Lisseth Herrera said her 17-year-old son Jose Adalberto Herrera, the eldest of four, is a playful older brother, a bit of a jokester, and a devoted fan of the Spanish soccer team Real Madrid.
Herrera said Jose was excited leaving the house for his first day of work on a construction project with his uncle, because he’d start making money to help the family cover rent, food and other expenses.
But she said the excitement soon turned to fear when Jose called to say the police had pulled them over on the way to work and that his uncle was being arrested.
“My son started to cry, and told me ‘Mom, they’re hitting my uncle,’” Herrera remembered.
Then, she said, a police officer told him to hang up the phone.
Later that morning, Herrera said she received a call from a man who identified himself as an immigration agent saying they had Jose in custody, and had no record of him in the immigration system.
Herrera recorded part of the phone call.
“Your son is probably going to be deported to El Salvador,” the official said in the recording, speaking in Spanish. “If you want, you can turn yourself in and be deported with him. But he is going to be deported either way.”
“I felt anxious, desperate, because what could I do?” Herrera said.
Kira Gagarin, an immigration lawyer assisting the family, said she’d spoken with the Border Patrol after Jose’s arrest. But she said she wasn’t aware of the threat of deportation to El Salvador.
“Did he say that on the call? That’s so crazy,” Gagarin said. “So no, I don’t agree with that assessment.”
Gagarin said Jose is currently being held in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement. And she expects he’ll be processed and released back to his family.
“So I mean, that’s very unfortunate that Border Patrol would be intimidating his mother and telling her that he’s likely to be imminently deported,” she said.
Jose’s mother said he entered the country six years ago as an unaccompanied minor, was processed by the federal government and reunited with the family, who’d arrived earlier and who are still waiting for a court date to present their immigration case.
Gagarin said the government never filed the paperwork to schedule a court date for Jose, leaving in a sort of legal limbo.
“We don’t really know why it’s not filed. I always kind of half jokingly say that the government processes, I don’t know, 1,000 people a week, and sometimes cases just get stuck in a corner with no one ever getting to them or looking at them,” Gagarin said.
Still, she said, that doesn’t explain why Jose was sent back to the Office of Refugee Resettlement to be processed as an unaccompanied minor instead of being released to his family.
“I’ve been doing this for 12 years, and I’ve never seen children detained for no reason and reprocessed by the Office of Refugee Resettlement,” Gagarin said.
The Portland-based Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project is calling the detention “extremely unusual, if not unprecedented,” and characterizes the action as “family separation in another form.”
Border Patrol did not respond to a request for comment. The Office of Refugee Resettlement said in a statement it does not comment on specific cases.
Meanwhile, Jose’s mother said he is allowed ten minutes a day to call home. She said she tries to cheer him up, but it doesn’t always work.
“He’s stressed, desperate, frustrated — he’s not sleeping,” Herrera said.
Herrera and her three younger children, meanwhile, are at home, afraid to go outside. She said she prays to God everyday to help her son, and also has a message for the president.
“I want to tell him we came to this country — we didn’t come to hurt anyone. We came to work for a better future for our children,” she said. “And that this situation is breaking our soul.”
This story appears through a media partnership with Maine Public.
