This is an archived article and the information in the article may be outdated. Please look at the time stamp on the story to see when it was last updated.

LOS ANGELES — A 13-year-old girl wailed as immigration agents took her handcuffed father away in a black car.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents pulled Romulo Avelica-Gonzalez’s vehicle over Tuesday about a half-mile from a school where the undocumented immigrant from Mexico had just dropped off one of his girls.

The dad, 48, was driving daughter Fatima Avelica to another school in the northeast Los Angeles neighborhood of Highland Park when ICE stopped them.

Left behind in the car with her mother, Fatima wept inconsolably as she captured video of her father’s detention. Rosary beads hung from the rearview mirror. A palm-frond cross rested on the dashboard.

“It’s terrible to feel and see your family being broken apart,” her sister, Brenda, told KABC-TV in Los Angeles.

Since President Donald Trump’s inauguration, scores of unauthorized immigrants have been detained and deported under his administration’s hard-line immigration stand.

Fatima’s video and plaintive cry offer one of the first up-close looks at the human toll of those policies.

ICE said in a statement that Avelica was arrested because he has “multiple prior criminal convictions, including a DUI in 2009, as well an outstanding order of removal dating back to 2014.”

The ICE statement said members of a Los Angeles-based fugitive operations team conducted surveillance to confirm Avelica’s identity before arresting him near a charter school.

Avelica, a father of four, had lived in the United States for more than 25 years, according to a statement from Emi MacLean, an attorney for National Day Laborer Organizing Network.

The statement said Avelica was picked up one block from his daughter’s school.

Ricardo Mireles, executive director of the charter school Academia Avance, told KABC that Avelica’s DUI conviction occurred nearly a decade ago and another run-in with the law came 20 years ago after Avelica said he unknowingly purchased a car with an incorrect registration sticker.

“I think the impacts are going to come in terms of, ‘Hey, how do we pay the rent? And how do we move forward?’ ” Mireles told the station. “We want to be able to find resources to help this family go through this process.”

The ICE statement Friday said Avelica was still in custody.

“It’s really hard what we’re going through,” his daughter Brenda told KABC. “I never thought we’d actually go through something like this.”

Immigration rights activists have criticized Trump’s policy of targeting most of the unauthorized immigrants as opposed to the Obama administration’s focus on violent offenders.

On Wednesday, Daniela Vargas, 22, was arrested after sharing her family’s story — including the arrests of her father and brother last month by ICE officers — during a news conference in Jackson, Miss.

Moments before ICE picked her up, Vargas spoke out publicly for young people who, like herself, were brought to the United States illegally as children but later qualified for a temporary reprieve from deportation under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA.

Recipients often are called DREAMers, a reference to the DREAM Act, which if approved by Congress would give DACA participants permanent legal status.