Arlit Martinez-Carrada and Rigo Mendoza-Lopez, a couple from Mexico who have lived in Salisbury for decades, made a plan in October.

Mendoza-Lopez quit his restaurant job to take care of the couple’s 15-year-old son, Kevin Martinez, who had been diagnosed with cancer and could no longer walk on his own. Martinez-Carrada would continue going to work to provide for the family’s four children, sometimes working two jobs to make ends meet.

But on Jan. 3, the family’s plan came crashing down when Martinez-Carrada was pulled over by federal immigration agents and taken into custody.

When a local advocate for the Latin American community on the Eastern Shore posted about the arrest to an online group hoping to find her relatives, Mendoza-Lopez commented that it was his wife who was taken. That’s when the advocate, Paola Subervi, said she called him to ask how she could help.

“That’s when he tells me, ‘I can’t leave my house, my son has cancer, I can’t leave him alone,” Subervi said.

Subervi, along with others, contacted the nearby Immigration and Customs Enforcement office and pleaded with them to release Martinez-Carrada so she could be with her son. They refused.

Then within a day of Martinez-Carrada‘s arrest, Kevin’s health suddenly declined, and Mendoza-Lopez rushed his son to the emergency room. The family said he was too unstable to be transported to the doctors who usually treat him in Baltimore.

By Sunday morning, Kevin died.

“I literally busted out crying,” Subervi said of the moment she heard the news. “What do you do at that point?”

Subervi said Martinez-Carrada was told that her son had passed away while being held in a Baltimore ICE facility.

“This is too much for me,” Mendoza-Lopez told WBOC, a local news station in Salisbury. “She’s never going to see him.”

Martinez-Carrada is one of thousands of immigrants across the country swept up in President Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigration. The most recent available data shows that ICE made about 700 arrests in Maryland between Sept. 1 and Oct. 15. About two out of every three people ICE arrested during that period had no history of criminal charges.

Maryland public records showed Martinez-Carrada had a traffic citation in 2015, but no prior criminal charges or convictions.

The Department of Homeland Security said in an emailed statement that Martinez-Carrada was previously deported three times.

“We have ended Biden’s catch and release politics,” the statement said. “She is now in ICE custody pending removal proceedings.”

The family and their community are pushing for the mother’s release so she can mourn her son and attend his funeral on Jan. 31. Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen’s office has also contacted ICE, requesting her temporary release to attend her son’s funeral.

“Her son died the next day without being able to say goodbye to his mom, and his mom unable to say goodbye to him,” Van Hollen, a Democrat, said at an ICE protest on Jan. 13, adding that his office is “working very hard” to have her released for the service.

When asked if the Department of Homeland Security would temporarily release Martinez-Carrada for the funeral, an official said in an emailed statement that the department is “working to return her to her home country as quickly as possible.”

Martinez-Carrada is currently being held at the Delaney Hall Detention Facility in New Jersey, according to ICE detainee records. It is the same detention facility where a 41-year-old man from Haiti died in December. Local officials have called for the closure of the facility since his death.

The community has rallied around the family since her arrest and Kevin’s passing, running fundraisers and protesting ICE action in the Salisbury area.