As Cruz stood next to her husband’s gray 2001 Toyota Tacoma on New Hampshire Avenue, she said later, she feared that she, too, would be arrested and deported.

A Takoma Park officer came up, handed her the keys, the truck’s registration and Hernandez’s Maryland driver’s license. ‘‘This is all that’s left of your husband,” she recalled the officer telling her.

Her husband’s deportation has left her trying to balance the prospects for their children — Hugo Jr., 4, and Lester, now 7 months old, both of them U.S. citizens — against the realization that the family won’t be able to make ends meet without him.

Hernandez was the family’s only provider and Cruz had to abandon their Takoma Park apartment to move in with a relative in Hyattsville. She now sells tostadas and tamales door-to-door with Hugo Jr. in tow. On a good day, she might make $40.

‘‘It is so hard, I am so sad — we had never been apart. And even more for him,” she said in Spanish, pulling Hugo Jr. toward her. ‘‘He looks at his pictures and misses him.”

Hugo Jr. thinks his father has been at work. ‘‘He says, ‘He’s working too much.’ I say, ‘Yes, I know.’”

Cruz said she understands that by coming forward, she could draw the attention of authorities, but she wanted her story to be heard.

Hernandez had no criminal warrants. Rather, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal agency that deals with illegal immigrants, posted a civil detainer for him on a national law enforcement database.

Hernandez had been caught when he tried to sneak into the country six years ago — before the federal government ended its ‘‘catch-and-release” policy for non-Mexicans caught along the U.S.-Mexico border. On his release, Hernandez was told he would receive notice to appear at a deportation hearing.

Cruz — who crossed the border a year after her husband — said they never received the letter. As in almost all such cases where someone does not appear at the hearing, a federal judge ordered Hernandez deported.

So when the Takoma Park police pulled Hernandez over and ran a standard check for warrants six years later, the civil detainer from having missed his hearing came up.

Deportations like Hernandez’s did not happen before 2003. It was then that the federal government began adding civil detainers to the National Crime Information Center database.

In Montgomery County, the number of people picked up on federal civil detainers remains small — 65 people were detained last year, according to county police.

But the number is large enough to damage the relationship between county police and immigrants, immigration advocates say: Witnesses and crime victims are afraid to come forward for fear of being deported.

Then there are the horror stories from family and friends that their loved ones disappear into the deportation system and the families always don’t know where they are or how to help them.

Hugo Jr. still doesn’t understand why his father has been working so much. Cruz doesn’t have it in her to tell him — not that he would even understand at his age, she said.

On Sunday, six weeks after the traffic stop, Hernandez returned to Guatemala.

Now, Cruz is caught between the opportunities her children will have living in the United States, where they are citizens, and her husband’s desire to keep the family together.

‘‘He says, ‘We’ll fight and we’ll struggle and we’ll do the best we can.’ But me, because of all the help and opportunity that my children have here, I want to stay.”

Only last month, she said, one of her brothers was killed in the family home in Guatemala, Cruz said. ‘‘You tell me how I could subject my children to that.”