They followed the government’s rules. ICE held them anyway

As National Guard Troops and local police confronted protestors speaking out against federal immigration enforcement across Los Angeles this weekend, Nancy Raquel Chirinos Medina crawled into bed without her husband.

“I try to stay calm, to show my children that I'm OK,” she said in an interview with LAist and the California Newsroom in the family’s home in Lancaster on Friday. “I try to pretend that everything is OK, even if, inside, it isn't.”

During the conversation, the gregarious woman sometimes broke into tears.

She’d compose herself quickly — to tell her family’s story.

Two days before the ICE raids that sparked the current protests, Nancy and her husband, Randal Isaías Bonilla Mejía, arrived at the downtown Los Angeles field office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Nancy (this article refers to the couple by their first names for clarity) said they were hoping for a routine check-in with the agency monitoring their presence in the United States while they apply for asylum. Instead, her husband was detained under threat of deportation back to Honduras, the country the couple fled in 2021. He was taken into custody despite a court order barring his deportation until the family’s asylum claim is adjudicated.

His was just one of a record number of ICE arrests on June 3 and 4, with more than 2,000 people detained each day at federal offices and in workplace raids all over the country, according to CBS News.

Nancy, who is nine weeks pregnant and has experienced complications with the pregnancy, said she waited at the office for more than 12 hours with Randal and their two young children. It wasn’t until late in the day they learned ICE officials planned to detain the entire family, despite her showing them health records from a recent hospital visit. Nancy said she and the children were released after ICE officials were told that their daughter, a toddler, had been born in the United States and is a U.S. citizen.

Nancy described the experience as “horrible,” but not a total surprise. When the couple received a text message from ICE two days earlier asking the family to report for a check-in, she said they debated what to do. Their attorney had warned them the agency was arresting people at these appointments, but because they had no criminal record and had a pending asylum claim, she said there was no reason for ICE to detain them.

They decided to comply.

“We don't want to be running away,” Nancy said in Spanish. “We've always done things right. We've always showed up. And if they detain us, fine. We’ll take what comes.”

News reports said immigrants around the country received the same text message. The message, obtained by the California Newsroom, asked them to make sure to bring anyone involved in their case. For many like Nancy and Randal, that meant bringing their entire families.

The escalation in ICE enforcement tactics comes as Stephen Miller, a top aide to President Donald Trump, has demanded 3,000 daily arrests from ICE. Trump has promised to deport “millions and millions of criminal aliens.”

Neither the Department of Homeland Security, which operates ICE, nor the agency itself responded to a request for comment about the enforcement action at the Los Angeles field office.

“This is a dramatic shift, primarily in the nationwide scope of what ICE is now doing,” said Greg Chen, Senior Director of Government Relations for the American Immigration Lawyers Association. He said AILA received reports of detentions at ICE check-ins from at least six states and eight cities last week, but at some point they stopped counting.

Chen pointed out that people attending regular check-ins have already been determined by the agency not to be a danger to society or a flight risk, otherwise they would already be in detention. He said many of those detained in this week’s push have a legal right to remain in the country while they pursue claims to asylum and other forms of residency status.

“It's quite clear ICE has not made specific determinations about the circumstances of the people that they are detaining, and that this is really just a mass effort to take as many people into custody as possible and deport them rapidly,” Chen said. “What is striking is that these are people who have been complying, for years in some cases, with the legal system.”

Nancy’s story demonstrates that even those who follow immigration rules may still be targeted for deportation, and that changes in enforcement policy and the whims of government officials can have devastating effects on the people seeking to stay in the U.S.

Wednesday, June 4

According to their asylum application, Randal and Nancy fled their native Honduras with their son after local members of Mara Salvatrucha, the international gang known as MS-13, forced Randal to pay them more than half of his earnings as a bus driver for a year. When the COVID-19 pandemic struck and he couldn’t pay, they threatened to kill him and his family.

The asylum application also details a days-long journey through Guatemala, then Mexico, where they were threatened and robbed by men wearing police uniforms. On July 13, 2021, the young family crossed into Texas and turned themselves in to U.S. Border Patrol agents, a common step for asylum seekers at the border.

“I remember feeling very calm and finally free from the fear I had felt since the gang members started extorting me,” Randal wrote in his asylum application. “It was very nice to feel safe and to be able to transmit the same to my family.”

Speaking to reporters last week, Nancy recalled Randal picking up their son Dominic after they made it to the U.S. and telling him, “You're not going to suffer anymore.”

After determining they had no cause to detain the family, immigration officials released them to join Randal’s brother and sister in California, where they began their asylum application.

But four years later, Randal would again find himself in the custody of the U.S. government.

The family did not arrive at the government building on Wednesday morning alone.

With them was Lizbeth Mateo, an immigration attorney whom they’d only just met. Mateo had agreed to step in for Sally Santiago, the attorney shepherding the family through their asylum process from Charlotte, N.C. Santiago, in turn, agreed to assist one of Mateo’s clients who received the check-in text in Charlotte.

“We had all the documents. We were prepared. We were ready to be there for a few hours,” Mateo said. Instead, she said she spent the better part of two days sitting on the floor by the elevators in the L.A. field office, waiting for news, and seeking answers from ICE officials.

The visit on Wednesday began as it always did, Nancy said. The family made their way to the basement of the building to present themselves to an ICE officer for the check-in. What was different was the crowd. The line was around the block. “So many people,” Nancy said. “We’d never seen a line that long.”

They took a number, and the hours passed. Nancy said it was getting hot in the building. Mateo remembers a security guard circulating through the crowd every 15 minutes, admonishing parents for letting their children cry or run around. When she showed an ICE officer hospital records from the week before — records showing bleeding and a slow fetal heart rate that meant she was at risk of a miscarriage — Nancy said the officer was unmoved.

By the late afternoon, Nancy said people were no longer coming out of the office they were waiting to get into. “That’s when we saw that something was off,” she said.

ICE officers began leading the remaining families into small rooms normally used for interviews with individual families, placing as many as 25 people into each room, according to Mateo. She said she saw guards posted at the doors.

Mateo stayed with the family until an ICE official asked her to step into the hall, where the official told her that all of the families would now be taken into custody.

“I couldn’t believe it,” said Mateo. “I was like, ‘What do you mean?’”

Then, because they were on a timer set to accommodate the business day, the lights went out.

“That's when, I can say, the anguish, the sadness began,” said Nancy. “My children will spend the night here,” she thought, “and we're going to be imprisoned.”

Law enforcement clash with demonstrators on Sunday in front of the federal building in downtown Los Angeles. Nancy, Randal and their children were told to go for a check-in at a nearby ICE field office.

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Etienne Laurent

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AFP via Getty Images

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As Mateo sat in the hallway trying to think of a way to free Randal, Nancy and their children, she texted updates to Santiago in Charlotte. Santiago texted back that she had managed to speak to a supervisor and help Mateo’s client avoid detention.

At one point, Mateo heard a man screaming in pain, yelling that officers were hurting his finger, and a woman crying. She said the guards outside the room were laughing.

“I've never seen anything like that,” she said. “And it took so much in me to not try to intervene or try to scream at the guards.”

Nancy said she heard the same sounds. “A man was yelling, ‘Help! Help!’” she remembers. The man’s wife and son, whom Nancy said looked about 4 years old, were in the room with her. The boy began to cry, “Daddy! Daddy!”

Nancy said her 8-year-old son, Dominic, asked her what was happening. “I grabbed his hand, and I felt him shaking,” she said.

Then an ICE officer led the family to a desk where Randal was asked to take everything out of his pockets and give it to Nancy, and to say goodbye to his family. “You won’t be seeing them,” Nancy remembers the officer saying. Then Randal was led away.

The same thing happened to the other husbands and fathers in the room. “They took them away,” said Nancy. “I didn't see them again. They only left their wives and children.”

Out in the hall, Mateo mentioned to an ICE official that Nancy’s daughter is a U.S. citizen. Nancy and the children were allowed to leave the field office shortly after. On the way out, Nancy said an ICE officer told her, “I’m letting you go only because [the baby is] an American, and I can’t keep her here.”

According to Mateo, many entire families appear to have been kept in the building overnight. She was unable to determine what had happened to them, and the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to questions about these families.

For the sake of her son, Nancy said she did her best to stay strong as she exited the building. But when they got outside she fell to the floor. They had arrived a family of four, and now, only three of them were leaving. Her son cried all the way home.

After she and the children got back to their house in Lancaster, Nancy’s cellphone rang. It was Randal, who relayed what had happened to him in the intervening hours. He said the ICE officers had told him he had no right to call Santiago, his lawyer, or have Mateo, her surrogate, in the room with him. But they handed him an order for his deportation to Honduras, which required his consent, and told him to sign it. When he refused, the officers forced him to thumbprint the form, he told Nancy.

Santiago, who said she heard the same account from Randal when she was able to talk to him by phone on Friday, said a thumbprint is a common substitute for a signature on this paperwork.

Mateo left the building with Nancy and the kids at about 8 p.m. She came back the next morning and spent most of Thursday waiting for an ICE official to explain why Randal was being detained. She showed the official the family’s stay of deportation, issued that morning by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. The court had forbidden ICE from removing him from the country until the appeal was decided, a process that had already lasted a year and could take months or years more to resolve.

Mateo asked the official why Randal was being held.

“She just said, ‘Because we can,’” recalled Mateo. “‘The stay doesn't say that we have to release him, it says that we can't remove him.’”

Neither Homeland Security nor ICE responded to questions about Randal’s detention.

On Friday, Santiago learned that Randal had been moved to Adelanto Processing Center, an ICE detention facility north of Los Angeles, and an hour east of his home in Lancaster.

Several California members of Congress went to the facility on Sunday to check on detainees. ICE did not let them in.

Nancy said that ICE instructed her to report to an office of the agency’s Intensive Supervision Appearance Program, where Santiago says she’ll likely be either fitted with an ankle monitor or issued a smartphone app that tracks her whereabouts.

The proper process

According to Santiago, Nancy and Randal’s progress through the immigration system has been plagued by indifference, incompetence and willful ignorance on the part of U.S. officials and an attorney charged with guiding them through the system’s complexities. When the family crossed the border in 2021, immigration enforcement officials were required to ask them whether they were fleeing danger or persecution in their home countries, a step intended to trigger screening interviews that could lead to humanitarian protection.

But according to the declarations Randal and Nancy wrote for their asylum applications, no one asked them anything. The Biden administration later discontinued the practice of asking about fear of return, requiring migrants to instead bring it up on their own, which dramatically shrank the number of people applying for asylum at the border.

Randal wrote that he and his wife were determined to seek asylum through the proper process. Once living with Randal’s family in California, they retained a lawyer who charged them thousands of dollars for a year-long case the Department of Justice said he mishandled at every turn. According to the couple, the lawyer, Rod Armande, never met with them in person or explained how the asylum system works.

In a letter of warning issued to Armande after Randal and Nancy filed a formal complaint, the Department of Justice said that in representing the family he had violated six different rules of the U.S. immigration court, including by making false statements and through incompetence.

Armande did not respond to a request for comment on the Justice Department’s findings.

According to the couple’s declarations, Armande did not translate the asylum application form, known as an I-589, into Spanish for them, or help them fill it out. They were left to plug its questions, and their answers, into Google translate.

They wrote about how, when the pandemic began and people stopped moving around the city, Randal made less money at his job as a bus driver and couldn’t pay MS-13 without starving his family. As punishment, two members of the gang held him at gunpoint while they set fire to his minibus. They told him if he didn’t give them the equivalent of two months’ pay, a sum the family couldn’t afford, his wife and son would bear the consequences.

“They knew their names, which meant they knew my life,” Randal wrote in his asylum declaration.

In 2021, members of the international gang MS-13 threatened to kill bus driver Randal Isaías Bonilla Mejía and his family if he didn’t pay them a weekly tax. When he couldn’t pay, they set fire to his minibus.

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Courtesy of Sally Santiago

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Randal and Nancy packed up a few belongings and their son, who was 4 at the time, and left their home forever without telling their families, for fear that even knowing where they’d gone would put their loved ones at risk.

In a 2022 hearing, an immigration judge denied the family’s request for asylum. Nancy said they were told in the hearing that the judge did not have enough evidence to approve their claim.

“When they told us that they were denying the case, we were in shock,” said Nancy. “But we didn't ask questions.”

It was then they reached out to Santiago, who explained that the process of preparing for such a hearing was much more thorough and time-consuming than they had been led to believe. Santiago is now helping them appeal their denial in the 9th Circuit.

Nancy tidies up a corner of the living room where her daughter plays.

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Julia Barajas

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LAist

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On Thursday, the day after she left the field office, Nancy again went to the emergency room. She said she had woken up with back pain. Given the stress of the previous day and being separated from Randal, she worried she’d lost her unborn baby. After another long day spent in a waiting room, an ultrasound showed the baby was fine. But the stress remains.

Thursday was her son Dominic’s last day of third-grade. He didn’t want to go to school, Nancy said, because he worried about being separated from his family and because he was shaken from the sudden absence of his father.

“My husband isn’t a bad person. He’s a hard-working man,” Nancy said. “He should have been at his son's school for the last day. The baby needs him.”

She said her husband would change their daughter’s diaper, then play with her before putting her to bed.

Apart from the emotional toll, she said, there’s the economic one. Randal, a mechanic, has been the family’s only breadwinner.

“When the food runs out, when my daughter doesn't have formula anymore, when she doesn't get diapers, when I have to pay the bills,” she said, “what am I going to do?”