Zoila Guerra Sandoval is the sole caretaker of a 7-year-old U.S. citizen girl who already lost her father in one of the most devastating tragedies in recent memory — the 2024 collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore. Now, the Department of Homeland Security is moving to deport her mother too. We are asking DHS to stop these removal proceedings immediately.

José Mynor López, Zoila's co-parent and close friend, was one of six immigrant workers killed on that bridge while filling potholes on an overnight shift. Their daughter was five years old when she lost him. Today, Zoila is all she has left.

After the collapse, the U.S. government reached out directly to families of the victims and encouraged them to apply for immigration protections. Zoila came forward. She trusted that promise. She handed over her personal information — including her fingerprints — in good faith, with the understanding that doing so would lead to a work permit and temporary legal status. Instead, that same information is now being used to place her in removal proceedings. That is not justice. That is a betrayal.

The men who died on that bridge were called heroes. Then-President Biden stood before their families and said, "We'll never forget the contribution these men made to this city." Deporting the mother of one of those men's children is not how you honor that commitment. It is how you break it.

Zoila has lived in the United States for over two decades with no criminal record. She is not a threat to anyone. She is a mother raising a grieving child who asks about her father and knows only that "he died in the water."

We are calling on the Department of Homeland Security to halt Zoila Guerra Sandoval's deportation proceedings and restore the protections that were promised to families connected to the Key Bridge collapse. A child who lost her father on that bridge must not lose her mother to a deportation order.