‘Inhumane’: Trump’s mass deportations ensnare noncriminal immigrants from all walks of life

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JACKSONVILLE, Fla. (AP) — When Juan and Madison Pestana went on their first date in 2023, Juan vowed to always keep a bouquet of fresh flowers on the kitchen table. For nearly two years, he did exactly that.

Their love story was a whirlwind: She was an introverted medical student who grew up in Wendell, North Carolina, and he was a charismatic construction business owner from Caracas, Venezuela.

When they first met at a sushi bar, Madison didn’t expect much. That changed when she found herself in her car at 2 a.m., still talking the night away.

“He is literally my best friend … (and) the only person I’ve ever thought truly understood me as a person,” she said. “He truly is the love of my life.”

Since that first date, the Pestanas hadn’t spent more than six days apart – until immigration agents showed up outside their Miami apartment.

On May 9, the day of Madison’s graduation from medical school, Juan was taken into custody despite having no criminal record. Madison said he was tackled to the ground – a sight so jarring, she said, that a neighbor called the front office to report a potential kidnapping.

“That shouldn’t be the word that people are using when proper law enforcement is taking people into proper custody,” Madison said.

Juan has been in detention ever since. Immigration authorities say he is in the country unlawfully. His wife, an American citizen, says he unknowingly overstayed his visa after the couple used an unscrupulous notary to file his green card application.

Madison has since moved, on her own, to Jacksonville, where she started a surgical residency in July. She lives alone, works 90-hour weeks and drives more than 300 miles to and from a detention center in Broward County every weekend to visit her husband.

They’re not allowed to embrace more than twice during each visit.

“I am living my worst nightmare,” Madison said, adding what she believes Americans need to know: “What’s happening right now is not justice. This is just inhumane.”

Madison acknowledges that she once was a supporter of President Donald Trump, enticed by the idea he would remove criminals from the country. Now, she said, “I feel lied to.”

“What was promised was that we were going to make things safer for people. Do you think they’re making my life safer?” she said. “My life is immensely more dangerous now that you’ve taken my husband from me.”

On the campaign trail, Trump, indeed, promised safety and security. He promised that changes to immigration policy would target criminals. His campaign, he said, was intended to rid the country of people he has called murderers, terrorists, drug dealers, animals -– “the worst they have in every country, all over the world.”

When he won a second term as president, some of his supporters were immigrants themselves.

Today, some 60,000 people are being held in immigration detention – a 51% increase since January, according to the nonprofit Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

About 70% of those detained have no criminal record, TRAC says. Many others have convictions for offenses as minor as a traffic violation.

“Even though a lot of the rhetoric was, ‘Let’s get the criminals out of the U.S.’ -– that’s not actually what’s happening,” said New York immigration lawyer Pouyan Darian. “What’s happening is all immigrants are being heavily scrutinized.”

The result, advocates argue, is an unprecedented attack on immigrants from all walks of life and living in the U.S. under all kinds of circumstances.

The administration has terminated Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of people who fled dictatorships and disasters in their home countries and were legally welcomed into the U.S. Some of these migrants -– who face the loss of work visas and eventual deportation –- have lived in the country for decades and have citizen spouses or children.

Before courts issued an injunction, Trump officials revoked hundreds of visas for immigrant students over noncriminal protest activities, previously dismissed misdemeanors and even traffic tickets.

Trump issued an executive order denying citizenship to anyone born on American soil to women either in the country illegally or here legally under a visa, if the father is not a U.S. citizen or green card holder. That order is on hold, for now, due to legal challenges.

The administration also wants to vastly expand its power to denaturalize those who have become U.S. citizens and give the Department of Justice discretion to pursue cases “as it determines appropriate.”

For immigrant communities across the country, the result is a climate of fear where even legal compliance offers no guarantee of protection.

In one example, Harvard University cancer researcher Kseniia Petrova, a Russian citizen, was apprehended in February at Boston Logan International Airport after she failed to declare frog embryos she’d brought into the country for research.

Although a fine and forfeiture of the undeclared item is a typical penalty in such cases, the government canceled Petrova’s visa and held her in detention for four months. She has since been indicted on smuggling charges and is out on bail as the case proceeds.

In another case, 18-year-old Guatemalan Ernesto Manuel-Andres was detained just weeks after his high school graduation during a June 4 raid at his apartment complex in Bowling Green, Kentucky.

According to Luma Mufleh, founder of the educational nonprofit Fugees Family, Manuel-Andres is in the U.S. under “special immigrant juvenile” status, which is granted to children who have been abused, neglected or abandoned.

Beginning in 2022, immigrants with that status were protected from deportation until a visa became available. On June 6, the Trump administration rescinded that protection.

During his 20 days of detention, Manuel-Andres was transferred to three different facilities in two states. He was released June 24 on bond, and his case is still pending.

“I feel like they’re testing the limits of the law -– they’re trying to see who they can take in,” Mufleh said. “And I’m like, ‘You’re going after kids? That’s who we’re going after now?’ ”

She described Manuel-Andres as someone who “always does the right thing without anyone asking him to do it. He’s someone you want on your team.”

There have been other instances, too.

Wualner Sauceda, a middle school teacher in Hialeah, Florida, was deported to Honduras after being detained at a regular immigration check-in as he explored a legal pathway to stay in the country.

Cliona Ward, a green card holder from Ireland who has lived for 30 years in Santa Cruz, California, was detained for more than two weeks over old drug possession charges that had been expunged. She has since been released.

Such arrests have become less predictable, with individuals being detained at court hearings or scheduled Immigration and Customs Enforcement check-ins.

“This really just forces people into the shadows -– that is what the consequence is of these policies,” said Laila Ayub, an immigration attorney and co-founder of Project ANAR, an Afghan immigration justice organization.

“It’s very clear that the goal is to make things harder, to discourage people from coming here and to increase fear in our communities.”

In the small Florida town of Wimauma, southeast of Tampa, the Ambrocio family is reeling from the ramifications of the administration’s policies.

Maurilio Amizael Ambrocio, the family’s patriarch, is an evangelical Christian pastor who since 2018 had led the small congregation of Iglesia de Santidad Vida Nueva, a tight-knit group bound by shared experiences of immigration and culture.

“He’s not only our father, but he’s also our pastor, a spiritual leader for us,” said his daughter, Ashley, one of Ambrocio’s five children, who range in age from 12 to 20 and are all American citizens.

Ambrocio and his faith offered many the missing piece for which they were searching in their lives.

“He supported and helped me move forward,” said Jennifer Dominguez, a 42-year-old from Mexico who has attended Ambrocio’s church for about four years. “There was a time I didn’t want to live, and he helped me through it.”

At 15, Ambrocio left everything he knew to escape a gang trying to recruit young boys in his hometown of Cuilco, Guatemala. He initially entered the U.S. illegally, via the Arizona-Mexico border. While in the country, he’d work odd jobs to get by.

He was deported in 2006 but returned to the U.S. later that year. And although he was under an immigration removal order –- issued after he was cited for driving without a license –- he had a stay that had allowed him to remain in the country, his family said.

For nearly 10 years, Ambrocio regularly attended ICE check-ins without a problem. That all changed in April, when he was detained at one of those appointments while Ashley, her brother Derlin and a fellow pastor waited outside.

An immigration agent called the family back and said Ambrocio would be held for 45 hours, Ashley said. In that time, Ambrocio was taken to Glades County Detention Center.

“I was really, really scared,” Ashley said. “I don’t know how the process is. I was like, ‘What if he gets deported right there?’ ”

Ashley remembers the change in her mother upon hearing the news: “She looked just lonely. Her eyes were just different … like if they took something away from her -– and they did.”

Weeks went by, and on June 28, the family got a call that planted a seed of hope: Ambrocio mistakenly believed he would be released while the immigration process played out. Instead, he was transferred to a staging facility in Louisiana.

A few days later, wanting to escape long-term detention, Ambrocio chose to self–deport. On July 2, he was on a plane back to Guatemala. He has been preaching at churches near his hometown of Cuilco and wants to open a tortilla business to keep himself afloat.

Ashley and Derlin have since gone to Guatemala to visit their father. When they got off the plane, they ran to him and embraced, the tears flowing.

They brought him clothing, family photos, a drawing from one of his congregants and a Bible, and together they spent time seeing places their father hadn’t seen since he was a boy.

“It felt so nice seeing him act like a child, getting excited seeing everything and taking pictures,” Ashley said. “It brings us comfort knowing he’s not suffering (in detention). He’s doing better.”

When Ashley turns 21 next July, she said, she will try to sponsor her father’s return to the United States. In the meantime, she, her mother and her four brothers are left to go on without him.

The family spends their Saturdays preparing for Sunday church services ; another pastor fills in for Ambrocio in his absence. And day and night, Ashley’s mother prays for her husband to be back in her arms.

“My father deserves to be here,” Ashley said. “Coming here for a better future isn’t a crime.”

Juan Pestana also had hopes of a better future when he came to the U.S. in 2021. He filed for asylum, obtained a work permit and launched a construction business –- designing and building fences and pergolas.

He and Madison met two years later. Within five weeks, they were engaged. Three months after their first date, they were married.

“Never did I have any doubts about it,” Madison said of their swift courtship. “We didn’t even apply for a green card through marriage until way later.”

That’s when they got into trouble, she said.

Last fall, the couple decided to submit paperwork to get Juan his green card. They hired the same person who had filed Juan’s asylum paperwork, paying about $5,000. But in April, Madison learned the application had been denied because it was completed incorrectly. She refiled everything on her own. Juan, nevertheless, was detained the next month.

Many detainees, like Juan, were in the middle of adjusting their status, caught up in a system riddled with scams and a court backlog of more than 3 million cases – with more than 500,000 of those in Florida, statistics show.

“We tried to do this the legal way. We tried to get help so that we didn’t have a problem. We tried,” Madison said. “People need to know that this could happen to their husbands or their wives. This is not just criminals.”

On a Saturday in June, Madison made the four-and-a-half-hour drive to Broward Transitional Center for her weekly visit with Juan. Sitting in the car in the detention center parking lot, she speedily applied her makeup even as her mother, who had joined her, reminded her Juan wouldn’t care what she looked like.

Guards at the front informed visitors of the dress code: no open-toed shoes, no shorts, no sleeveless shirts. Strangers exchanged shoes, even if it meant wearing a pair four sizes too big.

Inside, detainees sat on one side of long, cafeteria-style tables, while visitors sat on the other –- forcing them to maintain distance. Whenever they could, Madison and Juan squeezed hands, shared a wink and mouthed, “I love you.” Each life update was followed with tears, muddling Madison’s makeup.

She drove back that same day, arriving at the Jacksonville home Juan has yet to see for himself. They had decided to upgrade from their one-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment in Miami to a two-story house for more space, but Madison said it feels empty without Juan.

“I’m just stuck here in this big, empty house, alone,” she said, “and it just feels like there’s no way out.”

Now, while Madison works tirelessly for her surgical residency, Juan awaits a decision about his future in the country. They talk on the phone whenever Madison gets a break.

Their wish is simple: to continue the life they were building together.

“I made my life here,” Juan said in a phone interview with News21. “I met my wife, and I want to stay because we have a family here.”

“I made this country mine already.”

If Juan isn’t granted permission to remain in the U.S., he plans to self-deport to Portugal because he fears being persecuted in Venezuela. Madison then would have to decide whether to follow the love of her life, or stay behind to complete the training to which she’s dedicated years.

For the Pestanas, the consequences are personal and debilitating: the absence of a hand to hold, the silence at a dinner table once marked by fresh flowers. Madison even sleeps with Juan’s shirt on his pillow, spraying it with his cologne to remind her of his presence.

“You wake up in the morning, and for a minute, you don’t remember,” she said. “You think that everything’s OK, and then, all of a sudden, it slaps you in the face again and you remember that your whole life is upside down.

“I feel like the world is on fire outside, and all I want is my husband to walk through it with me.”

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This report is part of “Upheaval Across America,” an examination of immigration enforcement under the second Trump administration produced by Carnegie-Knight News21. For more stories, visit https://upheaval.news21.com/.