Maribel Trujillo, a mother of four American children from Fairfield, Ohio, who has never committed any crime in the 15 years she has lived in the US, has been deported to Mexico in the latest sign that the Trump administration is indiscriminately targeting undocumented immigrants.

Trujillo, 42, was put on a Mexico-bound plane on Wednesday morning having been held in federal immigration detention in Louisiana for the past week. Her removal to a country that she has not seen for almost two decades divides her family and leaves four US-citizen children, the youngest just three years old, effectively motherless.

Mother of four to be deported to Mexico in sign of Trump policy shift Read more

The deportation also runs counter to Donald Trump’s insistence that his immigration policy focuses on getting the “bad guys” – murderers, rapists and drug traffickers – out of the country. In an interview with the Guardian before she was picked up for detention, Trujillo said: “I don’t understand the reason to separate my family. I have no criminal record.”

Trujillo’s lawyer, Kathleen Kersh of the group Advocates for Basic Legal Equality, said that Wednesday’s events showed that the Trump administration was not focused on deporting criminals “but rather on separating peaceful mothers from their American children. It is horrific that American children will be the ones to pay the price for these heartless policies.”

Figures for the first two months of the Trump presidency show that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement has increased arrests by more than 30% over the equivalent period for the last year of Barack Obama’s term. The number of undocumented people, like Trujillo, with no history at all of crime has also doubled to 5,441 in those weeks.

Immigration lawyers and advocacy groups have also been dismayed by the revelation of possibly the first “Dreamer” to be deported. Juan Manuel Montes, 23, had ostensibly been protected from removal by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) programme introduced by Obama, having come to the US aged nine, but was ejected to Mexico by officers of US Customs and Border Protection.

Kersh said she was “disappointed and outraged” that Ice had shown no prosecutorial discretion in deporting Trujillo. She said the plight of the mother of four had elicited “thousands of calls and nationwide advocacy from community members, elected officials and faith leaders”.