Children Disappear on the Way to School – The Ongoing Case of Elizabeth Zuna Caisaguano

Elizabeth Zuna Caisaguano is 10 years old, a fourth grader in Columbia Heights, part of her school community since kindergarten. On January 6, in the first week after winter break, she left the house in the morning with her mother Rosa, on the way to school. She never arrived there. Immigration enforcement officers stopped them and took both of them with them. Elizabeth managed to call her father Luis. They told her she would be taken to school. He left immediately, waited in front of the building, spoke with the administration, with teachers, with the school leadership. Elizabeth did not come. At the end of that day, he learned that his daughter and his wife had already been transferred to the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas.

Since then, Elizabeth’s desk has stood empty. Classmates ask where she is. Teachers explain as best they can why a child is suddenly missing, without a goodbye, without a message. Elizabeth belongs in a classroom, not behind barbed wire. Her family is doing everything to bring her back. But the process is complex, time critical, and expensive. Lawyers must be paid, transportation organized, the bare essentials for daily life in the facility obtained. Conditions in detention centers are minimal, often inadequate. Without outside support, even food is lacking.

In this case as well, we are of course providing support wherever possible. With Elizabeth, the proceedings are not yet concluded – not for substantive reasons, but because decisions are delayed, postponed, or simply pushed aside. Nevertheless, pressure is being applied here as well. The case stands for a larger picture: hundreds of proceedings running in parallel, most of them invisible, without headlines, without images. And yet the same principle applies for us in every single case. Whenever we learn of a case, we try to support, to mediate, to establish contacts, and to get processes moving. Not selectively, not based on attention, but based on possibility and responsibility.

Elizabeth is not an isolated case. On January 23, 2026, the ordeal ended for Diana Crespo. The seven year old was traveling with her parents on January 15, 2026 in Oregon when they were detained in a hospital parking garage. Diana had severe nosebleeds that would not stop. They sought medical help. Three unmarked vehicles surrounded the car. The parents, Darianny Liseth Gonzalez De Crespo and Yohendry De Jesus Crespo, were forced out of the vehicle and restrained. Diana was not allowed to see a doctor, even though she continued to bleed. This family too was taken to the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, where another child had already been held previously. Diana developed a fever that lasted for days. Only after almost a week was she allowed to see a doctor.

The Oregon Nurses Association described this operation as alarming, shocking, and deeply shameful. And Diana is not the only one. In the same facility, there are other children from Liam’s school district, including two brothers, a second grader and a fifth grader. They were detained together with their mother at a routine court appointment. No violence, no flight, no risk. Just the wrong address at the wrong time. In these cases as well, assistance has already been organized.

She is still being held with her mother Rosa at the facility in Dilley, Texas. Detained on January 6, on the way to school. Still there. “It is the same situation as with Liam,” said Carolina Gutierrez, secretary at Elizabeth’s school, “but there were no pictures.” No video that went viral. No headlines. Just an empty desk.

What is happening here is not an isolated incident. Children are deliberately torn from their daily lives, from classrooms, hospitals, cars on the way to school. Parents are restrained in front of their eyes. Medical care is denied. The procedures run technically correctly, formally cleanly, but are humanly devastating. The separation is abrupt, final, traumatic.

These children are not only missing from their families. They are missing from their classes, their friends, their teachers. They are missing from textbooks, from playgrounds, from birthday parties. Their disappearance leaves gaps that cannot be explained away. And while lawyers sift through files and donations are collected, the fundamental question remains unanswered: in what country has it become normal for a school commute to end in a deportation detention center? Elizabeth, Diana, and the others should be learning, laughing, getting well. Instead, they learn detention rules, count days, wait for decisions they cannot possibly understand. Their place is not in Dilley, not in Texas, not behind bars. Their place is where they should have arrived that morning: at school.

Entering ICE detention facilities is like stepping into a false world – just moments before, you were still a human being. Nothing more can be carried by such a moment. What is undignified is not the rupture itself, but what you see there: the continued ignoring of human rights, the constant safeguarding of one’s own power, this moving on under the gaze of others whom you cannot take with you, as if the last hope had been lost. A shadow world in which everything outwardly continues. But: we will return, case by case, file by file.

To be continued .....