“It was a little bit hard, the words they were saying…” began Rey Estrada, in Spanish, after asked about being seized by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Oct. 21 as he did landscaping work in Rogers Park, ticking off terms that hardly need translation: “Illegal. Gordo. Negro.” Illegal. Fat. Black.
“That’s why they stopped me. My skin. “
Estrada was one of about 4,000 Chicagoans swept off the street in June through October in Operation Midway Blitz, the federal government deportation campaign targeting immigrants in the Chicago area. While labeling the people they were seizing as “the worst of the worst,” most of the immigrants arrested — more than 60% — had no criminal record whatsoever. Estrada hadn’t so much as a parking ticket.
He spent three hours in the back of an SUV, and was taken to ICE’s detention facility in west suburban Broadview. He spent the next 48 hours in a large room with 150 other men — in a room he was told was intended for 80 people. There were three metal toilets. The lights were always on.
“They never turned it off,” he said. Estrada had no bed, no mattress, no blankets. He folded his jacket as a pillow. Sleep was impossible anyway — every half hour the door was opened and various names were screamed.
It was also hot — the detainees begged the guards to keep a slot open for ventilation. They were fed Subway sandwiches that had spoiled — Estrada picked the black moldy meat off and ate the bun.
Ironically, he said the Spanish-speaking guards were harsher than the English speakers.
“The guards yelled at us, and called us pigs,” he said. “The guards who spoke English, I have nothing bad to say about them.”
He was allowed to call home the afternoon he was detained.
“We were worrying about him,” his wife, Liz Soto, said. “I was driving to go pick up the kids from school. He asked me, ‘How are you?’ and I asked him, ‘How do you want me to be?'”
He told her they were offering him self-deportation money to go to Mexico.
“I was like, ‘No!’ I started crying. I told him, ‘We’re going to fight the case.'”
“They were shoving deportation papers under people’s noses immediately,” said Kristen Hulne, who runs the landscaping company he works for. “‘Here’s $1,000, sign this.’ People were signing not knowing they were self-deporting.”
After two days, he was put on a bus to the North Lake Processing Center in Baldwin, Michigan. There they were divided into four groups, and given color coded T-shirts according to risk — blue, orange and red. He was in the lowest risk group.
At North Lake, treatment improved considerably, Estrada said, though he was “starving” — for the first two weeks, until he could use a system where his wife put money in a commissary account so he could buy cookies, candy bars and instant ramen.
His fellow inmates were laborers and landscapers like himself. “Painters. Cooks. Landscapers. Construction. Four men who worked in a cemetery.”
“The common question to ask somebody was, ‘How were you detained?'” he said. “It was the same story: ‘I was working. I was at my job.'”
I wondered, did he ever meet anyone he thought of as a criminal, a gang member?
“No,” Estrada said, pointing out that he was in the low-risk group.
How did he pass the time? They had 30 minutes of daily “recess” — walking the grounds. He’d also pray in the chapel. Otherwise he watched telenovellas, or slept in his room. The only drama came after the judge rejected his initial appeal. His bed was bolted to the floor, and he punched it, ripping it out and in the process injuring his hand.
But there was no retribution — they required him to go to therapy. He was comfortable with the therapist, who was friendly and professional, and helped him understand that “he’s not a bad person,” and had a chance of being reunited with his family.
He was allowed to call his wife every day, at 20 cents a minute, and that was key to his staying in this country. She told him not to sign anything, that his boss had hired a lawyer who was working to get him out.
Other landscapers in the detention facility told him that their bosses wouldn’t even take their phone calls. This made him think his boss might not help. But Hulne paid, she estimates, between $15,000 to $18,000 on a lawyer to free him.
Why?
“It’s family — we’re all family,” she said. “You can hire anybody. You can teach a skill. You cannot teach good character. We went to their wedding. I held all their kids when they were born. I couldn’t live with myself, leaving him out to dry.”
On Dec. 29, Estrada got out on $1,500 bond.
“Daddy’s coming back,” Soto told their children.
He called the guards at Baldwin “really good people. Anything we needed, they would help out. In Michigan, they never laid a hand on me. I really have nothing bad to say about the place.” Guards were respectful, he said, and they waved and fist-bumped him when he left.
Estrada came to this country 20 years ago. He walked across the desert for five days to enter the United States, and never tried to change his legal status.
“The application process is arduous, long, expensive,” said Hulne. “Ask anybody from any country,”
He was freed after a habeas corpus petition. His lawyer is fighting to adjust his status and get a green card — possible even for those who came here illegally, if it can be shown that deporting someone would cause “exceptional and extremely unusual hardship” to American citizens, in this case his wife and children.
Now does Estrada want to be a citizen?
“He will be,” said Hulne.
The couple has three children, 13, 8 and 5. In the video of him being picked up at Baldwin, his youngest son, who has autism, strokes his father’s face after he enters the car, as if he can’t quite believe he’s there.
Did the experience change Estrada’s view of the United States?
“No,” he said. “I still think the country is a great place, especially to have a family. There are better opportunities here.”