The National Council of La Raza (NCLR) and a number of Democratic senators asked the US Congress on Tuesday to reject the additional funding requested by President Donald Trump to increase deportation forces and to build a wall on the Mexican border.

Janet Murguia, president of La Raza, the largest Hispanic civil rights group in the US, denounced the constant fear that immigrant families are living through.

The activist spoke particularly of children, who, she said, are the principal victims of Trump's immigration policy, with about 6 million of them vulnerable to having their families broken up.

"We cannot allow this scorched-earth policy to be implemented. We need to end the assault on our children, end the assault on our families and end the assault on our community." Murguia told a press conference, together with a group of Democratic senators and some children whose parents, with no criminal records, were deported under orders of the president.

Fatima Avelica, 13, and her sister Yuleni, 12, watched while authorities arrested their Mexican father, when he was taking them to school. He had lived in the US for 25 years.

Yuleni told her sister to "be strong," but Fatima broke into tears.

"I was scared and sad at the same time," Fatima told CNN. "I never thought I would have to experience something like this in my life...on my way to school."

Now she wants to be an immigration lawyer when she grows up so she can help people like her father.

The case of Rosa Escobar's family is similar, since the law took away her husband, an undocumented immigrant from El Salvador, and deported him for breaking federal immigration laws. He cannot return to the US unless the case is reopened and his 15-year sentence is commuted.

Rosa and her two children, ages 2 and 7, are American citizens, and yet she can't find a way to reunite her family. At the same time she worries about the safety of her husband in El Salvador, which he left more than 15 years ago.

In view of such cases, Democratic minority leader Chuck Schumer insisted that "Senate Democrats are prepared to fight this all the way" in order to stop the money of American taxpayers from being used for projects like these, which harm the country both socially and economically.

He also said that from day one of Trump's campaign, the magnate said he was going after immigrants, and so he has.

Meanwhile "the administration is asking the American taxpayer to cover the cost of a wall - unneeded, ineffective, absurdly expensive - and he is cutting programs vital to the middle class to get that done," the New York senator said.