It was Friday, June 6, and the rent was due. As soon as she finished an errand, Imelda Carreto planned on joining her family as they gathered scrap metal to earn a little extra cash. Her fiancé, Julio Matias, and 15-year-old nephew, Carlos, had set out early, hitching a trailer to the back of their beat-up gray truck.

Shortly after 8 a.m., Carreto’s phone rang. It was Carlos, telling her an officer with the Florida Highway Patrol had pulled over the truck on Interstate 4 near Tampa. The stated reason: cracks in their windshield. But Carreto was worried. She knew Florida police were collaborating with federal immigration authorities. Her fiancé was undocumented. She says she rushed to the scene and made it there just before the immigration officers.

As she feared, Matias had been detained. But to her surprise, so had Carlos. He was just a kid. (ProPublica is only identifying Carlos by his first name because he is a minor.) Carlos was in high school. He’d been living in the United States for over two years and was working toward applying for legal status to stay long term. The government had given her, a legal resident, custody of him. Now he was in handcuffs. Why would they take him too?

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