Michelle Obama fielded an awkward question on the immigration debate on Wednesday. It came from a worried young girl who seemed to say that her mother is an illegal immigrant. The encounter, caught on video, came during a visit by the first lady and Margarita Zavala, the wife of Mexican President Felipe Calderón to a second-grade class in Silver Spring, Md.

When the two visitors took questions from the children, one little girl said, “My mom said, I think, she says that Barack Obama’s taking everybody away that doesn’t has papers.” After Mrs. Obama replied, “Yeah, well, that’s something we have to work on, right, to make sure that people can be here with the right kind of papers, right?” the girl said “But my mom doesn’t have [papers].”

The girl’s final word is difficult to hear on video, because a boy next to her asked “How do you make papers?” at the same moment, but Mrs. Obama seemed to acknowledge that there was a problem, telling the girl, “Well, we have to work on that. We have to fix that. Everybody’s got to work together on that in Congress to make sure that happens.”

Deepak Bhargava, executive director of the Center for Community Change, which has been critical of the Obama administration told Jonathan Weisman of the Wall Street Journal:

The little girl was right. The truth is that more mothers and fathers were deported in Obama’s first year as president than were deported in the last year under Bush. Mr. Obama, who so eloquently spoke of the pain and anguish caused by tearing families apart as a candidate, as president has only ramped up that pain and anguish.

Update: The Associated Press reported on Thursday that the federal government is not pursuing the child’s mother.