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Independent: Kilmar Abrego Garcia seeks gag order against Trump administration, singles out Noem and Bondi’s ‘inflammatory’ attacks
Barrage of public attacks could taint jury pools with ‘irrelevant, prejudicial, and false claims,’ according to Abrego Garcia’s attorneys
Kilmar Abrego Garcia is asking a federal judge for a gag order to stop Trump administration officials from publicly attacking him with “inflammatory” statements that attorneys say are threatening his right to a fair trial on criminal smuggling charges.
Lawyers for the wrongly deported Salvadoran immigrant say Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Attorney General Pam Bondi, among others, have spent months publicly disparaging his “character and reputation” by smearing him as a wife beater, pedophile, gang member and terrorist.
“The government’s ongoing barrage of prejudicial statements severely threaten — and perhaps have already irrevocably impaired — the ability to try this case at all — in any venue,” lawyers wrote Thursday night.
The Trump administration has “distorted the events and evidence underpinning his case to the public; misrepresented his criminal record; disseminated false, irrelevant, and inflammatory claims; and expressed the opinion that he is guilty of the crimes charged,” lawyers wrote.
Last month, the federal judge overseeing the criminal case ordered his release from jail before trial, finding that prosecutors failed to show “any evidence” that his history or the arguments against him warrant his ongoing detention. Judges have found the allegations “fanciful” and formally ruled that he does not pose a danger to the public.
Abrego Garcia was mistakenly deported to a brutal prison in his home country, igniting a high-profile legal battle for his return at the center of Donald Trump’s anti-immigration agenda.
Government lawyers admitted he was removed from the United States due to a procedural error, and several federal judges and a unanimous Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate” his return after his “illegal” arrest.
But the government spent weeks battling court orders for his return while officials launched a barrage of public attacks, declaring that he would never again step foot in the country.
He was then abruptly returned in June to face allegations that he illegally moved other immigrants across the country. He has pleaded not guilty.
In their request to keep him in jail before trial, federal prosecutors claimed he is a member of the transnational gang MS-13 and “personally participated in violent crime, including murder.”
Prosecutors also claimed he “abused” women and trafficked children, firearms and narcotics, and there is also an ongoing investigation into “solicitation of child pornography.”
Abrego Garcia is not facing any charges on any of those allegations, nor has he been convicted of anything. A federal judge determined that the government failed to link those allegations to evidence that implicates him.
Abrego Garcia’s wife had previously sought a protective order against him several years ago, though she never pressed charges and said the couple has since resolved their disputes. She has played a prominent public role defending him.
Last week, a federal judge granted his release from pretrial detention. Immigration authorities arrested him days later and threatened to deport him to Uganda.
A separate judge has blocked the government from deporting him while he challenges his latest arrest. A decision is expected after October 6.
His attorneys have argued that the indictment is aimed at punishing Abrego Garcia for his ongoing legal battle with the Trump administration, which has “vilified” him from the moment the case made headlines that caused massive political headaches for the White House.
After he was released from jail this month, Noem labeled him a “MS-13 gang member, human trafficker, serial domestic abuser and child predator.”
That same day, the White House called him “a criminal illegal alien, wife-beater and an MS13 gang member facing serious charges of human smuggling.”
This week, the president called him an “animal” who had “beat the hell out of his wife.”
But the “pièce de résistance,” according to Abrego Garcia’s lawyers, was a cartoon posted by the White House’s official X account depicting him with “MS-13” written beneath it.
“If the government is allowed to continue in this way, it will taint any conceivable jury pool by exposing the entire country to irrelevant, prejudicial, and false claims about Mr. Abrego,” lawyers wrote.
A DHS official told The Independent that if Abrego Garcia does “not want to be mentioned” by administration officials, “then he should have not entered our country illegally and committed heinous crimes.”
“Once again, the media is falling all over themselves to defend this criminal illegal MS-13 gang member who is an alleged human trafficker, domestic abuser, and child predator,” the official added.
“The media’s sympathetic narrative about this criminal illegal alien has completely fallen apart, yet they continue to peddle his sob story,” the official said. “We hear far too much about gang members and criminals’ false sob stories and not enough about their victims.”
The Justice Department declined to comment to The Independent.
I can’t recall ever seeing the gov’t so obsessed with demonizing someone as Kilmar Garcia.
Raw Story: Governor warns Trump allies: justice will catch up to those aiding his crimes
Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker delivered a pointed warning Sunday to Republicans aiding Donald Trump’s efforts to weaponize the federal government against political enemies, vowing they will be held accountable once power shifts. Citing Trump’s threats to send troops into Chicago, Pritzker said history shows justice can be delayed but not denied, and reminded allies that Trump has little loyalty to those who break the law for him. Quoting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Pritzker declared that the arc of justice “doesn’t bend on its own” — and promised to help force it there if necessary.
Read the full story here.
MSNBC: Columnist mocks MAGA: It’s ‘socialism’ when Mamdani does it, ‘genius’ when Trump does it
Newsweek: ICE detains dad of four “awaiting green card interview”
A Russian immigrant said to be awaiting a green card interview is being detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after Russian authorities allegedly issued an Interpol request for his arrest, according to a GoFundMe set up by his family.
Aleksei Levit—who escaped persecution in his home country some eight years ago, including a purported assassination attempt, per the GoFundMe—is being held at the Dodge Detention Center in Juneau, Wisconsin, according to ICE records.
A Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson told Newsweek: “Aleksei Levit, an illegal alien from Russia, entered the United States on March 13, 2017, on a B2 tourist visa. He overstayed the visa and remained in our country illegally.
“Over the past eight years, he never applied for a green card. ICE arrested him on July 31, 2025, and placed him in removal proceedings. All of his claims will be heard before a judge. Under President [Donald] Trump and Secretary [of Homeland Security Kristi] Noem, criminals are not welcome in the U.S.”
Newsweek reached out to Levit’s wife via the GoFundMe page.
Why It Matters
Levit’s case spotlights the Trump administration’s broader illegal immigration crackdown, which includes apprehending nonviolent individuals who lack the proper credentials to remain in the United States.
His family claims he was never provided with green card interviews for the majority of the last decade.
In February, a lawsuit was filed against ICE representing 276 immigrants from ex-Soviet countries, including Russia, Georgia and Kazakhstan, who claimed that they were detained and locked up for extended periods of time, violating federal law and internal policies, according to the Louisiana Illuminator.
In June, ICE reported its arrest of a 39-year-old, Tajikistan-born Russian national in Philadelphia who was wanted overseas for being suspected of being a member of the Al-Qaeda terrorist organization.
What To Know
Levit and his Slinger, Wisconsin-based family, which includes his wife and four children (ages 8, 6 and 4-year-old twins), fled Russia over eight years ago to seek asylum in the U.S. due to Levit “facing persecution for refusing to participate in corrupt practices,” according to a GoFundMe started by his wife. It’s unclear from where that claim is derived.
As of Wednesday morning, $1,650 had been raised of its goal of $5,500.
The husband and father has been detained for over three weeks. Photos show him wearing a hard hat and safety gear as part of his job. The job title was never mentioned.
“As a dedicated public servant, he always upheld the values of honesty and integrity,” the GoFundMe states. “However, this commitment came at a devastating cost. Our family was forced to leave behind a life we cherished, filled with love and hope, as threats, searches and even an assassination attempt made it clear that our safety was in jeopardy.
“The fear for our lives pushed us to start anew in a foreign land, without connections and with limited English. We faced countless challenges, losing everything multiple times, yet we persevered.”
“For over eight years, we have been waiting for our Green Card interviews, living and working legally, and contributing to our community,” the page says.
The crowdfunding campaign alleges that Levit was taken into custody “in handcuffs and chains, without explanation” as he left for work one day. It also alleges that Russian authorities issued an Interpol request for his arrest, seeking to deport him back to a country “where he would face certain death or imprisonment for his beliefs.”
“The Russian government is relentless in its pursuit of those they deem undesirable, and they have taken away my beloved husband and the father of our four young children,” says the GoFundMe. “Throughout our time in the U.S., we had an attorney who was supposed to guide us and represent us, but on that fateful day he abandoned us, leaving us without support when we needed it most.
“We lost all the money we had paid him, and now we find ourselves in desperate need of funds to hire a new attorney.”
They added that “without legal representation, the odds are stacked against us,” saying that individuals in his position who lack counsel “almost always lose.”
What People Are Saying
On Tuesday, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) spokesperson told Newsweek: “A green card is a privilege, not a right, and under our nation’s laws, our government has the authority to revoke a green card if our laws are broken and abused. Lawful Permanent Residents (LPR) presenting at a U.S. port of entry with criminal convictions may be found inadmissible, placed in removal proceedings, and subject to mandatory detention.”
What Happens Next
Levit’s future remains unknown as the family continues to attempt to hire legal representation in his case.
https://www.newsweek.com/ice-immigration-green-card-detention-father-russia-2120121
Raw Story: Pentagon turmoil grows as top tech chief quits under Hegseth’s rocky leadership
The Pentagon under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is facing mounting upheaval after Doug Beck, head of the Defense Innovation Unit and the last high-profile Biden holdover, abruptly resigned without explanation. Beck’s departure severs a key link to Silicon Valley and follows a wave of senior exits, including multiple top generals ousted or retiring early. Hegseth, a former Fox News host whose tenure has been marred by scandals and culture-war battles, now faces intensifying scrutiny as critics warn his leadership is destabilizing the nation’s defense establishment.
Read the full story here.
Slate: I’ve Covered Immigration for a Decade. I’ve Never Seen the Government Do This Before.
It’s the ultimate extrapolation of an alarming Trump administration strategy.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia has spent the past several months on an involuntary tour of detention centers at home and abroad. Back in March, Immigration and Customs Enforcement picked up the Maryland dad and took him to immigration detention facilities in Louisiana and then Texas before the U.S. government flew him to the notorious Salvadoran megaprison CECOT—which Trump administration officials have admitted was a mistake.
Months after a federal judge ordered him returned to the U.S., he was brought back in June and immediately taken into criminal custody in Tennessee before he was once again ordered released, at which point he was swiftly put back into ICE custody and shuttled to a facility in Virginia. Over the course of a few months, Abrego Garcia has been in at least three immigration detention facilities, one criminal facility, and a foreign gulag entirely unauthorized to receive U.S. detainees, all while the government has failed at every attempt to establish a clear legal basis for his detention. It is effectively ferrying him from one type of custody to another only when it skirts close to being in open contempt of court.
According to Abrego Garcia’s lawyers, he was offered a plea deal for the thin trafficking charge federal prosecutors are pursuing against him with the promise that he would then be deported to Costa Rica; if he refused, federal authorities would instead send him to Uganda, a country he’s never been to. That’s exactly what Trump officials then moved to do before the same federal judge ruled that he could not be deported until at least early October while she considered the legality of their deportation efforts; in the interim, Abrego García is renewing his application for asylum. This is the first time in a decade of covering immigration that I can recall the explicit use of a removal location as a cudgel to gain compliance, especially in a separate criminal matter.
It’s easy to lump this odyssey in with the rest of the Trump-era immigration enforcement spectacle, but I’d argue that it is more of an avatar for the collapse of various systems into an all-encompassing expression of government power. Lawyers, journalists, and researchers have long used the term crimmigration to refer to the interplay between the criminal and civil immigration systems—how a criminal charge can trigger immigration consequences, for example. Still, due process generally demands some independence between the processes; except where explicitly laid out in law, you shouldn’t be able to bundle them together, in the same way that it would be obviously improper to, say, threaten someone with a tax investigation unless they plead guilty to unrelated charges.
Yet since the beginning of Abrego Garcia’s ordeal, the government has been trying to make his case about essentially whatever will stick, flattening the immigration and criminal aspects into one sustained character attack. It attempted to justify his deportation by tarring him as a gang member, an accusation that was based on comically flimsy evidence and which the government never tried to escalate to proving in court. Per internal Department of Justice whistleblower emails, officials desperately cast about for scraps of evidence to paint him as a hardened MS-13 leader and basically struck out.
After a federal judge ordered that he be brought back, the Justice Department devoted significant resources to retroactively drumming up charges over a three-year-old incident that police didn’t act on at the time, in which the government’s main witness, unlike Abergo Garcia, is a convicted felon. It is so flimsy that his lawyers are pursuing the rare defense of vindictive prosecution, pointing out the obvious fact that the criminal charge was ginned up as punishment and PR in itself.
It’s not that the specific contours of the legal cases are immaterial or that we shouldn’t pay attention to the arguments and evidence that the administration is trotting out (or, as the case may be, attempting to manufacture). These things all create precedent and they signal what the administration is willing to do and how judges can or will exercise their power. But we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that the specifics of the immigration and criminal cases are effectively beyond the point, and this is all really about bringing the awesome weight of the government down to bear on a designated enemy.
The administration is attempting to create a situation where Abrego Garcia cannot actually win, even if he does ultimately succeed in his immigration and criminal cases. His life has become untenable despite the fact that the administration has, despite dedicating significant resources to the search, failed to produce any conclusive evidence that he is a public danger or a criminal or really anything but the normal “Maryland man” descriptor that they’ve taken such issue with. This is an effort to demonstrate to everyone the Trump administration might consider an enemy that it has both the will and capacity to destroy their lives by a thousand cuts.
Abrego Garcia is perhaps the most acute example because he sits at the intersection of an array of vulnerabilities: he is a noncitizen without clear-cut legal status, is not wealthy, has had criminal justice contact in the past, and is a Latino man, a demographic that right-wing figures have spent years trying to paint as inherently dangerous. Each of these characteristics provides a certain amount of surface area for the government to hook onto in order to punish him for the offense of making them look bad through the self-admitted error of deporting him illegally.
This is unforgivable for reasons that go beyond ego or malice; as Trump and officials like Stephen Miller move to tighten their authoritarian grip in areas of political opposition, they’re relying partly on might but also partly on a sense of infallibility and inevitability. To put in court documents that they erred in removing this one man to one of the most hellish places on Earth is, in their view, to call the entire legitimacy of their enterprise into question, and that cannot stand.
It is more useful to look at Abrego Garcia’s case as the ultimate extrapolation of this strategy, which is being deployed to various extents against administration opponents like, for example, Federal Reserve board governor Lisa Cook. Trump is attempting to fire her ostensibly over allegations of mortgage fraud, though the administration itself is barely even pretending that this is anything but the easiest and quickest entry point they could find to come after an ideological opponent, or at least a potential obstacle. If Cook had had some hypothetical immigration issue, the administration would almost certainly have latched onto that instead. It’s all a means to an end.
Albany Times Union: Ex-Border Patrol agent gets prison for making migrants show breasts
A former U.S. Border Patrol agent was sentenced to 12 months in federal prison Wednesday after pleading guilty to charges that he had made immigrant women expose their breasts when he was processing their information using a computer webcam.
The incidents took place after the immigrants had been encountered by Border Patrol agents in August 2023 while crossing the southern border.
Shane Millan, 54, who pleaded guilty in March to two misdemeanor counts of deprivation of rights under color of law, had been working at a Border Patrol station at Wellesley Island in Jefferson County and was using the computer to get information from the immigrants during interviews over a webcam. He had been a border patrol agent for 17 years at the time.
According to federal court records, Millan was tasked with gathering the migrants’ biographical and other information and saving the data electronically so that they could remain in the United States pending further immigration proceedings. Although the immigrants had crossed the southern border, Millan was doing the work through a computer from upstate New York at a time when record numbers of migrants were entering the U.S. and the federal agency was overwhelmed.
According to prosecutors, Millan “repeatedly abused his authority by requiring female immigrants to expose their breasts during these video-conference sessions, ostensibly so that he could confirm whether they had any chest tattoos.”
Millan did not speak Spanish but used a translation app to learn phrases such as, “I will also need you to lift your bra, please,” and “I will need to verify once more, can you stand in front of the monitor and lift your shirt and bra again, please,” according to court records.
One of the women, who was carrying an infant, resisted when Millan told her to lift her shirt a second time. Court records indicate he told her that he would not sign her paperwork unless she showed him her bare chest again. She reluctantly placed her child on the floor and lifted her shirt.
“These sickening demands violated agency policies regarding voyeurism and strip searches, but the victims did not know that,” federal prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memorandum. “(Millan’s) repeated instructions appeared legitimate, which is the lynchpin of a color of law offense, and multiple immigrants reluctantly complied with them.”
Acting U.S. Attorney John A. Sarcone III said: “Everybody deserves respect, and we will not tolerate the sexual exploitation of immigrants by members of law enforcement. Nobody is above the law.”
Prosecutors said Millan admitted requiring at least a dozen women to show him their breasts during the webcam processing. The misconduct was exposed after “multiple victims had the courage to come forward and report how they were exploited,” prosecutors said.When he was initially interviewed about the allegations in August 2023, Millan told investigators that he had asked only one woman to lift her shirt but never asked any women to remove their bras. In June 2024, after an investigation that lasted nearly a year, he confessed to what he had done, according to court records.
Millan’s attorneys, while noting his behavior was “disturbing” and “aberrant,” had asked the judge to consider a sentence of “supervision, rather than incarceration,” along with mental health counseling. They said that he had no prior criminal history and is having trouble finding a new job due to publicity about his case.
They also wrote in the sentencing memorandum that prior to his arrest last year, Millan’s “lifestyle was not only law-abiding, considering his family commitments, religious practices, and career, his lifestyle was devoted to caring for and protecting others.”
Making Amerika great again, one perverted bully-boy at a time!
L.A. Times: L.A. teen is moved to ICE detention center out of state without parents’ knowledge
Benjamin Guerrero-Cruz’s family was stunned and heartbroken when the 18-year-old was grabbed by immigration agents while walking his dog in Van Nuys just days before he was set to start his senior year at Reseda Charter High School.
This week, his family was caught off-guard once again when they learned that Immigration and Customs Enforcement had transferred him to Arizona without notifying any relatives, according to the office of U.S. Rep. Luz Rivas (D-North Hollywood), which spoke to his family and reviewed ICE detention records.
Guerrero-Cruz was moved out of the Adelanto Detention Facility in San Bernardino County late Monday night and taken to a holding facility in Arizona in the middle of the desert, according to the congresswoman’s office.
On Tuesday night, he was scheduled to be transferred to Louisiana, a major hub for deportation flights, but at the last minute he was taken off the plane and sent back to Adelanto, where he is currently being held.
“Benjamin and his family deserve answers behind ICE’s inconsistent and chaotic decision-making process, including why Benjamin was initially transferred to Arizona, why he was slated to be transferred to Louisiana afterward, and why his family wasn’t notified of his whereabouts by ICE throughout this process,” Rivas said in a statement.
On Tuesday, Rivas introduced a bill that would require ICE to notify an immediate family member of a detainee within 24 hours of a detainee’s transfer. Currently, ICE is required to notify a family member only in the case of a detainee’s death.
“Benjamin’s story of being detained and sent across state lines without warning or notification is like many other detainees in Los Angeles and across the country,” Rivas said. “Many immigrant families in my district do not know the whereabouts of their loved ones after they are detained by ICE.”
The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The agency previously stated that Guerrero-Cruz was awaiting deportation to Chile after overstaying his visa, which required him to depart the United States on March 15, 2023.
Guerrero-Cruz was arrested Aug. 8 and held in downtown L.A. for a week, during which time he was briefly taken on an unexplained trip to a detention center in Santa Ana before being transferred to Adelanto on Aug. 15, according to a former teacher who visited him in custody.
His experience of being pingponged around different facilities is common among those being detained in what the Trump administration is billing as the largest deportation effort in American history.
This trend is also reflected in ICE’s flight data. The agency conducted 2,022 domestic transfer flights from May through July — representing a 90% increase from the same period last year, according to a widely cited database of flights created by immigrant rights advocate Tom Cartwright.
Cartwright posited in his July report that this uptick could be related to a “need to optimize bed space as detention numbers have ballooned from 39,152 on 29 December to 56,945 on 26 July.”
Jorge-Mario Cabrera, spokesperson for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights L.A., called the Trump administration’s detention policies cruel, saying it appears that they are detaining people for as long as possible and “moving them from place to place for no reason other than because they can.”
“The fact that these dumbfounding transfers in the middle of the night cause chaos, confusion, and minimizes access to legal representation does not seem to bother them one bit,” he said in a statement.
Susham M. Modi, an immigration attorney based in Houston, said he had witnessed an uptick in the frequency of transfers among those recently detained by ICE.
“[Detainees are] also being often transferred to where there’s less lawyers,” he said. “I’ve seen consults where they’ve been transferred to Oklahoma, where it is very hard to find an attorney that might do, for example, federal court litigation.”
Although families can use ICE’s Online Detainee Locator to search for loved ones, it isn’t always up to date, and some families do not know how to use it, Modi said. When detainees are transferred, they often can’t make outgoing calls from the detention facility until someone has deposited money into their account — another hurdle for keeping family members updated on their whereabouts, he added.
L.A. teen is moved to ICE detention center out of state without parents’ knowledge
Benjamin Guerrero-Cruz, detained by immigration agents while walking his dog, was moved across state lines without his parents’ knowledge. A congresswoman says ICE should be required to notify family when a detainee is transferred.
LA Times: An ICE raid breaks a family — and prompts a wrenching decision
- Jesús Cruz came to Los Angeles 33 years ago. He was sent back to Mexico and his wife faced an impossible decision. Should she and their children join him in Mexico? Or stay in Inglewood?
- ‘I want them to have a better life,’ Cruz says of his U.S.-born children. ‘Not the one I had.’
On a hot June night Jesús Cruz at last returned to Kini, the small town in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula where he spent the first 17 years of his life.
His sister greeted him with tearful hugs. The next morning she took him to see their infirm mother, who whispered in his ear: “I didn’t think you’d ever come back.”
After decades away, Cruz was finally home.
Yet he was not home.
So much of what he loved was 3,000 miles away in Southern California, where he resided for 33 years until immigration agents swarmed the car wash where he worked and hauled him away in handcuffs.
Cruz missed his friends and Booka, his little white dog. His missed his house, his car, his job.
But most of all, he missed his wife, Noemi Ciau, and their four children. Ciau worked nights, so Cruz was in charge of getting the kids fed, clothed and to and from school and music lessons, a chaotic routine that he relished because he knew he was helping them get ahead.
“I want them to have a better life,” he said. “Not the one I had.”
Now that he was back in Mexico, living alone in an empty house that belonged to his in-laws, he and Ciau, who is a U.S. permanent resident, faced an impossible decision.
Should she and the children join Cruz in Mexico?
Or stay in Inglewood?
Cruz and Ciau both had families that had been broken by the border, and they didn’t want that for their kids. In the months since Cruz had been detained, his eldest daughter, 16-year-old Dhelainy, had barely slept and had stopped playing her beloved piano, and his youngest son, 5-year-old Gabriel, had started acting out. Esther, 14, and Angel, 10, were hurting, too.
But bringing four American kids to Mexico didn’t seem fair, either. None of them spoke Spanish, and the schools in Kini didn’t compare with those in the U.S. Dhelainy was a few years from graduating high school, and she dreamed of attending the University of California and then Harvard Law.
There was also the question of money. At the car wash, Cruz earned $220 a day. But the day rate for laborers in Kini is just $8. Ciau had a good job at Los Angeles International Airport, selling cargo space for an international airline. It seemed crazy to give that up.
Ciau wanted to hug her husband again. She wanted to know what it would feel like to have the whole family in Mexico. So in early August she packed up the kids and surprised Cruz with a visit.
Kini lies an hour outside of Merida in a dense tropical forest. Like many people here, Cruz grew up speaking Spanish and a dialect of Maya and lived in a one-room, thatched-roof house. He, his parents and his five brothers and sisters slept in hammocks crisscrossed from the rafters.
His parents were too poor to buy shoes for their children, so when he was a boy Cruz left school to work alongside his father, caring for cows and crops. At 17 he joined a wave of young men leaving Kini to work in the United States.
He arrived in Inglewood, where a cousin lived, in 1992, just as Los Angeles was erupting in protest over the police beating of Rodney King.
Cruz, soft-spoken and hardworking, was overwhelmed by the big city but found refuge in a green stucco apartment complex that had become a home away from home for migrants from Kini, who cooked and played soccer together in the evenings.
Eventually he fell for a young woman living there: Ciau, whose parents had brought her from Kini as a young girl, and who obtained legal status under an amnesty extended by President Reagan. They married when she turned 18.
As their family grew, they developed rituals. When one of the kids made honor roll, they’d celebrate at Dave & Buster’s. Each summer they’d visit Disneyland. And every weekend they’d dine at Casa Gambino, a classic Mexican restaurant with vinyl booths, piña coladas and a bison head mounted on the wall. On Fridays, Cruz and Ciau left the kids with her parents and went on a date.
As the father of four Americans, Cruz was eligible for a green card. But the attorneys he consulted warned that he would have to apply from Mexico and that the wait could last years.
Cruz didn’t want to leave his children. So he stayed. When President Trump was reelected last fall on a vow to carry out mass deportations, he tried not to worry. The government, he knew, usually targeted immigrants who had committed crimes, and his record was spotless. But the Trump administration took a different approach.
On June 8, masked federal agents swarmed Westchester Hand Wash. Cruz said they slammed him into the back of a patrol car with such force and shackled his wrists so tightly that he was left with bruises across his body and a serious shoulder injury.
Ciau, who was helping Esther buy a dress for a middle school honors ceremony, heard about the raid and raced over. She had been at the car wash just hours earlier, bringing lunch to her husband and his colleagues. Now it was eerily empty.
Cruz was transferred to a jail in El Paso, where he says he was denied requests to speak to a lawyer or call his family.
One day, an agent handed him a document and told him to sign. The agent said that if Cruz fought his case, he would remain in detention for up to a year and be deported anyway. Signing the document — which said he would voluntarily return to Mexico — meant he could avoid a deportation order, giving him a better shot at fixing his papers in the future.
Cruz couldn’t read the text without his glasses. He didn’t know that he very likely would have been eligible for release on bond because of his family ties to the U.S. But he was in pain and afraid and so he signed.
Returning to Kini after decades away was surreal.
Sprawling new homes with columns, tile roofs and other architectural flourishes imported by people who had lived in the U.S. rose from what had once been fields. There were new faces, too, including a cohort of young men who appraised Cruz with curiosity and suspicion. With his polo shirts and running shoes, he stood out in a town where most wore flip-flops and as few clothes as possible in the oppressive heat.
Cruz found work on a small ranch. Before dawn, he would pedal out there on an old bicycle, clearing weeds and feeding cows, the world silent except for the rustle of palm leaves. In all his years in the big city, he had missed the tranquility of these lands.
He had missed his mother, too. She has multiple sclerosis and uses a wheelchair. Some days, she could speak, and would ask about his family and whether Cruz was eating enough. Other days, they would sit in silence, him occasionally leaning over to kiss her forehead.
He always kept his phone near, in case Ciau or one of the kids called. He tried his best to parent from afar, mediating arguments and reminding the kids to be kind to their mother. He tracked his daughters via GPS when they left the neighborhood, and phoned before bed to make sure everyone had brushed their teeth.
He worried about them, especially Dhelainy, a talented musician who liked to serenade him on the piano while he cooked dinner. The burden of caring for the younger siblings had fallen on her. Since Cruz had been taken, she hadn’t touched the piano once.
During one conversation, Dhelainy let it slip that they were coming to Mexico. Cruz surged with joy, then shuddered at the thought of having to say goodbye again. He picked them up at the airport.
That first evening, they shared pizza and laughed and cried. Gabriel, the only family member who had never been to Mexico, was intrigued by the thick forest and the climate, playing outside in the monsoon rain. For the first time in months, Dhelainy slept through the night.
“We finally felt like a happy family again,” Ciau said. But as soon as she and the kids arrived, they started counting the hours to when they’d have to go back.
During the heat of the day, the family hid inside, lounging in hammocks. They were also dodging unwanted attention. It seemed everywhere they went, someone asked Cruz to relive his arrest, and he would oblige, describing cold nights in detention with nothing to keep warm but a plastic blanket.
But at night, after the sky opened up, and then cleared, they went out.
It was fair time in Kini, part of an annual celebration to honor the Virgin Mary. A small circus had been erected and a bull ring constructed of wooden posts and leaves. A bright moon rose as the family took their seats and the animal charged out of its pen, agitated, and barreled toward the matador’s pink cape.
Cruz turned to his kids. When he was growing up, he told them, the matador killed the bull, whose body was cut up and sold to spectators. Now the fights ended without violence — with the bull lassoed and returned to pasture.
It was one of the ways that Mexico had modernized, he felt. He felt pride at how far Mexico had come, recently electing its first female president.
The bull ran by, close enough for the family to hear his snorts and see his body heave with breath.
“Are you scared?” Esther asked Gabriel.
Wide-eyed, the boy shook his head no. But he reached out to touch his father’s hand.
Later, as the kids slept, Cruz and Ciau stayed up, dancing cumbia deep into the night.
The day before Ciau and the kids were scheduled to leave, the family went to the beach. Two of Ciau’s nieces came. It was the first time Gabriel had met a cousin. The girls spoke little English, but they played well with Gabriel, showing him games on their phones. (For days after, he would giddily ask his mother when he could next see them.)
That evening, the air was heavy with moisture.
The kids went into the bedroom to rest. Cruz and Ciau sat at the kitchen table, holding hands and wiping away tears.
They had heard of a U.S. employer who, having lost so many workers to immigration raids, was offering to pay a smuggler to bring people across the border. Cruz and Ciau agreed that was too risky.
They had just paid a lawyer to file a lawsuit saying Cruz had been coerced into accepting voluntary departure and asking a judge to order his return to the U.S. so that he could apply for relief from removal. The first hearing was scheduled for mid-September.
Cruz wanted to return to the U.S. But he was increasingly convinced that the family could make it work in Mexico. “We were poor before,” he told Ciau. “We can be poor again.”
Ciau wasn’t sure. Her children had big — and expensive — ambitions.
Dhelainy had proposed staying in the U.S. with her grandparents if the rest of the family moved back. Cruz and Ciau talked about the logistics of that, and Ciau vowed to explore whether the younger kids could remain enrolled in U.S. schools, but switch to online classes.
When the rain began, Cruz got up and closed the door.
The next morning, Cruz would not accompany his family to the airport. It would be too hard, he thought, “like when somebody gives you something you’ve always wanted, and then suddenly takes it away.”
Gabriel wrapped his arms around his father’s waist, his small body convulsed with tears: “I love you.”
“It’s OK, baby,” Cruz said. “I love you, too.”
“Thank you for coming,” he said to Ciau. He kissed her. And then they were gone.
That afternoon, he walked the streets of Kini. The fair was wrapping up. Workers sweating in the heat were dismantling the circus rides and packing them onto the backs of trucks.
He thought back to a few evenings earlier, when they had celebrated Dhelainy’s birthday.
The family had planned to host a joint sweet 16 and quinceñera party for her and Esther in July. They had rented an event hall, hired a band and sent out invitations. After Cruz was detained, they called the party off.
They celebrated Dhelainy’s Aug. 8 birthday at the house in Kini instead. A mariachi band played the Juan Gabriel classic, “Amor Eterno.”
“You are my sun and my calm,” the mariachis sang as Cruz swayed with his daughter. “You are my life / My eternal love.”
An ICE raid breaks a family — and prompts a wrenching decision
He came to Los Angeles 33 years ago. Now a man sent back to Mexico and his wife faced an impossible decision. Should she and their U.S. children join him in Mexico? Or stay in Inglewood?
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2025-08-28/immigration-deportation-los-angeles-mexico