Since Marietou Ouattara was a child, she remembers welcoming each new year with the same routine: In the evening on New Year’s Eve, her father would drop her, her sister and their mother at her aunt’s house in University Heights in the Bronx, then continue his shift as a taxi driver.
With the Times Square ball drop on the TV in the background, the siblings and their mother would spend the last hours of the year sharing food like chicken with attiéké, an Ivorian side dish made from fermented cassava, with a light, couscous-like texture and nutty flavor. Together, they reflected on the last year as well as the memories they hoped to create in the upcoming year.
Around midnight, the last step of their routine would arrive through a phone call from their father — Seydou Ouattara, 57, who would park his cab near 42nd Street in Midtown and wished them a Happy New Year, while boasting to the siblings that he was near the ball drop that they had just watched on TV.
“My sister and I would always look forward to having a phone call with him, or him saying he’s by 42nd, and the amount of people he saw, the confetti and everything,” Marietou said.
This year, although most of the steps remained the same, the phone call they received from their dad did not come from Midtown. Instead it came from thousands of miles away in Ivory Coast, the country where Seydou Ouattara had been deported the day before Christmas.
The Ouattaras are one of thousands of New York families reshaped by Trump’s deportation agenda. In the first year of his second term, through Oct. 15, 2025, 4,177 immigrants apprehended in New York state were deported, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) data originally obtained by the Deportation Data Project. Of those, 2,454 were, like Seydou Ouattara, immigrants without criminal convictions, with 851 self deporting. These deportations not only leave a void in the communities where immigrants have cemented themselves for years, but often force families left behind to take on new roles to support themselves financially. For the families that spoke with Documented, their new year’s resolutions center around reuniting with their loved ones.
“[We] just looked forward to being in the same time zone and that phone call, and him coming into the house a couple of hours later,” Marietou said.
Marietou, 22, laughed as she described her father as someone who embodies typical dad behavior. Every weekend he woke up around 5 a.m. and would turn the volume of the TV very loud. She explained that as a taxi driver of nearly three decades, her father spent most of the day driving around the city and only returned at night. “He used to work a lot,” she said.
Her dad had been living in the Bronx for 31 years since migrating from Ivory Coast with a student visa. Having overstayed, Seydou Ouattara had to check in yearly with the ICE since 2007, Marietou explained. She added the family had always been nervous the days he went to Federal Plaza, including during the pandemic when he made the effort to not miss any of the appointments and checked in online. “He used to say: ‘I rather go there instead of them coming to take me.’ He always made sure to check in,” she said.
And he had always returned home, until Oct. 9, 2025. “This was one of our biggest fears and it happened,” Marietou said. With statistics showing that 60 percent of ICE arrests in New York during Trump’s second term have been of immigrants without criminal convictions or pending charges, the Ouattara family was very nervous this time around. She said her father even took with him a copy of his approved I-130 petition, on which she had sponsored him last year. The form, which establishes a relationship between an immigrant and a U.S. citizen or Lawful Permanent Resident, was the first step to give him the opportunity to apply for a Green Card.
The number of deportations of New Yorkers without convictions is expected to rise once the full year’s data is available. In the period beginning Jan. 20, 2025 and ending Oct. 15, 2025, deportations in New York of immigrants without criminal convictions increased by 1,058 percent compared to the year before. Biden’s DHS deported 212 immigrants without criminal convictions in New York during the same period in 2024.
On Dec. 16, on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY-14) — who represents the family’s district and had assisted them — said: “President Trump ran on a promise to the American people that ICE would go after the ‘worst of the worst’ … but what we have seen is that ICE is not overwhelmingly going after criminals. In fact, over 70 percent of people currently detained in detention facilities do not have a criminal record.”
Ocasio-Cortez added that Trump had deported a six-year-old in her district, and targeted students for their political views, including people born and raised in the U.S.
When asked at a press conference Thursday if ICE was likely to continue arresting people without criminal convictions, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said, “We’re continuing to do our work to bring those criminal illegal aliens to justice and ICE will continue to get up every day and do what they can to protect New York City.”
Marietou disagrees that her father meets that criteria. “Somebody that goes to work, comes back, takes care of his children is deemed as a criminal, jailed and detained, just because he wants a better life for his children and has been in this country for 30 years,” she said.
Like Seydou Ouattara, O. Herrera, a Honduran national who was deported in October of last year, told Documented that he was also trying to do the right thing and follow the law by showing up to his ICE appointments.
Herrera migrated with his wife and children in 2023, presenting themselves at the border to seek asylum. He was required to check in with ICE every year, since he already had an order of removal from attempting to enter through the border in 2014. He checked-in with ICE without issues in September 2023 and 2024. This past year was different.
“I had an appointment with ICE on September 25, and they told me that they were going to arrest me because I had a deportation order from 2014,” the 59-year-old father told Documented in Spanish via a phone call from Honduras, where he has been since October of 2025. “When they [ICE] told me that they were going to deport me, my son started to cry.”
B., Herrera’s wife, who requested the use of only an initial due to an ongoing asylum case, said that their 8-year-old son could not stop crying during the hour-long train ride from Federal Plaza to their home in the Kingsbridge neighborhood of the Bronx, even though he did not understand what a deportation meant.
“He asked me: ‘Mom, when am I going to see my dad?’ I told him that I did not know,” she said in Spanish.
Also Read: Airport ICE Arrests See a 94% Spike — Putting Thousands of Immigrants In Danger
That same day she decided to leave the Bronx and join her cousins in Maryland, she said, due to fear of being deported like her husband.
Beyond the ongoing emotional impact, the financial impact turned her life upside down. “Imagine me, alone here, without him. He was the only breadwinner. I did not work because I had to take my son to school, I went to pick him up, and I would make breakfast and lunch for him,” the 46-year-old mother said, holding back tears.
Now, B. has gotten a job that requires her to wake up at 3 a.m. for a delivery distribution center and work many hours. “It is not easy. It has been difficult without my husband,” B. said. “Thank God I was able to find a job, even though it is only enough to pay the rent.”
The financial impact of a deportation is also something shared by the Ouattara family, Marietou said. “I have also picked up another job, so I work two jobs now to try to keep things afloat. But it’s been very hard to say the least,” she said, adding that she works more than 60 hours a week. She said she had to sacrifice going to graduate school to ensure that her family remained afloat. She is also the one that has been dealing with the legal aspect of hoping to bring her father back.
你知道吗？非公民办理驾照时的这个错误可能会导致选民欺诈
During their conversations with their dad back home, both sisters said that he tries to distract them by making jokes. “He said that I am working too much,” Marietou said, laughing at the comment because it was something that she used to tell him during his 12-hour taxi shifts.
Herrera said he is hoping to return to the U.S. and plans to make an appointment with an immigration lawyer in Honduras. Meanwhile, Marietou hopes to be reunited in the Bronx with her father this year. “The fight doesn’t end here just because he’s out of the country. He’s been here for almost 30 years,” Marietou said. “You can’t just give it up just because somebody wants to … put a percentage or make a quota.”
