Immigration and Customs Enforcement blames a mother it deported for her two-year-old son’s brutal death months later, even though she says she pleaded to be reunited with the boy as she was being sent back to Honduras.
Orlín Josué Hernandez Reyes, 2, died in Escambia County, Florida, in March, while in the care of his uncle, after the boy’s mother, Wendy Hernandez Reyes, was deported in January.
Officials say the child’s body showed multiple broken ribs, a transected pancreas, multiple burns, and evidence of possible sexual abuse.
After the child’s death and his uncle’s arrest on murder allegations, ICE claimed in a March press release that Reyes “abandoned” the two-year-old and “chose to leave her son here with a violent murderer who took his life.”
“How could I abandon my son, if my son was the love of my life?” Wendy Hernandez Reyes told The Washington Post. “I did everything with my son. I am not a bad mother who left my child with a killer.”
The Independent has contacted ICE for comment.
Wendy Hernandez Reyes and her sister were in a car that was pulled over in early January in Alabama as she headed to her job laying concrete foundations.
The Baldwin County Sheriff’s Office, one of many that cooperate with federal immigration authorities under the 287(g) program, then handed her off to ICE, who detained her in Louisiana. A judge had previously ordered Reyes, an asylum-seeker who came to the U.S. in 2022, deported after she missed a hearing.
Throughout the process of her detention, Hernandez told the Post, she requested to be reunited with her son.
“I told them to help me with my boy,” Hernandez said. “I needed him.”
The Independent has contacted the sheriff’s office for comment.
She was deported less than a month after her arrest.
While Reyes was in detention in Louisiana, she left her son in the care of her brother-in-law Samuel Maldonado Erazo.
Maldonado Erazo is a heavy drinker and hit his own children with cords and wires, his daughter later testified.
In March, Maldonado Erazo called 911, saying that two-year-old Orlín had collapsed.
Authorities were skeptical of the story, given the nature of the two-year-old’s injuries.
Orlín had a swollen stomach and testicles suggesting he had been “stomped on,” medical examiner Deanna Oleske told police, according to court records obtained by the Post.
“Absolutely no toddler has ‘normal’ injuries like bruising to the back of the hand/knuckles from doing toddler stuff,” she said.
Maldonado Erazo was indicted on charges including murder in late March and has pleaded not guilty.
The Independent has contacted the Escambia County public defender’s office, which is representing him, for comment.
In March, ICE lodged an immigration detainer against him, claiming he entered the country illegally in 2021.
Community advocates are raising funds on GoFundMe for Orlín’s remains to be returned to Honduras.
Reyes claims she was deported without her passport, frustrating efforts to transfer the body.
Grace Resendez McCaffery, a Florida-based activist and owner of bilingual news site Latino Media Gulf Coast, has helped raise more than $15,000 for the effort. She told the Pensacola News Journal in March that she was aware of six children left behind in a single week after their parents were deported.
“I think we use the term separating families lightly because it’s become a common phrase,” McCaffery said, “but this is the reality of what it’s like for a child to lose their parents, and in this case, be left in the hands of a monster. They’re so vulnerable and it just doesn’t have to be this way.”
