José Contreras Díaz is now free: ICE releases the DACA recipient it had deported and returned to the US to be arrested again

José Contreras Díaz, a beneficiary of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, was released Thursday from the Port Isabel Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center in South Texas. The 30-year-old Honduran had been separated from his family for more than three months: ICE detained and deported him earlier this year. After appeals from his lawyers, he was returned to the United States on April 29 with parole, but the agency immediately detained him again upon his arrival at Harlingen Airport.

After his release, Contreras said: “This has been the hardest thing my family and I have ever experienced.” He condemned the fact that, after being detained and deported “to a country I barely remembered,” the authorities made him feel “that I could go home, see my family, and hug my son, only to then take that hope away from me.”

“José should never have been detained or deported in the first place, because his DACA status was valid and his parole had been granted,” said his lawyer, Stacy Tolchin.

According to his family, the young man was transferred from the ICE detention center in Port Isabel to another in Harlingen. From there, he was released at a bus station in Brownsville, an hour from his home, where his sisters picked him up.

“There are no words to express what it means to have my brother back home. We waited months for this moment, living each day with the fear and uncertainty of what would happen next,” said Emily Barahona, one of his younger sisters, on Thursday afternoon.

This Thursday, Contreras held his baby, Mateo, for the first time. Mateo was born after his arrest. “It meant everything to our family,” Barahona said. “We are whole again.”

Contreras is not the first DACA recipient to be detained and deported since January 2025, after Donald Trump assumed his second presidency. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) admitted in February of this year that between January and November 2025, ICE had arrested 261 DACA recipients and deported 86.

Tolchin told EL PAÍS that before 2025, she had “never” had to represent a DACA beneficiary who was detained and deported.

The legal battle

Contreras arrived in the United States with his parents in 2004, when he was a child. He did not return to Honduras until he was deported in January 2026. A DHS spokesperson confirmed to EL PAÍS that his family had a deportation order.

Attorney Tolchin is aware of the order, which was issued more than two decades ago, but argues that Contreras was only eight years old when the immigration judge made that decision. He later applied for DACA and, for the past decade, has been able to renew his permits, which protect him from deportation and allow him to work.

When ICE called him in for a routine check-in in early January, his sister recalls that her father had a bad feeling. Contreras took a break from his workday and went to the appointment during his lunch break. That day, the agency used the deportation order issued against his family and detained him. Days later, they put him on a plane back to Honduras.

Tolchin recounts that on April 11, they sent a letter to ICE requesting Contreras’s return to the United States: “He had been illegally deported.” Days later, the agency granted him parole so the young man could return to Texas: “He was supposed to return on April 29, but he was immediately detained that day.”

The lawyers challenged his detention in district court: “You can’t detain someone who can’t be deported. And since he can’t be deported, he must be released,” Tolchin explained regarding the appeal. It remains unclear whether Contreras was released by order of this court.

Recently, this lawyer also represented María de Jesús Estrada Juárez, another DACA beneficiary who was deported in February and returned to the United States after a judge’s order. The judge behind the decision said that expelling her from the country was a “flagrant violation” of the protections afforded by DACA.

Tolchin says that cases like those of Estrada and Contreras show that “ICE is acting outside the law.” DHS argued in an email that Contreras, whom they define as an “illegal alien,” could not remain in the United States.

Attacks on DACA

Since former president Barack Obama announced DACA in June 2012, the program has faced numerous attempts by Republican politicians to end or cripple it, including by President Trump. In his second term, his administration eliminated access to affordable health insurance for its 600,000 beneficiaries, as well as educational assistance. And recently, a ruling by a panel of judges could open the door for some DACA recipients to be deported.

Organizations and lawyers say that the detention and deportation of DACA recipients with valid permits is something they have never seen before. And it’s not the only way they believe their rights are being violated.

“They’re attacking the program on several fronts,” says Todd Schulte, president of FWD.us, an organization that promotes immigration and criminal justice reform. He says that since 2025, permit renewals have also been affected.

“It used to take about two weeks, and now it’s taking almost two and a half months. What we’re seeing is DACA recipients losing their benefits because of the time the renewals are taking,” he explains, adding that they are also losing their jobs. He cites cases where it has taken more than two months to renew a permit.

Schulte argues that, instead of this “insidious” approach, Trump should stop the attacks and ask Congress to pass a law that protects these young people by opening a path to citizenship for them.

The president of FWD.us celebrated Contreras’s release on Thursday. However, he insisted that what happened in his case “remains a scandal”: “Correcting an injustice is not the same as undoing it. What the government must do is stop its attacks against DACA recipients.”

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