HOME ALONE

ICE got Dad, then Mom. Now the Perez kids are fending for themselves.

- By Samantha Michaels

AS HER OLDER siblings prepare breakfast, 13-year-old Cynthia Perez waits at the kitchen table, not very hungry.

“I’m nervous,” she tells her mom’s friend Mariana Blanco, who gently brushes the girl's long brown hair.

“I know you are, love,” Blanco says. “It’s gonna be okay.”

It’s a March morning in Palm Beach County, Florida, and a big day for the four Perez children: They are missing school and work to testify via video in their mom’s final immigration hearing, where a judge will decide whether she’s coming home or getting deported to Guatemala.

Both their parents have been detained since last fall—their dad at Alligator Alcatraz and then a detention center in Georgia, their mom at a federal facility in Arizona. The kids, all US citizens, have been on their own for months, leaning on Blanco and each other. Fifteen-year-old Romeo Jr. is the stoic one, who dreams of becoming a surgeon. Jessica, 18, the bubbly and creative one, is considering military service after high school. Eliza, 21, is the practical one. After her parents were detained, she dropped out of college, where she'd planned to study computer science, to take over the family landscaping business and pay the rent.

I ask Cynthia about her own personality, and she flashes a grin. The “annoying” one, she tells me. Always joking and teasing her siblings. “I mean, I am the youngest, so I like to play, but now I’m just...I just don’t want to do nothing,” she adds quietly.

“She used to be a lot more talkative,” Eliza tells me. “I feel like we're all quiet now.”

Cynthia looks uninterestedly at her waffles and strawberries. They're in the kitchen of the Guatemalan-Maya Center, a nonprofit for immigrants that Blanco helps lead, and soon they'll be talking with the judge and a Homeland Security attorney. Blanco quizzes her: “What are you gonna say if they ask you: ‘If your mom gets deported, what are you gonna do?”