A Hayward child who attended a school for the Deaf in Fremont was detained and deported to Colombia, alongside his mother and brother — all of whom were under protection meant for asylum applicants — during a routine immigration office visit this week.

Six-year-old Joseph Rodriguez, his 5-year-old brother and their mother, 28-year-old Lesley Rodriguez Gutierrez, were suddenly detained and arrived in the South American nation Thursday after what was supposed to be a check-in visit Tuesday at a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in San Francisco, according to his family’s immigration attorney with Bay Area-based Centro Legal de la Raza. The family reportedly fled from Colombia four years ago to escape an abusive relationship involving a man with gang ties in that country, according to television station KTVU.

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond, one of several Democrats vying to become governor in this year’s midterm elections, said Friday he was calling on Markwayne Mullin — the Oklahoma senator tapped by President Trump to serve as the new Secretary of Homeland Security — to “help find the child and return him to California.”

Joseph, who lived in Hayward with his family, attended the California School for the Deaf in Fremont. Thurmond said that during his detention, the child was separated from and denied vital assistive equipment to help him hear.

“It is unacceptable that this young man, instead of being in class with his friends at what is a state-of-the-art program … he’s probably somewhere in some cell in some terrible conditions, and we are calling for his immediate release and return for him and for his family,” Thurmond said at a news conference in Los Angeles. “Senator Mullin … get on the damn phone, call Donald Trump, and have this student released and returned so that we can continue to provide care for this young man.”

Nikolas De Bremaeker, the family’s attorney with Centro Legal de la Raza, said the family arrived in Colombia on Thursday. He said the child’s mother — a childcare worker, cleaner and manicurist — and the rest of her family appeared “traumatized.”

“They’re just horrified by the past few days,” De Bremaeker said during Friday’s news conference.

He added, “When the family was detained in San Francisco at their routine ICE check-in, there was a family member outside who could have brought the assistive equipment to the family. ICE did not let them do this, and it’s inhumane, it’s illegal, and it’s unconstitutional.”

The attorney emphasized that the family, all immigrants, were under asylum protection and had been following a supervision order that should have prevented deportation. Such orders provide a set of conditions imposed by ICE for a person or people who is allowed to remain in the community while awaiting immigration hearings.

“There were other forms of relief available to her,” De Bremaeker said. “The supervision order, as long as you comply (with) it, grants certain protections, those were not followed. Years of policy around this has not been followed. U.S. attorneys and immigrants rely on the precedent around these protection orders to be followed and this was violated.”

“It’s pulling the rug from (under) other immigrants who have been doing everything possible to comply with the orders,” he added.

Messages sent to Mullin’s office were not immediately returned Friday afternoon.

A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said in a statement that Rodriguez Gutierrez entered the country illegally in 2022, adding that “ICE does not separate families.

“Parents are given a choice: They can be removed with their children or place them with a safe person they designate,” the spokesperson said. “This is consistent with past administration’s immigration enforcement. Gutierrez chose to be removed with her children, and they returned to their home on March 5.”

“(Gutierrez) received full due process and was issued a final order of removal by an immigration judge on November 25, 2024,” the DHS statement said.

Thurmond and De Bremaeker, though, stressed that Gutierrez was in compliance with her asylum application.

They also decried how attorneys trying to track down and file emergency petitions for the family were misled by ICE officials. In several instances, they said, the attorneys were given incorrect information about their whereabouts, which they alleged was purposeful to frustrate their efforts to get them in front of a judge.

“When we were trying to get in touch with the family, we were unable to find out where they were. We were consistently misled. We were told at every point that the family was at a different location,” De Bremaeker said. “And even up to (Thursday) night when I spoke with ICE, they told me a different location than where they actually were based on my conversation I just had with the mother.”

“This is no way for a democracy to work,” the attorney added. “This is a complete obstruction of access to counsel, and it’s a violation of our constitution and our due process protections.”

De Bremaeker also called the situation needlessly cruel given Joseph’s special needs.

“The child had been in an intensive program to learn ASL, had been thriving learning this sign language. Sign language is entirely different in Colombia. It’s entirely different from ASL, from American Sign Language,” he said. “It’s incredibly cruel to rip a child as they are thriving, and not only using the assisted devices that they need, but also to be ripped out of this incredibly brave and strong progress that he has made.”

Thurmond pointed out that the family was following a message from recently ousted Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who commissioned ads encouraging immigrants to comply with federal law. He stressed that attending a meeting with immigration officials should not be a reason in itself to “be abducted and whisked out of the country without your legal rights being met.”

“You don’t have to be from an immigrant family to care about this,” Thurmond said. “Anybody who has a shred of decency would know that this is the wrong thing.”

Southern California News Group contributed to this report.