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Immigration and Customs Enforcement has detained more than 56,000 people as of mid-June of this year, according to Transaction Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC.What the numbers showRising actions by ICE over the last six months, and falling actions by Customs and Border ProtectionNearly 72% of detainees have no criminal record. A family's journey to Omaha“You only leave home when home won't let you stay,” Rachel Yamamoto, Omaha immigration attorney, said as she read the writing on her poem bowl.The rocks in this bowl represent the people she’s helped win asylum for. She glued flags to the rocks and wrote her clients' first names. The smaller rocks with nothing on them represent the dependents included in some of the asylum cases.“You only run for the border when you see the whole city running as well,” Yamamoto said as she continued reading the poem on the bowl.Husband and wife Abel and Maria are two of Yamamoto’s clients.Abel fled gang violence in Guatemala. He came to the U.S. in 2012. He turned himself in at the border. Within a month, he had an expedited order of removal, but they allowed him to do a credible fear interview, which he passed.This allowed him to move forward with his asylum case. He still doesn’t have a scheduled date for his final asylum hearing due to the backlog of cases at the Omaha Immigration Court.In 2014, Maria and her and Abel’s 3-year-old daughter fled to the U.S. for the same reasons as Abel.“They decided to come because they told me they were also looking for me, where I live,” Abel said.She turned herself in at the border, but she didn’t immediately get a credible fear interview like Abel. Instead, ICE placed her under an order of supervision.According to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, this order is issued to someone who has an order of removal, but they’re allowed to remain in the U.S. with a work permit until further action. “Everybody on an order of supervision has been at the mercy of ICE the whole time,” Yamamoto said. “It's very easy to just call them in and have them come to their appointment again, as they have been doing for years, and detain them.”In October 2020, six years later, Maria had her credible fear interview, which the immigration court denied.They’ve lived in Omaha the entire time they’ve been in the U.S., and now they have a 10-year-old son who was born here — making him a U.S. citizen. Their daughter is 14 now.Not just a number: Mother and daughter detained in OmahaDuring Maria’s annual check-in in May of 2025, they put an ankle bracelet on her.“I’ve seen many situations like that when they make that kind of change, they put the ankle bracelet on. It means they’re already going to be detained and don’t let that person go,” Abel said.Immigration attorney breaks down the steps toward citizenshipHe was dropping their son off at school when he got a call from Maria. ICE wanted him to come to the check-in appointment. He said they asked him to show proof of his check-ins, but he hasn’t been required to do check-ins since eight or nine years ago. After verifying his information, they let him go.ICE asked Maria to come back in two weeks in another location and to bring her entire family.“I knew Maria was at a pretty high risk of probably getting detained at her next appointment because of the status of her case,” Yamamoto said.Abel said they went to church as normal a few days before the appointment. “I told her that it all depends on God's hand,” Abel said. “If they detain us, we can’t do anything. If we don’t show up, we are not obeying the law. Whatever happens, we will show up.”On that June 4 appointment, ICE agents allowed Yamamoto to go into the meeting with Maria, while Abel and their two children sat in the waiting room.“They were very polite and calm the whole time,” Yamamoto said. “Nobody ever yelled. Nobody ever got snippy.”She added the ICE agents told Yamamoto she wasn’t allowed to talk.Yamamoto said, “They were going to call back her daughter into the room and have her be detained as well.”Yamamoto said the ICE agents explained they were detaining their daughter because she was with Maria when they crossed the border when she was 3 years old.“She's 14 years old. She had to come in with her mother in 2014 when she was three. She had no awareness of what happened in Guatemala,” Yamamoto said.Abel wasn't able to say goodbye to his wife or daughter and was left to tell their 10-year-old son what happened.“I told him, 'Don't be too sad, we will see them again soon,'” Abel said. “That's what I tell him so he can calm down a bit and not feel so sad.”Right now, Maria and their daughter are together in a detention center in Texas.“They weren’t going to separate them, which at that moment I thought, that's the least you can do is keep a 14-year-old girl with her mother,” Yamamoto said.She added that in her 22 years in law, she’s never seen anything like this.“This detention with Maria is probably when it really hit home that things have changed,” Yamamoto said. “I've had clients, who are children, who were detained at the border and held in those facilities with the cages and everything. But I have never had a minor client detained who's already been living inside the United States.”Get the Facts: Immigration attorney explains pathway to citizenshipShe said Maria and her daughter had no criminal record, and Maria was working legally.“It's prosecutorial discretion. It's baked into the system,” Yamamoto said. “They didn't have to detain her, and they absolutely did not have to detain her daughter. They are following orders. Somebody, somewhere, made that decision to detain these families and these children with their parents. And they did not have to do that.”Yamamoto said Maria has exhausted all of her options. "They came here fleeing violence. They turned themselves in at the border, and then they followed all the rules. I don't know what else they could have possibly done differently," she said.The effects of this are long-lasting for this family. “There are days I don’t work because my son doesn’t want to stay with the person who takes care of him. It’s not the same anymore,” Abel said.This moment even changed their son’s perspective on his future.“When I asked him a year ago, he told me he wanted to be a firefighter. Then this year he said, ‘No, Daddy, I don’t want to be a firefighter anymore.’ So, I asked him, ‘What do you want to be, son?’ He said, ‘I want to work in immigration to protect people,’” Abel said.Yamamoto said Abel has a final hearing for his asylum case, and she’s working to get their daughter an asylum interview.She hopes to add their names to her poem bowl.“I do hope to add Abel’s name to my pile of successes for asylum cases,” Yamamoto said.An ICE spokesperson told Hearst sister station KETV a part of Trump’s focus is to find illegal immigrants who “pose a threat to the security of our communities.”KETV's Madison Perales sent Maria and her daughter’s information to ICE and asked if they were a threat to the security of the community, to which an ICE spokesperson said, "Being in the United States illegally is a threat to the community."ICE added, "De Leon-Us has had five years to adhere to the immigration judges' order and self-deport, but has instead chosen to disregard our immigration laws, remain in the U.S. illegally and to take opportunities from American workers."