Seven days after being born, Elisa Esmeralda saved her mother from being taken away by U.S. immigration agents – la migra – but one of their undocumented family members wasn’t so lucky. At around three or four in the morning on Tuesday, Juana Salmerón and her husband, Esteban Canales, woke up startled when they heard people knocking on the door of their second-floor apartment, located in a house on Mineola’s Willis Avenue.

“We hadn’t done anything wrong, so we opened the door for them because they said they were the police,” said Salmerón. “When they found out that we didn’t have papers they took my brother Francisco away with them, and they told me that they weren’t taking me just because of our baby.”

Salmerón said that her husband has a green card, but that they still hadn’t begun the process to legalize her status since her arrival from El Salvador, where she has four other children: Maribel, 15, Noé de Jesús, 14, Yuris, 11, and Marlon, 9.

“They came here asking for someone by the name of José Mendoza. When they didn’t find him, they took my brother,” said Salmerón, who stood alongside her other brother, Miguel Ángel, who lives just a short distance away.

“It’s unjust and even arbitrary that they showed up in the middle of the night to arrest a hard-working man, while other people roam the streets doing evil, and they don’t do anything to them,” said Elvis Sánchez, the owner of the Deli Lucky Mini Market, located on the first floor of the building where the Salmerón family lives.

Sánchez told Hoy that around six months ago immigration agents came looking for an undocumented immigrant who hadn’t shown up to a scheduled appointment with the immigration service. “The people from la Migra never lose,” said a neighbor who preferred to remain anonymous. “If they don’t find who they’re out looking for, they’ll detain whoever crosses their path.”

Along with Francisco Salmerón, agents also detained Humberto González Cambray, 54, who neighbors described as a man with mental problems who wouldn’t harm anybody. “They took us away in a one of those vans to Manhattan, and when they checked out my green card they let me go,” said González. He added he didn’t know where he was when they released him, but that some people told him how to take the train to Long Island so that he could return home. “Francisco lent me $20 because I didn’t even have a penny on me,” said González.

Worried about their brother’s fate, Juana and Miguel Ángel stated that Francisco worked in a churrasquería [South American barbecue restaurant] to support his wife, Guadalupe, and his children, Jeremías, 10, Ever, 8, and Alex, 6, who reside in Morazán, El Salvador.

Supervisor R. Nieves, at the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, told Hoy that “the detainee will be given the opportunity to call his family."