The pounding of a fist on her front door jolted Evangelina Escamilla awake. She glanced at the alarm clock: 5:30 in the morning. “Go see who it is,” she whispered to her boyfriend, Luis Romero. He slid out of bed, taking care not to wake their two-month-old baby lying between them or their two-year-old son in his crib in the corner. Pulling a pair of jeans over his boxers, Romero padded out of the bedroom.

“Luis Romero?” a male voice said.

“Yes?”

“We have an order for your deportation.”

At that, Escamilla bolted out of bed and into the living room in her pajamas. Two men and a woman in police-type uniforms were standing there confronting Romero.

“Sit down!” one of them barked at her.

Escamilla ducked back into the bedroom to call Romero’s parents. She left them a quick, frantic message, but by the time she came back out, the officers were gone, and so was Romero. “They didn’t even let him put on his shoes,” says Escamilla.

For the next three days, she and the children had no idea where Romero was. When they finally saw him again, it was through the reinforced glass of the visiting room of a federal detention facility.

Escamilla and the children are all U.S. born-and-bred citizens. But Romero came to this country from El Salvador illegally. Though he’s had no trouble with the law ever since, that years-ago transgression may cost the family their father.

Romero had the bad luck to get caught in an intensifying crackdown on illegal immigrants that is tearing families apart from coast to coast. The old INS was dismantled after the September 11 attacks, and its internal policing duties handed to a new, more aggressive outfit: Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. Since then, deportations have nearly doubled from 108,249 in 2000 to 192,838 last year. Most of those people were never convicted of any offense other than having entered the country illegally. Millions more are at risk. The nonprofit Urban Institute estimates that nearly one in ten U.S. families with children—a group comprising nearly ten million individuals—includes at least one parent that isn’t a citizen. More than three million of these are in the United States illegally, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.

“There are hundreds of thousands of working immigrants who have been here many years as a positive part of the community. They’re members of the PTA, they coach Little League, they go to church,” says Peter Schey, president of the Los Angeles-based Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law, which provides free legal help to immigrants. “To deport people like that, who have complied with all our laws, other than the initial violation of coming here illegally—there’s no parity between the violation and the penalty. And most of the price is paid by their U.S. citizen children.”

Escamilla is a petite twenty-three-year-old, her brown eyes framed in oval wire glasses and her glossy black hair pulled back in a ponytail. She tells her story sitting in the living room of her modest apartment in a working-class neighborhood in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley. Her bright-eyed baby girl, Amy, squirms happily on her lap, but little Luis Jr. stays mostly out of sight, making occasional forays from the single bedroom.

Romero came to California at age sixteen, slipping over the border with a coyote’s help to rejoin his mother, who had come years earlier and was by then a legal U.S. resident. Escamilla, a Los Angeles native, met him at a church dance four years ago. They moved in together the next year, and she was pregnant soon after. Everything was going fine. They had a second child, and Romero was making enough money as a tile layer for Escamilla to be able to stay home with the babies. They held off getting married, though, because Romero’s lawyer told him that would complicate the application for a green card he had already filed with his mother’s help. Bad advice. His application was denied, and the order for his deportation issued.

Since the ICE agents came to enforce it, Escamilla has been struggling to keep her little household afloat. She recently found a telemarketing job, so she’s leaving the kids with grandparents during the day. But with the extra burden of Romero’s legal bills, she’s fallen behind on her car payments and has had to get help from her church to cover the rent.

“I don’t know how long I can keep going like this,” she says.

No one’s denying the human cost of these banishments—not even Jennifer Silliman, the assistant special agent in charge of ICE’s Los Angeles bureau.

“As a mother and a wife, I have my personal views,” says Silliman, a young blonde with a no-nonsense manner. “But at the end of the day, these are laws I have sworn to uphold. And at the end of the day, I’ll do my job.”

ICE’s crackdown comes on several fronts. One is the workplace: Over the last few years, ICE has swept down on businesses all across the country, confiscating the assets of companies that employ indocumentados and even slapping their executives with prison terms. ICE is nailing them with hefty asset forfeitures and criminal charges. The owner of an Ohio-based sewing machine repair company, for instance, was sentenced this year to six months in jail and lost his home after being convicted of deliberately recruiting illegal immigrant workers. A labor-contracting firm in the same state had to forfeit $12 million and see its president sent to prison for fifteen months because of his involvement in supplying hundreds of undocumented employees to local businesses.

Since ICE’s inception, worksite arrests have mushroomed from 485 in 2002—the last full year of the old INS’s authority—to 3,667 in 2006. This year, the agency is on track to top 5,000. Last year alone saw the two biggest worksite raids in U.S. history: a multistate action against pallet-making company IFCO Systems North America in which 1,187 workers were arrested, and another targeting meatpackers Swift & Co. that netted 1,297 illegal workers.

Almost every one of those raids inflicts collateral damage. The Swift raids left so many families destitute after their breadwinners were jailed or deported that the company itself donated $300,000 to charities helping them out. Earlier this year in Massachusetts, the arrest of hundreds of mostly Guatemalan workers at a leather goods factory left about 100 children stranded at schools and daycares, parentless. Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick declared the situation a “humanitarian crisis.”

Many of those ICE arrests wind up in the machinery of the immigration courts. Deportation is rarely automatic; those who don’t leave voluntarily can try to win what’s called a “cancellation of removal.” To do that, immigrants must establish that they have lived for ten continuous years in the United States, have “good moral character,” no criminal record, and that their deportation would cause “exceptional or extremely unusual hardship” to a close family member who is a citizen or permanent resident. But the bar is set very high.

“You need to gather evidence about the health and psychological impacts on the kids, declarations from experts, conditions in the third country,” says Schey. “It’s extremely time consuming and expensive.”

Last year, fewer than 4,000 undocumented immigrants had their deportations suspended or cancelled—less than 2 percent of the number deported.

Unlike in criminal courts, defendants in immigration proceedings are not provided with government-funded lawyers. That leaves most with an ugly choice. They can either represent themselves in the byzantine and highly technical proceedings—something about two-thirds of all such immigrants do. Or they can pony up thousands of dollars to hire a private lawyer.

Many desperate immigrants wind up spending everything they have on a lawyer who isn’t up to the job. “On top of ICE, I end up battling a lot of bad attorneys who take advantage of very vulnerable people,” says Rosy Cho, a San Francisco immigration lawyer. “If you mess up and get someone deported, they’re not going to sue you.”

It’s an unhappy irony for undocumented immigrants that trying to legalize their status can itself trigger their deportation. Take Liliana, a slim twenty-nine-year-old with long blond-highlighted hair and Cleopatra eyes from Michoacan, Mexico, who does not want her last name printed. In 1998, she snuck over the border and made her way to Oxnard, California, where her parents and most of her eleven siblings live.

She got a job in a frozen vegetable packing plant, where she met the man who soon became her husband, a naturalized citizen originally from Mexico. By the time their second child arrived a few years later, Liliana had filed her green card application, with her husband’s support. But as her paperwork wound its way through the bureaucracy, immigration officials discovered that Liliana had been arrested back in 1998 for trying to enter the United States with a fake birth certificate. Instead of legalizing her, they ordered her deported.

Desperate, Liliana has taken refuge in an Episcopalian church in Long Beach, hoping that ICE won’t risk the bad press of dragging a woman out of a house of worship. She’s been there since May, living in a sparsely furnished former office the church staff has converted into a bedroom for her. Her four-month-old baby, Pablito, stays with her while her husband takes care of the other two kids.

“The first week was the hardest. Just me and Pablito, alone,” says Liliana, her eyes reddening. Her husband works days driving a forklift in a warehouse and nights delivering pizza, so she gets visits from her family only on weekends. “It’s very lonely without my kids,” she says, “but the reason I’m doing it is so I can stay in this country with them.”

The church is one of dozens of interdenominational houses of worship across the country that have signed on to what is being called the New Sanctuary Movement. Modeled on the work of American churches in the 1980s that sheltered Central American refugees threatened with being sent back to their war-torn homelands, the movement aims to support immigrants with families and clean records who have been ordered deported. Since January, many labor, religious, and civil rights groups have called on the Bush Administration to impose a moratorium on any further worksite raids and related deportations. Some municipalities, including San Francisco and Chicago, have formally declared themselves “sanctuary cities,” where police are barred from asking about the immigration status of most people with whom they come in contact.

But they’re up against a tough national mood. The state of Colorado and several cities have recently passed laws barring illegal aliens from receiving government services and even renting apartments.

“There’s nothing about the crime of illegal entry that should make it forgivable just because someone has a job or owns a house,” says Bob Dane, a spokesperson for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a conservative Washington, D.C.-based group. “If I rob a bank and get hauled before a judge, it’s no defense to say, ‘You can’t jail me because I won’t see my kids.’ Breaking the law has consequences.”

Earlier this year, there was hope for these families as the Senate debated a massive immigration bill that would have allowed law-abiding, long-term immigrants like Romero to apply for citizenship after paying fines and other penalties. But conservatives pilloried that measure as “amnesty.” Between that and criticism from unions and progressives over the measure’s proposed guest-worker program and other provisions, the entire bill wound up scuttled. With an election next year, no one in Washington is likely to push legislation.

That leaves couples like Evangeline Escamilla and Luis Romero on their own. Romero has lost thirty pounds since he’s been locked up, says Escamilla. (ICE refused a request for an interview with Romero.) After being held for a few months in Southern California where she and the children could at least visit him, he was recently moved to a federal lockup in Arizona.

“I try not to show how upset I am in front of the kids,” says Escamilla. “Sometimes I can’t sleep at night. Sometimes I just don’t want to get out of bed.” If he’s deported, she’ll be left to raise their children alone, or follow him to an impoverished foreign country she’s never set foot in. “We just don’t know what’s going to happen.”

Vince Beiser is a freelance journalist specializing in criminal justice and other social issues. His work has appeared in The Los Angeles Times Magazine, Harper’s, Mother Jones, and many other publications