More than half of Americans in their 40s find themselves caring for both an aging parent and their own children at the same time, according to Pew Research Center. For a growing number of Latino teenagers and young adults, that same caregiving crunch is arriving decades early, overnight, when ICE detains or deports a parent.
Pew Research Center reported in late August 2026 that 54% of Americans in their 40s are “sandwiched” between an aging parent and their own children, part of a well-documented, slow-building demographic trend. Hispanic adults are already disproportionately represented in that squeeze more broadly: 30% of Hispanic adults are sandwiched between a parent 65 or older and a dependent child, compared with 23% of white adults and 21% of Black adults, according to Pew’s data. That gap has typically been explained by longer multigenerational households and cultural expectations around elder care.
But across the country, a different, faster version of that same pressure is now landing on Latino teenagers and twentysomethings who never expected it: raising younger siblings alone, managing rent and bills, and stepping into a caregiving role that usually arrives, if it arrives at all, decades later in life.
From back-to-school shopping to raising her sister alone
Dulce Zepeda was 19 when her parents were detained by ICE and deported to Honduras, leaving her responsible for her 13-year-old sister, Maria. Their lives changed in an instant in August 2025, during a family back-to-school shopping trip at a Walmart in Fort Worth. For nearly a year afterward, Dulce cooked, drove her sister to middle school, worked at a local McDonald’s, and sold her mother’s jewelry to help cover bills. “You never know when the last hug that you’re going to have from your parents,” she said. Both girls are U.S. citizens, legally entitled to remain in the country; their parents are not.
Advocates say the Zepeda sisters’ situation reflects a wider and increasing pattern. Immigration attorney and advocate Lakhani said roughly 50 U.S. citizen children a day are experiencing the arrest, detention or potential deportation of a parent, and argued that changes to what’s known as the ICE detained parents directive have put children at greater risk by giving parents less opportunity to arrange care for their kids before being deported.
When aunts, uncles and older siblings become the safety net
The caregiving crunch doesn’t always fall on a sibling. Often it falls on whichever relative is willing, and able, to step in fast. In a case CNN documented last year, a woman named Perez was deported to Honduras despite having a valid work permit not set to expire until spring 2026, leaving behind two U.S. citizen children in the care of a friend. In a separate household from that same CNN investigation, an aunt and uncle, both themselves undocumented, took in three additional children when their parents were detained and swiftly deported. The added household strain became so severe that the aunt, unable to afford a babysitter, arranged for a family friend to drive the youngest child, a 2-year-old U.S. citizen, across the border to live with his father in Tijuana. The stress had already sent her to the hospital once with severe headaches.
In Texas, a 37-year-old undocumented woman identified as Y.R. spent nearly a year filling out government forms, submitting to a background check and a DNA test, trying to gain legal custody of her niece and nephew, ages 11 and 14, who had already spent close to 400 days in a federal shelter after crossing from Honduras. According to reporting from the Texas Tribune and Houston Public Media, ICE agents detained Y.R. herself in the parking lot of her apartment complex as she left for her construction job, in the middle of that same custody process. Attorneys say federal agencies have effectively used children in shelters as bait, arresting the very relatives who come forward to claim them.
Three sisters, one year, no parents
Not every version of this story involves a minor suddenly left in charge. In Orange County, California, three adult sisters have spent the past year navigating life after their parents, Nelson and Gladys Gonzalez, were detained during a standard immigration check-in and deported to Colombia after 35 years in the United States. The sisters have channeled the aftermath into advocacy, raising awareness about detention conditions while pushing for a pathway to citizenship for parents like theirs. “We are trying to stay hopeful and doing whatever we can, exploring any avenue that is available to bring them back home, at least temporarily,” one sister, Quintino, said.
A directive meant to prevent this is being applied differently
ICE’s own Directive 11064.4, issued in July 2025, states it is agency policy to avoid unnecessarily infringing on the parental or guardianship rights of detained parents and to help facilitate their participation in family court and custody proceedings. But advocates and reporting from CNN and NBC’s Dallas-Fort Worth affiliate describe a growing gap between that stated policy and what’s happening on the ground, pointing to accelerated deportation timelines that leave little room for parents to arrange care before being removed from the country.
Why this connects back to the sandwich generation, decades early
The generational squeeze Pew describes, caring simultaneously for the young and the old, typically builds gradually, over years, as parents age and children grow. What’s happening to families like the Zepedas, the Gonzalez sisters, and Y.R.’s household is structurally similar but compressed into a single traumatic event: no years of gradual adjustment, no chance to plan finances or living arrangements, just a parent detained on one day and a teenager or young adult suddenly responsible for siblings, rent, school pickups and grocery bills by the next. Where Pew’s sandwiched adults are, on average, in their 40s and 50s, balancing two generations they’ve had decades to prepare for, the Zepeda sisters were 19 and 13.
The demographic pattern Pew documents, Latino adults disproportionately carrying caregiving duties across generations, may help explain why this accelerated version is landing so heavily in Latino communities specifically. But the mechanism is entirely different: not a slow cultural or demographic trend, but a sudden legal one, arriving through a knock on the door or a routine ICE check-in that ends in detention.
