The whereabouts of a six-year-old boy from China remain unknown after he was allegedly separated from his father while both were held by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in New York last week.
The city’s mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani on Tuesday raised the issue on social media, saying that the first grader, named Yuanxin, was “arrested and separated” along with his father Fei Zheng during a “routine check-in” with ICE on November 26.
“Now he’s in custody, alone. ICE won’t say where. This cruelty serves no one. It must end,” he added.
US Representative from New York Nydia Velazquez joined Mamdani on social media. “ICE tore 6-year-old Yuanxin from his father at a check-in at 26 Federal Plaza and they still won’t say where he is,” she said.
Velazquez claimed that ICE arrested 151 children between January and October. “They are tearing families apart and traumatising kids. My heart is with this family. We need answers now,” she added.
Fei Zheng appears in ICE’s online detainee locator as being held at the Orange County Correctional Facility in Goshen, upstate New York. However, the South China Morning Post could not locate Yuanxin in the database.
In a statement to the Post, Department of Homeland Security assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin said that ICE “does not separate families” but did not disclose where the boy was being held.
She described Zheng and his son as “illegal aliens from China” and said that “they were given a lawful order of removal as a family unit”.
According to McLaughlin, Zheng “refused to board the plane and was acting so disruptive and aggressive that he endangered the child’s well-being”.
“He even attempted to escape and abandon his son,” she added in the statement, asserting that Zheng “had the right and the ability to depart the country as a family and wilfully chose to not comply”.
“If law enforcement pulled an American citizen over with kids in the back seat and they chose to not comply with lawful orders, the parents would be arrested and the children would be placed in safe custody,” the statement said.
The Chinese embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
According to The City, a New York news publication, this is the third time the boy and his father have been held by ICE since they attempted to cross the border seeking asylum in April. However, this is the first time they were separated, it said.
The case comes amid a sharp rise in immigration enforcement actions targeting Asian nationals across the US.
A report published in July by the Asian-American Studies Centre at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) found that Asian immigrant arrests nearly tripled from fewer than 700 in 2024 to almost 2,000 between February and May 2025.
Arrests in the first week of June were almost nine times higher than in the same week the previous year. The proportion of detainees who were convicted criminals fell from nearly half in the first three months of 2025 to less than a third in early June.
Among those arrested, nearly a third were from China, more than a quarter from India and almost a sixth from Vietnam, the UCLA study found.
A recent report by ProPublica, a US-based nonprofit news organisation, found that since the start of this year, about 600 immigrant children have been placed in government shelters by ICE – the highest number recorded in a decade.
As outrage over Yuanxin’s situation grows, advocacy groups are speaking out and urging the public to apply pressure.
Stop AAPI Hate, a US-based nonprofit coalition, took to social media on Tuesday, saying that the US government had “acted in pure hypocrisy by refusing to disclose Yuanxin’s whereabouts” while claiming it does not separate families.
The post, which was shared with a photo of Yuanxin, called on Americans to contact their “elected officials now to demand that they pressure ICE to release Fei and Yuanxin immediately”.
Immigration Coalition, an immigration advocacy group, has been posting “still missing” posters on social media, urging New Yorkers to call their representatives to secure the pair’s release.
“The first grader has been separated from his father for almost a week, following ICE abducting the pair for the third time this year! ICE refuses to disclose the 6 yr old’s location. WHERE IS YUANXIN??!” the group wrote. -- SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
