Tuesday, May 19, 2026
As OpenAI Celebrates Court Win Against Musk, Other Challenges Lie Ahead
As OpenAI Celebrates Court Win Against Musk, Other Challenges Lie Ahead
“OpenAI won a lawsuit against Elon Musk, allowing it to proceed with its initial public offering. However, the company faces challenges from competitors like Anthropic and Google, who are rapidly improving their AI technologies. OpenAI also faces numerous lawsuits related to copyright infringement and wrongful death, and Musk plans to appeal the recent court decision.
A jury’s rejection of Elon Musk’s $150 billion lawsuit against OpenAI was a major hurdle crossed. But the maker of ChatGPT faces a list of other problems.
Jason Kwon, OpenAI’s head of strategy, celebrated with a team of lawyers in a federal courthouse in Oakland, Calif., on Monday, after Elon’s Musk’s $150 billion lawsuit against the artificial intelligence company was rejected by a nine-member jury in less than two hours.
But Mr. Kwon and OpenAI cannot afford to celebrate for very long.
Although the decision left OpenAI free to continue with its plans for an initial public offering as soon as this year, the company still faces a long list of other challenges as it approaches what could be one of the largest Wall Street debuts in history.
Rival A.I. companies like Anthropic and Google are rapidly improving their technologies, giving OpenAI far more competition than it faced during the first three years of the A.I. boom. Dozens of other lawsuits accuse OpenAI of everything from copyright infringement to wrongful death. And Mr. Musk has already vowed to appeal Monday’s decision.
In a lawsuit filed in 2024, Mr. Musk accused OpenAI, its chief executive, Sam Altman, and its president, Greg Brockman, of breaching the A.I. lab’s founding agreement by putting commercial gain over the public good. Mr. Musk founded OpenAI as a nonprofit in 2015 alongside Mr. Altman and Mr. Brockman, before leaving in a struggle for power.
After Mr. Musk left, Mr. Altman attached a commercial company to the original nonprofit and began raising billions of dollars from Microsoft. OpenAI is now valued at $730 billion.
Mr. Musk asked for a court order unraveling another move OpenAI made last year to give the for-profit company more control. On Monday, after less than two hours of deliberation, the jury said that he had not filed his suit before the expiration of a statute of limitations. It did not actually consider his claims, and Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers dismissed them after the jury’s decision.
If Mr. Musk had succeeded, OpenAI’s plans to go public would have been caught in limbo. But now that its plans can move ahead, OpenAI faces significant business challenges.
Though it has raised tens of billions of dollars in funding over the past several years, OpenAI remains a long way from being profitable. Investors may expect it to close the enormous gap between how much money is heading out the door and how much it is taking in.
The company’s revenues are on the rise amid the rising popularity of Codex, an OpenAI technology that is particularly good at writing computer code. And the company has a new revenue stream now that it has started to serve ads inside ChatGPT. But the competition is doing the same.
In November, Google ratcheted up the pressure when it released a new A.I. model called Gemini 3, saying the technology had surpassed OpenAI’s leading technology and was now the best in the world. Anthropic also started grabbing big chunks of the market with its A.I. technology, called Claude.
In just a few months, Anthropic added thousands of big business customers and more than doubled the revenue it expects to see this year to $19 billion, up from $9 billion last year. A high-profile disagreement with the Defense Department raised Anthropic’s public profile, and its smartphone app climbed to the No. 1 spot in Apple’s App Store.
Anthropic grabbed more headlines when it unveiled a new A.I. system called Claude Mythos and said the technology was too powerful to share with the general public, because hackers could use it to exploit security holes in computer networks with unusual speed. Anthropic shared the technology with only about 40 organizations, so they could use it shore up holes in common internet infrastructure.
OpenAI released its own technology designed specifically for cybersecurity. And its technologies continue to outperform most systems on the market, according to standard benchmarks. But Google is a formidable rival in the ad market. And after Anthropic’s sudden rise, OpenAI faces a battle as it tries to sell its technology to businesses.
In an effort to meet its soaring demand, Anthropic recently made a deal with Mr. Musk’s firm SpaceX to use all of the computing capacity from the rocket company’s Colossus 1 data center in Memphis.
Google and Anthropic declined to comment on the verdict in the trial.
As OpenAI fights its rivals, it also faces myriad battles in the courts.
Book authors, publishers and news organizations have sued OpenAI for copyright infringement, claiming their copyrighted works were illegally used to train its A.I. systems. Many parents and other groups have sued the company for negligence and wrongful death, claiming that ChatGPT contributed to various suicides and school shootings.
(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied the suit’s claims.)
And despite Monday’s decision, the company still faces a legal challenge from Mr. Musk because he and his lawyers said they would appeal.
“The judge and jury never actually ruled on the merits of the case, just on a calendar technicality,” Mr. Musk said in a social media post. “There is no question to anyone following the case in detail that Altman & Brockman did in fact enrich themselves by stealing a charity. The only question is WHEN they did it!”
Peter Molk, a law professor at the University of Florida who specializes in corporate structures, said that while Mr. Musk lost in court on Monday, there was still a chance this case could stir anger in the court of public opinion. And that, he said, could get the attention of the state attorneys general who approved the company’s new for-profit structure.
“This could raise some concerning flags that the state attorneys general could have a reason to revisit OpenAI’s structure,” he said.
Catherine Bracy, who helps lead a coalition of organizations called EyesOnOpenAI, said people should continue to question OpenAI’s restructuring as for-profit. Ms. Bracy, who was in the courtroom for much of the trial, has long complained that California’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, allowed OpenAI’s restructuring to move forward.
“In light of the mounting evidence of OpenAI’s unlawful abdication of its nonprofit mission,” she said, Mr. Bonta “must revisit his agreement with OpenAI, order an independent valuation of the nonprofit’s assets and compel their transfer to a truly independent charitable entity.”
Cade Metz is a Times reporter who writes about artificial intelligence, driverless cars, robotics, virtual reality and other emerging areas of technology.
Natallie Rocha is a San Francisco-based technology reporter and a member of the 2025-26 Times Fellowship class, a program for early-career journalists.“
Monday, May 18, 2026
Catastrophe Is Emerging in the World’s Most Vulnerable Places
Catastrophe Is Emerging in the World’s Most Vulnerable Places
“The humanitarian relief system is facing a severe crisis due to funding cuts and the ongoing Middle East war, which has increased the cost of essential goods like food, fuel, and fertilizer. In Somalia, a country already grappling with drought and conflict, the situation has worsened, with many families struggling to access basic necessities. The war has disrupted global supply chains, leading to delays in aid shipments and further exacerbating the humanitarian crisis in vulnerable regions worldwide.
The humanitarian relief system, decimated by cuts, faces a grave challenge as the Middle East war causes soaring costs for food, fuel and fertilizer.
Photographs by Finbarr O’Reilly
Peter Goodman traveled to Somalia, visiting camps for displaced people, schools, health centers and a hospital for the treatment of malnourished children.
For nine days, they trudged across the parched soil of southern Somalia, taking turns carrying their 3-year-old daughter on their shoulders. Abdullahi Abdi Abdirahman, his wife and their seven children sought escape from a landscape drained of life.
Another drought had killed their goats and sheep, turning their life savings to dust. So they pressed on for 140 miles toward Dollow, a dusty outpost on the Ethiopian border. They were drawn by the same things that had already attracted more than 100,000 other people: International relief organizations were clustered there, offering food, water and health care.
Yet when they arrived in late January at a camp on the fringes of town, they were horrified to learn that aid groups had abandoned the area. President Trump had dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development, or U.S.A.I.D., eliminating Somalia’s primary source of assistance. From London to Berlin, governments had reduced funding for humanitarian aid. Relief organizations had been forced to choose where to focus their remaining money.
Dollow had not made the cut. Inside the camps, thousands of tents remained, but aid was disappearing. Families were losing cash grants for food. Health clinics were bereft of medicines and staff.
The following month, another shock unfolded, as the United States and Israel unleashed war on Iran. The closing of the Strait of Hormuz halted the shipment of oil, fertilizer and other critical commodities from the Persian Gulf. The cost of moving cargo soared. In Somalia, which depends on imports for 70 percent of its food, staple goods like rice and wheat flour doubled in price.
“Milk and meat are just a dream for us,” said Mr. Abdirahman, 47. His family was subsisting on a daily meal of sorghum porridge and wild grasses plucked from nearby riverbanks.
“The children are hungry,” he said. “It hurts.”
As the conflict in the Middle East grinds into its third month, catastrophe is unfolding across the world’s poorest, least stable countries. If hostilities continue beyond June, those confronting acute hunger will swell beyond 363 million people worldwide, an increase of 45 million compared with before the war, the World Food Program warned.
The danger is mounting absent the usual degree of international mobilization.
Four years ago, when Russia began its war on Ukraine, the global supply of fertilizers and grains was disrupted, prompting fears of hunger from sub-Saharan Africa to South Asia. But the pain was limited by $43 billion in humanitarian assistance marshaled by governments and multilateral institutions, according to data compiled by the United Nations. That campaign, which included emergency food aid, water and medical care, was led by $17 billion from the United States.
Last year, overall humanitarian funding dropped to $28 billion, and the United States contributed only $4 billion. Cuts are continuing.
“The system has been eviscerated,” said Kate Phillips-Barrasso, who heads global advocacy at Mercy Corps, an American aid group that runs relief and development programs around the world. The organization led journalists from The New York Times on a reporting trip in Somalia.
“This is the era of indifference,” she said.
Somalia is rife with calamity. In recent decades, the country has suffered civil war, famine, and the unpredictable attacks of Al-Shabaab, a militant Islamist group affiliated with Al Qaeda.
Drought ravaged the most recent harvest. Some 6.5 million people — roughly one third of the population — were suffering hunger at levels deemed an emergency, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization warned in February. That included more than 1.8 million children under 5 facing acute malnutrition.
Those numbers have almost certainly increased given the war. Yet the World Food Program, the largest source of aid in Somalia, has only enough funding to support 300,000 people a month through July, a fraction of the nearly 2 million people a month it was reaching in early 2025.
Humanitarian relief organizations now contemplate a surreal hierarchy of suffering.
“There are different categories of starvation,” said Hameed Nuru, the World Food Program’s Somalia director. “We are only able to reach those who are really on the verge of, if you don’t give them something now, they will not be there tomorrow.”
In some areas, children are still getting food, but not pregnant mothers. “Literally, it’s who dies first,” he said, “and who dies next.”
A Feedback Loop of Trouble
In scores of countries, overlapping crises are now reinforcing one another. Higher prices for food and fuel are limiting the benefit of what aid remains.
Marine traffic diverted from the strait has overwhelmed the port of Salalah in Oman, a hub for cargo that is transferred onto smaller vessels bound for destinations in West Africa.
Because of traffic jams in Oman, a World Food Program shipment that included split peas from Kenya and cereals from Belgium recently arrived 40 days late at the port of Berbera in the north of Somalia. That held up enough supplies to feed 500,000 women and children for a month.
In Sudan, scene of the world’s most dire humanitarian disaster, some areas are suffering famine, and 41 percent of the population is acutely short of food, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. Yet in late April, the U.N. Children’s Fund, or UNICEF, had to scrap plans to ship five trucks loaded with emergency supplies to two cities in the south of the country.
In addition to the hurdles of moving goods in a country besieged by civil war, trucking companies were refusing to make the journey from Port Sudan. They were afraid of getting stuck in the hinterland, unable to refuel given shortages of oil.
“Kids are dying,” said Sheldon Yett, UNICEF’s representative to Sudan.
Four years ago, as Somalia confronted its most severe drought in years, it received $2.4 billion in humanitarian aid, more than half from the United States.
But when President Trump returned to office last year, he brought animus toward Somalia, deriding immigrants from the country as “garbage.”
Last year, the United States slashed humanitarian assistance to Somalia to $70 million from $467 million in 2024. Over the first four months of this year, less than $3 million came from American government donors — only 2 percent of all relief for Somalia. Britain, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Canada and Qatar each contribute considerably more.
Still, many European governments have also retreated, spurred by Mr. Trump’s insistence that they spend more on defense rather than relying on American protection.
Relief organizations now reckon with a process they describe as “hyper-prioritization.” What aid remains has been concentrated on the neediest 21 of Somalia’s 90 districts.
This was the situation before the United States and Israel started a war on Iran.
Food, Fertilizer and Fuel
Somalia is dependent on imports for oil, most of it from the United Arab Emirates. As Iran launched retaliatory strikes on production facilities in the Persian Gulf, and as transport through the strait effectively ceased, the price of gasoline and diesel more than doubled.
Some people in the camps sell fruits and vegetables that they buy in markets in town. The fares for transporting their wares by motorized rickshaw have more than doubled. They were passing on the extra costs to their customers.
Trucking companies doubled and tripled prices for bringing sacks of corn over the border from Ethiopia. The cost of hauling rice shipped into Somalia’s ports rose by similar margins.
At a fish market in Mogadishu, the city of more than 3 million that is Somalia’s capital, Fatumo Abdi Noor, 45, tended to her stall as men used machetes to hack tuna and king fish into steaks. She had nearly doubled her prices. Owners of fishing boats could no longer afford to venture out to the deeper waters of the Indian Ocean. They were settling for smaller fish closer to shore, reducing the catch.
Faced with higher prices for fish at the market, customers were buying smaller quantities. Ms. Noor’s sales were down by half.
At a trade school in Dollow, a half-dozen women trained to be seamstresses, operating manual sewing machines. Materials used to maintain the machines had nearly tripled in price. Thread and fabric from Mogadishu had become difficult to secure.
At some public wells, the price of water had tripled, given that many pumps are fueled by diesel. Faced with the loss of funding from U.S.A.I.D., Mercy Corps, the American development organization, had halted programs installing solar cells to power public wells. Aid organizations like UNICEF were paying more to truck water to drought-afflicted areas.
Somalia also depends on the Persian Gulf for about one-third of its fertilizers. With stocks marooned on the wrong side of the Strait of Hormuz, farmers were contending with higher costs.
At a 10-acre cooperative farm in Dollow, a tractor tilled the ground in preparation for the planting of onions. The diesel that powered the machine had more than doubled in price. A 30-kilogram bag of nitrogen fertilizer had jumped to $35 from $20.
The cooperative planned to recoup its costs by demanding more for its harvest.
As he sat beneath the shade of a mango tree, its branches sloping toward the river dividing Somalia from Ethiopia, Adan Bare Ali, deputy mayor of Dollow, said his community was suffering from troubles that had been concocted far away. The drought was worsened by climate change — primarily the result of industrial polluters in larger, more powerful nations. The war was the handiwork of foreign actors.
“The situation has become unbearable,” he said. “The American regime is led by a person who really doesn’t care about anything happening outside his gates. The Americans are not honoring their commitment to the world.”
Throughout Somalia, unaffordable food combined with fewer medical clinics meant that children were more likely to suffer malnutrition and at greater risk of developing dangerous complications.
On a sweltering morning, more than 100 women sat on wooden benches with infants and toddlers in their arms at a nutrition center in Mogadishu. They were waiting their turn to lay their children on an examination table. Attendants applied cuffs to tiny arms, measuring their circumference to assess the extent of malnutrition. Babies shrieked as their mothers deposited them into a plastic bucket attached to a scale.
Those deemed moderately malnourished were given special foods. Those recorded as severe cases were administered therapeutic milk formula and antibiotics to ward off infection.
And those in greatest peril were sent to a so-called stabilization unit run by UNICEF inside a local hospital. There, babies and toddlers lay on cots, many with feeding tubes curling into their nostrils, and some attached to oxygen.
Eighteen-month-old Mohamed Abdi Abdullahi leaned against his mother, Fartum Abokor Omar, his ribs protruding from his chest. Folds of skin slumped from his arms.
The family had arrived a week earlier from their village north of Mogadishu. The river had dried up, decimating crops. When her son began vomiting, unable to hold down their single daily meal, Ms. Omar traveled to the nearest town to seek help.
There, a nurse at a clinic urged her to continue on to Mogadishu to seek care at Banadir Hospital. The bus fare was normally $12, a relative fortune. Now, it was double that. She wandered the town, begging for the needed money.
Inside the hospital, doctors had stabilized her baby. He was likely to be discharged within a few days. Which made this a positive ending in Somalia: a child spared from hunger.
Yet his story ran counter to the trend.
Throughout the country, UNICEF had closed 205 of its 800 local health clinics. These were the facilities best positioned to arrest the severity of malnutrition. When people were assessed and treated earlier, they had better odds of recovery.
Since January, the hospital had admitted 768 infants and toddlers with medical issues caused by severe malnutrition — double the pace of the previous year. Doctors estimated that one-third of those children could have avoided hospitalization had they been seen earlier.
Greater Need, Less Relief
Mr. Abdirahman and his family knew little of this context as they proceeded toward Dollow.
What they knew was hunger, fear and exhaustion. They walked dirt roads, traversing a largely treeless plain. They slept wherever they happened to be when the sun went down, resuming their journey as the first light seeped from the horizon.
On a sweltering morning in January, they reached the camp where international aid workers had previously provided help.
“There was nothing here,” said Mr. Abdirahman, still nursing a palpable sense of disbelief. “There are no services.”
They set up a tent alongside a fence of thorn bushes, taking shelter under leftover plastic sheeting held aloft by sticks.
Since their arrival, Mr. Abdirahman has been working as a farm hand, earning $1 a day. His wife, Sadia Abdirahman, walks across a bridge into Ethiopia where she washes clothes for better-off families. But as the cost of food rises, fewer households can afford to employ her.
“Sometimes, we go out begging,” she said.
In the center of the camp, a health clinic formerly financed by UNICEF sat empty, save for a volunteer midwife. The organization used to fund prenatal services, dispensing iron pills and medicines. It paid for ambulances to take women to local hospitals when they suffered complications during labor. Not anymore.
In late April, a woman in a neighboring tent, Muslima Ibrahim Mohamed, 38, went into labor. Her sisters helped her to the clinic. It was the middle of the day, but the building was locked. They borrowed money for a motorized rickshaw ride to a hospital in town. She lay on the bench for the half-hour journey, suffering the bumps of the rutted dirt road.
“I was in real pain,” she said. “I was terrified.”
At 38, she had lost four children to disease and hunger. Now, she cradled her newborn son, Noor Mohamed, against her chest. He had entered the world in a moment of extraordinary vulnerability.
A school inside the camp had also lost funding from UNICEF. The head teacher, Abdulnasir Mohamed Farah, 30, was still there, working without pay, because his fingerprint unlocked a digital payment card stocked with cash from the World Food Program. He used the money to buy rice and beans, typically the only meal of the day for his students.
“I can’t abandon the children,” he said.
The World Food Program has traditionally relied on American government support for nearly half of its budget. Given the cuts, it had reduced its allocation to the school by 60 percent. And that money was buying less at local markets. The school enrollment had swelled beyond 800 from less than 600 as the drought sent more families toward the camp.
At the World Food Program’s local headquarters, high walls were encircled in barbed wire. The head of the operation, Josephine Muli, surveyed her warehouse space — 13 A-frame tents used to store medicines and nutritional supplements.
Twelve of the tents were empty.
A single tent held cardboard cartons loaded with a peanut-based paste for malnourished children and pregnant and breastfeeding women.
The cartons were emblazoned with the American flag, the U.S.A.I.D. logo and a message: “From the American people.”
“This will last for two months,” Ms Muli said. “The pipeline is dry. Beyond July, the pipeline will be zero.”
Peter S. Goodman is a reporter who covers the global economy. He writes about the intersection of economics and geopolitics, with particular emphasis on the consequences for people and their lives and livelihoods.“
Over 100,000 Family Separations in Deportation Push, Report Estimates
Over 100,000 Family Separations in Deportation Push, Report Estimates
“A new analysis by the Brookings Institution estimates that over 100,000 children, mostly U.S. citizens, have been separated from their parents during the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. The researchers argue that official statistics are an undercount because the government doesn’t consistently ask about children or detainees fear disclosing them. The analysis highlights the significant impact of parental detention on children, many of whom are left in the care of friends or family facing their own challenges.
The Brookings Institution suggests that federal statistics are an undercount because immigrant parents are not being asked about or not disclosing their American children.
Ledy Ordonez was on the job at a San Antonio seafood wholesaler last July when immigration agents entered the facility, taking her and about a dozen others into custody. The single mother remains in detention, separated from her only child, Alonzo, a U.S.-born 2-year-old now in the care of a friend.
“He can walk and talk now,” Ms. Ordonez said from a detention center in Texas. “I’ve missed so much.”
A new analysis suggests that more than 100,000 children have been separated from their parents during the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. And roughly three-quarters of those children, like Alonzo, are likely U.S. citizens, according to estimates from the Brookings Institution that were shared with The New York Times.
The Brookings estimate of the number of children who are U.S. citizens is more than double the amount that would be expected over the same time period based on official Department of Homeland Security data. The researchers, whose report is based on a statistical analysis of the detainee population, argue the official statistics are an undercount because of how the government collects that information.
The findings point to a scale of family separations that far eclipses that of the first Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy in 2018, when about 5,500 children were removed from their parents immediately after crossing the southern border.
D.H.S. did not directly respond to questions about the number of parents who had been detained or the analysis suggesting that the official statistics did not reflect the full number of U.S.-born children whose parents had been arrested.
D.H.S. said in a statement that parents are given a choice of being removed with their children or placing their U.S.-born children with a designee.
“Any way you cut it, there are tens of thousands of children who have experienced parental detention since this president entered office,” said Tara Watson, a senior fellow at Brookings. “The majority are U.S. citizens,” she said.
The researchers estimated that about 205,000 children have had a parent detained — typically a precursor to deportation — including about 145,000 who are citizens. They used data from the Census Bureau and on Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests to determine the likely number of children detainees had based on their immigration status, sex, age, nationality and whether they were married.
The United States is home to more than 13 million immigrants who are vulnerable to deportation, because they either are undocumented or have temporary statuses. Some five million children under the age of 18 live with at least one unauthorized immigrant parent, according to estimates by several think tanks, and more than four million of them are U.S. citizens.
The Trump administration has arrested about 400,000 immigrants during enforcement operations in the interior of the country. There is no reliable information about how many children the detainees have, or what happened to those children once their parents were taken into custody.
Ms. Watson, an economist, and her co-author, Maria Cancian, a public policy professor at Georgetown University, sought to answer those questions, they said.
The estimates assume immigration enforcement is essentially random — that immigrant parents are just as likely to be detained as immigrants without children. But the researchers also created an interactive tool that estimates the likely number of children affected by parental detention under different enforcement scenarios and assumptions. Their most conservative estimate for the number of U.S.-born children with a parent detained is about 117,400. Their highest estimate is approximately 175,000.
The researchers said they considered 145,000 to be their most accurate estimate, and they predicted that it will grow, given that Congress allocated $45 billion in the One Big Beautiful Bill to expand detention capacity.
Their estimate contrasts with figures released by D.H.S., which say the parents of about 60,000 U.S.-born children were arrested over the same time period. In their report, the researchers theorized the discrepancy was becauseD.H.S. was not consistently asking about children, or detainees were fearful of revealing they had children, worried about putting them or their caregivers at risk.
Based on interviews with child welfare agencies, the researchers estimated only a small fraction of the children end up in the foster care or similar arrangements.
“We found that remarkably few end up in foster care — most children stay with friends and family who don’t have a legal obligation to care for these children,” said Dr. Cancian, who studies child welfare and immigration.
Many schools and legal aid organizations have helped immigrants appoint a caregiver for their children in the event they are separated.
However, the children are often left in the care of older siblings or working-class families already grappling with financial hardship and precarious immigration statuses, making these arrangements ultimately unsustainable, experts say.
If the government is separating children from good parents who happen to be undocumented, it has “the obligation to safeguard their well-being,” Dr. Cancian said.
Public Counsel, a nonprofit legal aid organization in Los Angeles, has educated more than 4,000 immigrants on custody plans since last year, ensuring that someone is empowered to make medical and school-related decisions.
Still, the nonprofit regularly receives calls from schools, churches and others seeking assistance for children whose parents were just detained.
“We are seeing kids in tenuous situations, left with neighbors who don’t have the proper paperwork they need; older siblings who have children of their own; and cases where a father cannot handle young children,” said Sharon Cartagena, a family law lawyer at the nonprofit.
Casey Revkin, executive director of Each Step Home, which began by assisting immigrant families during the 2018 border separations, now focuses almost exclusively on helping parents in detention who have lived in the United States for many years and were separated from their children.
“Almost every day we are contacted by a mom in detention who was arrested and taken from her kids,” said Ms. Revkin, whose group raises funds to help parents in detention pay for phone calls to their children. “This time the cruelty is often being inflicted on U.S.-citizen children.”
The mother of Samantha Lopez, a 3-year-old U.S. citizen, was turned over to ICE last month by a sheriff’s deputy after a traffic stop while she was driving to her restaurant job, according to her husband.
Mr. Lopez, who asked that his full name not be disclosed out of concern that he could be targeted by ICE, said that his wife had told agents she had a young child, to no avail.
“I am feeling such a void and such anguish,” he said. “When our daughter talks to her mom, she listens attentively and then starts to cry.”
“This is my American child being harmed,” he said.
Mr. Lopez, a construction worker, said that he needed to work as much overtime as possible to afford a lawyer to secure his wife’s release, but he must also watch his daughter after day care.
Ironically, having a U.S.-born child can keep families apart.
Ms. Ordonez, who has been separated from her U.S.-born son for more than 10 months, said that she pleaded with agents long ago to allow the pair to stay in a family detention center while she fought her case. But American citizens cannot be held in immigration detention.
“I never wanted to be separated from my only child,” she said.
Agents have warned Ms. Ordonez that her deportation is imminent, she said. To accompany his mother, Alonzo needs a passport. Ms. Ordonez has been struggling to arrange it, she added. Agents warned her recently that they would deport her without the boy if she did not obtain the document, leaving him with his current caretakers.
“These aren’t family or anything, they are just caring for him as a favor,” she said, weeping. “If they deport me, I want to take my child.”
Miriam Jordan reports from a grass roots perspective on immigrants and their impact on the demographics, society and economy of the United States.
Jeff Adelson is a reporter on The Times’s data journalism team who specializes in using demographic data to explore social trends, population dynamics and the effects of policy.“
Sunday, May 17, 2026
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