‘We lost everything’: Families of detained immigrants are drowning in debt

When he arrived in the United States in April last year, Ariel Figueredo López, a 35-year-old Cuban, went to live with his brother Ameed and his family in Lincoln, Nebraska. Figueredo arrived through the CBP One program, and had a temporary visa to live and work legally in the country. Eager to get ahead, he got a job at a solar panel company, and moved to Atlanta, where he met his girlfriend Eliani Rusindo, a fellow Cuban from the interior of the island who had also recently arrived.

When Figueredo finished his work in Georgia, the couple moved to Florida. There, they made a $1,500 downpayment on a 2018 Kia Sedona and got their first credit cards from Capital One and Chase. Figueredo’s company offered him another opportunity in Osceola, Arkansas, and off they went with a few possessions in the trunk of their car. They started sharing the $2,200 rent for a three-bedroom home with two other families. On the days he wasn’t working with solar panels, Figueredo delivered food for DoorDash, and so managed to cover his and Rusindo’s expenses. Little by little, they bought a set of bedroom furniture, a television and the other things they needed for their home, planning to eventually move to Nebraska to be near Figueredo’s family.

But that dream came crashing down the day that Osceola police fined Figueredo for driving seven miles an hour over the speed limit. When he tried to pay the fee online, he realized his name had been registered incorrectly. After a month had passed, he decided to go to the police to figure out what to do. That was when he was detained. “He told them that it wasn’t in the system, that his name was incorrect. They detained him and told him they were going to deport him to Cuba,” says Rusindo.

Ever since that day more than five months ago, Figueredo has been held in a Louisiana detention center. There are no more unpaid traffic violations on his record, but authorities will not release him on bail nor into the custody of his family. His case is just one among hundreds of thousands of immigrants who have been detained around the country in recent months as part of the anti-migrant crusade of Donald Trump’s administration, which has led to mass express deportations, and lengthy detentions of individuals without serious criminal charges or even records. The consequences of the Republican government’s agenda have been severe, and their economic and social impacts abound. The policies are leading to the loss of belongings and property for the family members of detained and deported migrants, who are not only dealing with the detention of a loved one on whom they depend economically, but are also running the risk of losing their homes and incurring serious debt.

Although U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) does not confiscate belongings, according to an email sent by the Department of Homeland Security to this newspaper, Nayna Gupta, policy director at the bipartisan advocacy group American Immigration Council, explains that federal immigration law “does not offer deportees anything explicit in terms of protecting their savings or personal belongings.”

“Generally, a deportation does not affect the typical property rights that a person has in the United States, and property rights also apply to non-citizens. In other words, a deportation order on its own does not subject someone to the confiscation of their belongings,” says Gupta. “However, if the deportation is tied to a criminal sentence, there is a possibility of a criminal seizure of assets.”

Fear of being detained, or in the worst case, deported, has led many immigrants to come up with strategies to hold onto their belongings, to the point where they are withdrawing their savings from bank accounts and designating legal representatives, according to family members of detainees, immigration lawyers, and migrant advocacy organizations.

Families like that of Figueredo suddenly find themselves without their primary breadwinner, adrift amid an avalanche of unexpected expenses, and many have lost everything they fought so hard to achieve as recent arrivals to the country. Ameed Figueredo and his wife Bárbara Delgado paid a $2,500 retainer and now send $500 a month to an immigration lawyer to defend their brother.

In April, the Department of Homeland Security revoked the legal status of hundreds of thousands of immigrants who, like Figueredo, had arrived through CBP One. He has an asylum hearing this month. His family says that if he is deported to Cuba, he is likely to be sent to prison due to his activism against the regime.

Rusindo had to return to Florida, where she is staying with some family members in Tampa. She brought everything she could fit inside the Kia, and during the first two months of Figueredo’s detention, continued paying the car’s $436 monthly payments and $150 insurance fees, until she could no longer afford them. This week, a tow truck came from the dealership and took it away. “We wanted to buy a home, have a family, so many things. But in the end, we lost it all. The things we had, that we had bought little by little — even our clothes,” says Rusindo.

Figueredo sent her the password to his DoorDash account so that she could withdraw the money in his account. She could also use his Chase account, thanks to ending up with a phone that had that account information stored on it. She can’t access the other credit cards. “He had good credit,” she says. But now, that’s ruined too.

Contingency plans

Enrique got to the United States with his family in 2021. He received a document known as the I-220A, which allowed him to remain in the country while his immigration case was pending. The 40-year-old Cuban, who asked for his last name not to be revealed, has not been detained yet. But he knows he could be at any moment because, four years later, he still has not managed to regularize his immigration status. And so, he has prepared power of attorney documents for himself, his wife and their son, and authorized a close friend to see to his belongings in the case that he is detained. The process of formalizing each power of attorney costs nearly $200. He also withdrew all his money from the bank, leaving only what was necessary to pay bills.

“A person doesn’t sleep from the worries, this fear, that I won’t be able to have any control, that it will be out of my hands, because it’s not just me, it’s my family. It could be tomorrow, God forbid. They catch you in a traffic stop, they put you in a hole and no one knows where you are and you lose everything. Your life is over,” says Enrique.

Entire communities are preparing similar contingency plans, says a spokesperson from the Florida Immigrant Coalition, which has been passing out “family preparedness plans” for harm reduction in the case that someone is detained and is at risk of deportation. The plans take the shape of informational packets that explain immigrants’ constitutional rights and have a blank page meant to be filled with emergency contacts, like consulates, employers, and lawyers, plus a list of documents to have on hand. The organization holds community workshops in which the plans are distributed.

The situation is not only impacting immigrants who are recent arrivals. Some who have been in the United States for a long time, have American children, their own homes, or are business owners, are also being detained and deported. Such is the case of a woman who was detained in February when she attended a residency interview at the immigration offices in the northern Miami neighborhood of Oakland Park. The woman, who is from Haiti, arrived late to an immigration hearing in 2007 and a deportation order was issued in her name, explains her lawyer, Frandley Julien, who did not represent her at the time. Julien appealed that order, managed to get her case reopened, and says his client has “a clear path to getting residency.”

Even so, the 50-year-old woman has been detained in Louisiana since February. She and her husband have been cleaners for decades, and managed to save the money to buy two houses, one they live in and another that they rent. While she has been detained, her family has faced economic difficulties on a single income, and are afraid they will lose both properties.

“This is truly the case of a beautiful life story, of a person who respects the law, who has worked for little more than minimum wage and even so, managed to buy two houses. You would think that the government would value that,” says Julien, who adds that the day his client arrived late to court, there had been an accident on the highway. “It could happen to anyone. She never should have been a priority for immigration.” In his eyes, authorities are “destroying communities.” Now he says he will be presenting a writ of habeas corpus on his client’s behalf. He laments, “it doesn’t make any sense.”

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