Should a person be deported because once, a decade and a half ago, they left their toddlers home alone for a half hour to buy them pajamas at Walmart? That’s what the Trump administration is arguing in a little-noticed federal appeals court case being decided in California, with sweeping implications for both the immigration and child welfare systems. A ruling is expected in the coming months.

In 2010, Sotero Mendoza-Rivera, an undocumented farmworker who’d immigrated from Mexico 10 years earlier, made a fateful decision. He drove with his girlfriend, Angelica Ortega-Vasquez, to their local Walmart in McMinnville, Oregon, according to a police report. The store was seven minutes from their apartment. In addition to the pajamas, they purchased motor oil and brake fluid for their car.

When they got back to the apartment, their 2-year-old son, who’d been in bed asleep when they’d left, had woken up and somehow gotten out the door. A bystander found him by the street outside the complex, baby bottle in hand, and called the police.

The responding officer issued Mendoza-Rivera and Ortega-Vasquez a misdemeanor citation, which they resolved with a guilty plea, a fine and probation. The officer stated in his report that the little boy and his 3-year-old sister were healthy and clean, that the apartment was well-kept and stocked with food, and that a neighbor said that the mother was usually home with the kids.

The Obama administration then opened deportation proceedings against Mendoza-Rivera, but did not keep him in detention. He appealed, and the case wound its way slowly through the legal system before hitting a backlog at the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, where some immigration matters from nearly a decade ago are still being decided.

But in August, amid the Trump administration’s campaign of mass deportations, Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained Mendoza-Rivera and locked him up in another state. And the Department of Justice is now arguing that what he did in 2010 (the current case is against him only) is a crime deserving of immediate removal from the country. A DOJ lawyer argued before a panel of the 9th Circuit in Pasadena, California, last month that it doesn’t matter if no harm to children occurred, saying an immigrant parent should still get deported if their parenting decision involved a “substantial” deviation from a “normal” standard of care for kids.

Child welfare officials and experts told ProPublica they are deeply concerned by the case, as well as several others like it that have been making their way through the courts and are now reaching a decisive point. “Imagine what a weapon it would be in ICE’s hands if child welfare is added to all the other areas where a conviction for the most minor offense means deportation,” said Richard Wexler, executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, an advocacy group.

Indeed, if Attorney General Pam Bondi’s team wins this case, thousands of immigrant moms and dads could be exposed to deportation for minor involvement in the juvenile court system, a new realm for President Donald Trump’s deportation regime. There aren’t exact numbers as to how many immigrants are accused of low-level parental negligence in juvenile courts. But as ProPublica has previously reported, millions of parents are accused of child neglect every year in this country, in many instances for reasons stemming from poverty like a lack of child care or food in the fridge, rather than physical or sexual abuse.

Immigrant parents are no more likely than U.S.-born parents to abuse children. But undocumented parents may be more likely to be accused of certain low-level forms of neglect, according to legal aid attorneys. For one thing, due to their lack of legal status, they sometimes avoid interactions with officials at schools and hospitals, leading to potential allegations against them for neglecting their kids’ health or education. They also disproportionately work long and unpredictable hours, sometimes having their older children look after their younger ones, which in the U.S. can be deemed inadequate supervision. Differing cultural norms regarding how much hands-on supervision is necessary also play a role.

There is no evidence yet that ICE has been actively looking for cases like these to identify parents to deport, according to interviews with over a dozen federal and state child welfare officials. But data on specific child welfare cases is reported from states to the federal government annually, via the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System. (The data contain identifiers for children but not their names, though state agencies have those.)

“The million or so reports in NCANDS would be a gold mine for Noem and Miller,” said Andy Barclay, a longtime child welfare statistician, referring to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and top Trump adviser Stephen Miller.

The first Trump administration did not seek to use such data for deportations, according to Jerry Milner, who was appointed to oversee the U.S. child welfare system as head of the federal Children’s Bureau from 2017 to 2021. “I never had any of those discussions around the data,” Milner told ProPublica. “I can’t guarantee that others did not, but they never made it to me.” But, he said, “things are different now.”

“I would have strong concerns if any of the data are used for purposes other than what they were intended for,” Milner said.

Medicaid data, for instance, is now reportedly being shared with the Department of Homeland Security, and those files can have more identifying information than NCANDS does on families with child welfare cases. DHS has also accessed Office of Refugee Resettlement data on migrant children, which can be used to identify young people’s locations and the (sometimes undocumented) adults taking care of them. Indeed, DHS and FBI agents have visited migrant kids at the homes of their caretakers, ostensibly to perform “welfare checks.”

The White House declined to answer questions for this article. The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment. A Justice Department spokesperson in an email accused the Biden administration of letting Mendoza-Rivera’s case languish and said that “as part of this Administration’s commitment to making America safe again, the Attorney General will continue to defend efforts to remove criminal illegal aliens, especially those convicted of offenses which place children in situations likely to endanger their health or welfare.”

The Trump administration’s view, according to the Justice Department’s filings in Mendoza-Rivera’s case, is that undocumented parents convicted of even the most minor forms of parental negligence should be ineligible for a type of legal relief called “cancellation of removal.” (Mendoza-Rivera sought this relief during his initial deportation proceedings, which is part of what spurred the current appeals case.) It’s an off-ramp from deportation that until now has been available to such moms and dads if they’ve been in the U.S. for 10 or more years, they have “good moral character,” and their deportation would cause extreme hardship to their U.S. citizen children. This would apply to Mendoza-Rivera and Ortega-Vasquez’s kids, who are American citizens.

One of the main federal laws that the Trump administration has been relying on in its effort to deport millions of people comes from the Bill Clinton era. In 1996, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act overhauled immigration enforcement in part by stating that noncitizens, even lawful permanent residents, must be expeditiously deported if they’ve been convicted of certain offenses, including aggravated felonies, crimes of “moral turpitude,” drug crimes or domestic violence, or a “crime of child abuse, child neglect, or child abandonment.”

The motivation for including this sort of language, at the time, was clear. Amid the violent crime wave of the ’90s, the law’s co-author, Bob Dole, said on the Senate floor that the crimes he wanted to make deportable included “vicious acts of stalking, child abuse and sexual abuse.”

Yet over the three decades since, societal norms around what constitutes bad — and even criminal — parenting have come to include all sorts of nonviolent and even harmless behavior. A range of parenting practices that were considered normal for most of the 20th century are now investigated and prosecuted as child maltreatment in many states; letting your kids play at the park and walk home alone could be “neglect,” especially if you’re poor and a person of color. So could leaving them in their car seats briefly with the windows cracked and the car alarm on while you run into a store to buy diapers, or failing to properly secure their bedroom windows at night.

Some rulings by other courts have blocked deportations for people with these sorts of alleged parenting lapses, while the federal Board of Immigration Appeals has offered changing guidance on the issue. Immigration advocates fear that the current appeals court proceeding, which groups together several similar cases including Mendoza-Rivera’s, could become hugely influential across the legal system — and with much higher stakes now given the present administration’s enforcement focus.

Although the Obama and Biden administrations took similar positions to the Trump administration on this point, in general they didn’t pursue deportations as aggressively. “There was some discretion being exercised,” said David Zimmer, Mendoza-Rivera’s appellate attorney. “So it was at least possible, in a given case, that they might have decided not to pursue removal if the parent hadn’t done anything meaningfully wrong.” That’s no longer the case in a regime that is seeking any reason to expel an immigrant, Zimmer said.

This case could be heard by the full 9th Circuit next and then head to the U.S. Supreme Court, if the justices choose to take it up. Much of the debate rests on the question of whether it matters if immigrant parents meant to harm their children, given that intention is part of the definition of most crimes. If the parent both didn’t harm and wasn’t aware they might harm their child, advocates argue, it shouldn’t qualify as a “crime” worthy of deportation.

The Oregon misdemeanor negligence statute under which Mendoza-Rivera was convicted doesn’t require proving any intent to harm a child, any actual harm to a child or even exposure of a child to any harm, acknowledged Justice Department lawyer Imran Zaidi at a 9th Circuit hearing in January. But negligence is still a “culpable mental state” deserving of deportation, he said, because it is “incompatible with a proper regard for consequences.”

Jed Rakoff, a New York federal district judge serving as a visiting member of the 9th Circuit panel, responded that he’s been hearing this argument since “my first year of torts class.” Negligence, he said, is by definition unconscious; otherwise it would be “recklessness,” which is a different, more serious act involving consciously disregarding potential harm. In the context of these family court cases, it is often just conduct that’s a small deviation from some middle-class “reasonable person’s” — a neighbor’s, a caseworker’s — subjective opinion of what “good” parenting looks like.

“I’m talking about the term ‘crime’: What did Congress mean by that single word?” Rakoff said, referring to the 1996 law’s description of a “crime” of “child abuse, child neglect, or child abandonment.” Lawmakers clearly meant something more serious than briefly leaving kids unattended, Rakoff continued. After all, the consequence they were prescribing — deportation — was so much more severe than any other possible consequence for any similar misdemeanor.

Zaidi, the Justice Department lawyer, responded that if many state laws say that something is a crime of child neglect, then it is a crime of child neglect, and Congress said that a crime of child neglect is deportable. The two judges other than Rakoff seemed more open to this argument.

The fundamental question that the appeals court is considering, then, is whether these essentially harmless parental “crimes” alleged by increasingly hands-on local child welfare authorities are the same category of crime that the U.S. Congress was talking about when it passed a law on immigrants committing violent crime, domestic violence and terrorism.

Josh Gupta-Kagan, founder and director of the Columbia Law School Family Defense Clinic, said that it appears Mendoza-Rivera and Ortega-Vasquez “were not a safety threat to their children, let alone to anyone else,” even if they showed bad judgment by leaving toddlers alone for a half hour. So it is “fair to question,” he said, how pursuing either of their deportations serves the Trump administration’s “stated interest in public safety.”

McMinnville, Oregon, where Mendoza-Rivera and Ortega-Vasquez bought those pajamas at Walmart, is where they’ve lived for nearly a quarter century and where they had their two children, who are now teenagers. It’s also where Mendoza-Rivera spent all those years picking and packaging produce.

But he has now been locked up for months in a detention center in Tacoma, Washington, and his family has in turn lost much of its income. His kids are without him. And if the Trump administration gets to use a law against him that was intended to protect children, they will lose their dad to a foreign country for good.