dexter says. “And because Jackie was refusing to separate from her children, they couldn’t send her to an ICE facility. So they were caught in this sort of no man’s land, literally, near the border.”

Late in that afternoon, Dexter and her crew pulled up at the CPB facility in Ferndale, outside Bellingham, Washington, well north of Seattle. “We literally rang the bell. I said, ‘I’m Congresswoman Maxine Dexter. I’m here looking for a family.” The representative was told she’d have to wait for the arrival of the facility supervisor. Dexter persisted: “Can you just tell us if we’re in the right place? And he was like, ‘Yes, you are.’”

“That’s the first time somebody was recognizing that they had custody of these kids and their mom,” she says.

Dexter alone was allowed to enter the lockup, without her phone, to see where her constituents were jailed. “It’s a windowless cell to the outside,” she recalls. “But there’s a soundproof glass window that the guards can look through. There’s no privacy at all. The lights go on and off all night long.” The cell had a toilet, a “tiny sink,” and a cement bench. “They were the only people at this detention facility. They don’t have food facilities, they don’t have shower facilities. It is not meant for long term detention.” The conditions looked dismal: “There were a few mats on the floor and a couple blankets,” Dexter says. “They had been there 12 days at that point.”

The member of Congress wasn’t allowed to communicate with Jackie. She could only wave, as the mother sat on the floor with her children, praying. “Jackie had no idea who I was, or that we were trying to help her. She didn’t know if her family knew where they were. This is happening on our watch,” Dexter says. “With our taxpayer dollars.”

Attempting to talk sense into the officials in the scene, Dexter objected to the jailing of the Merlos children, insisting: “They didn’t do anything wrong. You can’t just detain them.” The officials countered that Jackie wouldn’t let herself be separated. “Would you?” Dexter shot back. “You don’t know if you’ll ever get to see your kids again.”

“I’m a mother,” she tells Rolling Stone during an interview from her district office in a federal building in Portland. “I wouldn’t agree to have my kids removed from me either.”

Locating Jackie and the children didn’t end the drama. Federal authorities were still attempting to rush the family out of the country. Dexter had arrived on a Thursday, and stayed overnight in a hotel. The next day she presented again at the facility with Jackie’s attorney. But the family was already being moved around by federal authorities, who were pressing forward with a plan to remove Jackie and the kids from the country. “They put them in a van and went to Portland to go try to find the paperwork that they needed to get them passports,” Dexter says. 

The government claimed that Jackie had signed an order for voluntary removal — but would not produce that paperwork, even for Dexter. The children didn’t have passports, and to obtain them the government needed their father’s consent. Jackie’s team soon learned the government had taken pictures of the children to the ICE detention center in Tacoma where Carlos was being held, and had him sign documents verifying these were his offspring. “They showed him photos of each of his kids, and said, ‘Is this your child? Yes? Sign this form,’” says Dexter. “It was the form to get them passports.”

For Jakie’s advocates, it was time to pull out all the stops. Dexter dressed down the Congressional Affairs liaison for CBP, warning him that effectuating the involuntary removal of four American citizens would be an “enormous illegal maneuver, and I, as a member of Congress, will not stand silent on that.” Simultaneously, Jackie’s lawyer filed a request for a temporary restraining order in federal court to block Jackie and her children from leaving the country. 

That restraining order came through Monday morning, with the judge detailing that Jackie had been “serially re-located and denied contact with counsel” in ruling to block her removal from the court’s jurisdiction. The order went into effect just hours before the Merlos family were scheduled to board a flight.

Only when its hands were tied by the court did the government move to release Jackie’s kids. “I got a call the day we got the TRO,” Lettunich recalls. “They say, ‘We have the Merlos children. Would you like to come get them?” It was the first time the idea had been floated, and suddenly the government was behaving, Lettunich says, as if the children had just wrapped up a play date. “Come get them.” Lettunich rushed to the pickup at SeaTac airport. ”I still didn’t get to see Jackie, but we picked up four children — with four new passports.”

Rolling Stone reached out to the Department of Homeland Security with a detailed list of questions about the Merlos family’s experience. A CPB spokesperson responded with a brief emailed statement about Jackie: “At her request, her children initially remained with her in CBP custody. She is now in ICE custody, and formal removal proceedings are underway.” The statement adds: “For clarity, DHS does not deport U.S. citizens. In cases involving minors, parents are given the choice to accompany their children during removal proceedings, or alternatively, to have the children placed with a designated guardian of the parent’s choosing.”

In the car with Lettunich, the kids revealed a secret. “Mimi, Mom wrote you a note.” One of the children had left the facility with a coloring book provided by the feds. On the first page was a handwritten note to Lettunich offering thanks and parenting pointers — asking that the kids be careful near the swimming pool and noting an upcoming orthodontist appointment. “I will miss my babies. Please take care of them. This is so hard,” Jackie wrote, adding: “We are on God’s hand.”

Lettunich and her husband were aspiring empty nesters. “I have two boys. They’re both drinking age,” she says. In her mid 50s, Lettunich has now been vaulted back into caregiving for nine-year-old triplets — two boys and a girl — and one younger brother, seven. The children share a bedroom, and have the run of the lower floor of the Lettunich home, which has a basketball hoop and a life-size sculpture of a bull by the covered pool.

Debriefing the children from the traumatic experience of their incarceration, Lettunich learned that they had been questioned by federal agents, away from their mother. She testified to this in an unsworn “shadow” congressional hearing held by Democrats in Washington D.C.  in mid-September. Lettunich denounced “the state sponsored abuse the children endured.” As she described it, “Agents interrogated the children without Jackie. They were asked: Where did they live? Did they have any money? Did they have relatives? Did they have a father? Shortly thereafter, ICE took their dad,” Lettunich said. “The children believed that was their fault.”

Jackie is now being held in an ICE facility where she can be reached by phone and is an active part of the children’s parenting. “They talk every day,” says Lettunich. The Merlos children, she says, “are strong, really, smart, confident kids, which is a tribute to how they’ve been raised. That said,” she adds, “they’re in trauma. They’re seeing a psychologist. A couple of them have night constant nightmares.”

The four children have their clothes and possessions organized in a tidy series of bins with their names on them, spaced throughout their bedroom, and on shelves in the closet. Attached to a mirror are family photos of the Merlos children from the before times, clinging affectionately to their parents. 

Here is also taped a handwritten note from Jackie to her children, in Spanish, decorated with an array of small pink hearts. “Pardon me for not being there,” it reads, promising the children that she is saving up all the hugs and little kisses she has not been able to give them directly. “What’s happening to us won’t last a lifetime,” Jackie adds. “I only ask, my children, that you be patient and that we trust in God that the best is yet to come.”

Jackie has so far been denied release, and her next court date is October 14. After weeks in detention, her mother, Juana, was finally set free in late September, telling The Oregonian: “I’m so traumatized that I have nightmares that I’m still there.” As detailed on the family’s Go Fund Me page, Carlos lost his own hearing in early October. Lettunich tells Rolling Stone he was deported to Honduras on October 7. “It’s hard to be optimistic,” she admits.

Dexter holds up the Merlos family story against the promises of Trump and his administration to to target violent offenders and drug dealers for deportation. “This story is so egregious and so cruel — and so clearly not what the American people thought Donald Trump was going to be doing,” she says. “He said he was going after the ‘worst of the worst’ — and cleaning up crime and getting fentanyl out of our communities.” 

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By contrast, she says, “These folks are tax-paying, law-abiding Christians — employing community members and sending their kids to Christian school. There’s nothing about them that our community wants to have removed — and yet this is who they are pursuing and won’t let out.“

She insists the administration is abusing other families like Jackie’s, who don’t have the resources or the family connections to make their stories heard. And she says the administration is using the machinery of mass deportation to keep millions more on edge — carrying their passports and green cards at all times because they are frightened that they could be snatched off the street.

“You don’t use fear to control people,” Dexter says, “unless you have nefarious goals.”