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16-Year-Old Girl Who Fought to Get Dad Released from ICE Dies After Rare Cancer Battle
“The Torres family’s story is, unfortunately, all too similar to the terror and trauma which has been forced upon on countless families across Chicago,” the city’s mayor said in a statement.
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On Friday night, 16-year-old Ofelia Torres died from a rare and aggressive form of tissue cancer—and due to Trump’s cruel deportation campaign, she spent the last days of her life fighting for her father’s freedom.
Torres, who was diagnosed with alveolar rhabdomyosarcoma in December 2024, was undergoing cancer treatment when she took a break from the hospital to visit her home in Chicago in October. That month, her father, Torres Maldonado, was detained at a Home Depot during Operation Midway Blitz, and Torres’ efforts to highlight his case helped spotlight how barbaric and senseless ICE was becoming. (This was before ICE began Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota.)
“My dad, like many others, is a hardworking person who wakes up early in the morning and goes to work without complaining, thinking about his family,” she wrote on Instagram. “I find it so unfair that hardworking immigrant families are being targeted just because they were not born here.”
According to NBC Chicago, Maldonado was released from detention on a $2,000 bond about two weeks later, after a judge ruled it necessary for Torres’ treatment be taken into consideration since he helped care for his daughter, and determined his detention was illegal and violated his due process rights.
Ofelia Torres’ bravery in the face of injustice was beyond words — her courage became a symbol of strength at a time when even the strongest would have bowed.
My deepest condolences to her family and loved ones.
May her memory be a blessing.
— Governor JB Pritzker (@govpritzker.illinois.gov) February 15, 2026 at 2:00 PM
According to family attorneys, because of the stress, Torres was unable to continue treatment after her father was arrested.
Operation Midway Blitz was just one of half a dozen immigration crackdowns unleashed on Democrat-led cities since September, leading to the arrest of over 1,600 people, per numbers from the Marshall Project. According to the Chicago Tribune, only a small fraction of those arrested had any sort of criminal history.
About three days before she died, Torres attended a Zoom hearing in which another Chicago judge ruled that Maldonado’s deportation should be blocked because he has children who rely on him, and Torres and her brother are both U.S. citizens. The decision is still expected to allow him to obtain permanent residence and citizenship.
The Department of Homeland Security, of course, went with a different narrative—and speaking to NBC News, said in a statement that Maldonado had “a history of habitual driving offenses and has been charged multiple times with driving without insurance, driving without a valid license, and speeding.” But DHS also recently tried to frame a woman who spoke out about her miscarriage in ICE detention as a “murderer.”
“The Torres family’s story is, unfortunately, all too similar to the terror and trauma which has been forced upon on countless families across Chicago,” the city’s mayor, Brandon Johnson, said in a statement on Sunday. “This indiscriminate, bigoted campaign which has upended the lives of hard-working families who came to Chicago, and other cities across the country, in search for a better life, must come to end.”
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