A deported mother returned to the United States to bury her slain toddler

The funeral home doors swung open, and Wendy Hernandez Reyes inched toward the tiny white coffin cradling her 3-year-old son, Orlin. He lay frozen in a tan outfit and matching pageboy cap to cover his injuries.

The Department of Homeland Security had quietly allowed Hernandez to return to the United States late Monday, after Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers deported her to Honduras without him. Now she was being given three days in Atlanta to say goodbye. An ankle monitor tracking her movements blinked red above her black shoes.

When she saw the toddler lying in the satin-lined casket, she fell to her knees and began to wail.

“My God, why?” Hernandez cried. “Orlinsito, my son.”

Acting ICE director Todd M. Lyons claimed in March that Hernandez had “abandoned” her son to a “violent murderer” who killed him weeks later. ICE had arrested her after a sheriff’s deputy in Baldwin County, Alabama, stopped the car she was riding in with her sister to work. Contrary to Lyons’s assertion, Hernandez said she had begged ICE to deport her with Orlin. Instead, the child and his cousins were put in the custody of her sister’s estranged partner, Samuel Maldonado. He was a laborer who had been in the Honduran military and the father of her sister’s three young children.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2026/05/29/deported-mothers-anguished-return-say-goodbye-her-slain-toddler/