The gardener going to work or the boyfriend coming home: The ravaged normality of migrants detained by ICE

Fermino Sánchez Hernández had not had any problems with the law since he arrived in the United States four years ago from Mexico, but that was not enough for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. A few days ago, he left his home in Freehold, New Jersey, to go to his job as a gardener. He was walking down the sidewalk, it was almost 7 a.m.. “Suddenly, two people came out of nowhere, asked him his name, asked for identification, and when he told them he didn’t have any, they arrested him,” says Roxana, his relative.

The 28-year-old was taken to the Elizabeth Detention Center, where someone saw him sitting in a corner, barely speaking, and insisted he call a family member. Fermino, who has rudimentary Spanish as he is a Tzotzil speaker, a language native to his home state of Chiapas, picked up the phone and called Roxana to tell her he had been detained by ICE. In his next call, he told her he had been transferred to a detention center in Louisiana because the Elizabeth jail was overcrowded.

The last time Roxana heard Fermino’s voice, he sounded distressed and impatient. He even told her that he wanted to sign his own deportation order to Mexico. “He’s desperate, he says they don’t give them food, only a cup of soup or a cookie all day, he says he can’t stand it, that it’s ugly in there.”

For a few weeks now, these phone calls have become agony for Jessica Acosta Sánchez. She is always afraid of what she may hear on the other end of the line. Several nights ago, Jessica answered her partner’s call in a panic. In just over a minute, the tight and immense time afforded a detainee, she wanted to know how he was, what they were saying to him, and where he was calling from, especially where he was at that moment.

— It’s frustrating to imagine that the next call will be from Cuba.

But that call from Juan Manuel Fernández Ramos, 30, was from a detention center in Houston, where he arrived in the early morning, handcuffed, as part of a group of more than 100 detainees. He had been put on a plane in Florida and, only when he landed, was he told he was in Texas.

When he made his previous call, Juan Manuel was in the Krome Processing Center, a jail in Miami operated by ICE. He was taken there by authorities after appearing in court. He had been ticketed for speeding in February, when he was driving just three minutes away from his home in Tampa. He also had a DUI.

The couple arrived in the United States three years ago, she on a journey through Central America to the border, he on a raft that sailed 90 miles through the Florida Straits. Everything was fine, or at least that’s what they thought. She worked in a factory. He was a delivery man for a Costco supermarket. They were planning to get married. But they never imagined it would be like this: he detained by ICE and she asking for help to raise the $15,000 that a lawyer is charging her to represent him.

The first time he called her from Krome, Juan Manuel told her that he and other detainees were spending the night outside the detention center because there was no capacity for them amid the wave of arrests unleashed since the beginning of the year by the administration of Donald Trump, when it declared a “national emergency” and its immediate crusade against the country’s undocumented migrants.

Since the Republican returned to power, arrests across the United States have increased significantly, reaching a figure of about 23,000 according to ICE data. At the end of January, arrests stood at 872 people per day and in February, just under 600, compared to the average of 255 people who were arrested daily during Joe Biden’s administration. Today, there are almost 42,000 people in ICE custody, 4,000 more than before the new government was installed in the White House, something that has caused detention centers to collapse: they have reached 109% of their capacity.

Trump’s detainees do not have a specific face; anyone could be arrested next. The father going to pick up his children from school, the neighbor getting into the car, the woman going out for a walk... The president stated that he would begin with the arrest of criminals, of “murderers” and “rapists,” but the data show a different picture. Many of the crimes committed by undocumented immigrants, such as driving under the influence of alcohol or traffic tickets, are considered minor. Almost 90% of immigrants of this type in the United States do not have a criminal record, and arrests of people without charges increased from 6% to 16% in mid-January. Attorney Jonathan Shaw says that something “historic” is happening, something he had never before seen in his years of defending migrants before the judicial system.

“Over the last six weeks we have seen that it has been different. Normally, under the Barack Obama and Biden administrations they would make arrests, but they would have identified people, people who maybe committed a lot of crimes in the country, but now it’s different. Before there was a purpose to protect the communities, now I am observing that the officers are trying to meet the quotas, with that pressure that they have from the White House to record a very high number of arrests,” says the lawyer.

Shaw, for example, has defended two cases in recent weeks of people detained without any criminal record: a family that was deported to Colombia after the father appeared in immigration court and the mother and son were taken from the child’s school. He also mentions the case of a Venezuelan immigrant in Utah, whose door was knocked on by ICE agents. He was told that he should have been arrested on drug charges, even though there was no record of this in the entire criminal system. The young man was released on bail.

Juan Manuel has not been so lucky. In another of his calls, he told Jessica that if he has endured this detention, it is because he does not want to return to Cuba. “He never imagined that he would go through this process, he always thought that he would sort out his papers, that he would become legal.”

On one of the last occasions they spoke, Juan Manuel told her that if he still has strength, it is because he knows she is waiting for him. But it is hard. They had him handcuffed for several days, “as if they were murderers, rapists, criminals,” says Jessica. “He told me: my hands are swollen, they haven’t let me shower, I have pimples on my face, they have barely given us food.”

He also told her that in Krome, some officers approached him to sign a voluntary deportation order to Cuba, but he didn’t do it. “He told me that every day an officer came to get him to sign an order voluntarily to be deported, but we told him not to sign any document, especially if it was in English and he didn’t understand it, because they could trick him,” says Jessica.

Neither Trump nor Tom Homan, the new border czar, are particularly happy with the number of migrants being deported, which is happening at a much slower pace than they had in mind. Although arrests have increased, the number of deportations is still lower than under the previous Democratic administration. In the last month, the figures show a total of 18,000 people deported, an average of 600 people per day, compared to more than 750 during the Biden era.

Even though some may feel pressured to sign their own deportation, attorney Shaw insists that it is important for detained individuals “not to sign a document without understanding what it is.” “They are trying to portray it as a normal, run-of-the-mill deportation, so it is important that they do not sign documents without speaking to an attorney first.” He also explains that, depending on the case, there are many legal remedies that detainees can use, such as being eligible for a bond process, assessing whether they have a viable case for asylum, or whether the cancellation of a deportation order is possible.

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