3 May 28 - June 3, 2026 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents TANGLED IN ICE’S WEB Two North Texans built lives here before being forced to start over in ‘homelands’ they do not know. BY EMMA RUBY I t was not until Jonathan Celis stood 100 feet from the Texas-Mexico border car- rying nothing but two T-shirts, a pair of pants and a dead cell phone that he re- alized he would be deported from the United States, the country the 31-year-old has called home since he was 8 years old. He’d avoided thinking about this possibil- ity after getting arrested at a probation hear- ing in August 2025. He’d denied that it would come to this during the next four months that he spent in a Texas detention center. And that December morning, even as he was loaded onto a crowded bus and driven south, there was still a part of him that could not compre- hend that within a few hours he’d be told to walk across a bridge over the Rio Grande into a country that is his in legal terms only. At that moment, shuffling across the southern border, Celis was numb. Some of the men around him cried. Others rejoiced, happy to be free. He was quickly met by vol- unteers who bombarded him with questions — did he need shelter, did he need clothing, was he fed, was he healthy, where did he plan to go next? — before handing him 2,000 pesos and an ID card that identified him as a recent deportee. They also gave him a voucher good for one bus ride, a friendly way of saying “you can’t stay here.” With that skimpy inventory of belongings, Celis began the process of starting his life over. Celis is one of the hundreds of thousands of individuals who began this process last year after President Donald Trump took office and initiated the country’s most significant immi- gration crackdown in a decade. While it is not clear how many people were deported from the U.S. last year, the Department of Home- land Security took credit for “more than 400,000 deportations” since the year’s start. The Brookings Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, estimates that the figure is somewhere closer to 310,000 to 315,000 deportations. Some of the most high-profile crack- downs, from mistaken deportations to the killing of U.S. citizens by ICE agents, have resulted in thousands of headlines. A March 2026 Harvard Kennedy School poll suggests that only 37% of Americans approve of the hardliner policies. Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an El Salvadoran man who first came to the U.S. as a teenager, became the face of the administration’s mas- sive deportation effort after he was detained by agents and sent to his home country’s no- torious CECOT mega-prison against the or- ders of a federal immigration judge. Investigative reporting by ProPublica found that in the first nine months of Trump’s second term, at least 170 U.S. citizens had been detained by federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. ICE agents are permitted to hold people suspected of being in the country illegally, and nearly all of the af- fected Americans were Latino, ProPublica found. In some cases, detainees were held for weeks before being released. As much attention has been given to Abrego Garcia and the U.S. citizens who have found themselves in the crosshairs of sweeping immigration enforcement, there are hundreds of thousands of individuals whose stories haven’t been told. In some cases, they have found them- selves forced into countries they do not know. They’ve had to handle lost jobs and family separations; cars, apartments and fi- nancial obligations have been abandoned, defaulted on or seized during months of de- tainment. They have lost their personal ef- fects, their wardrobes and their pets. In the process, some have lost their sense of self. “There’s just no way I could be the same person I was before, after all this,” Celis re- cently told the Observer in a video call from Tijuana. “I’m hopeful that I will be able to go back to the U.S. one day and be reunited with my family. [In the meantime], it’s just time to grow up. To figure out who I am.” No Room for Mistakes Celis remembers his dad coming to North Texas before the rest of the family followed a year later. He was raised with the under- standing that his parents had left Mexico to find “a better life” for their children, but the family also acknowledged that they “were different.” His parents routinely explained to their three children that consequences for their family wouldn’t necessarily look like the consequences their peers faced. Celis was young when he qualified for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which was started by President Barack Obama. The program grants conditional residency to children who entered the U.S. illegally prior to 2007. “Dreamers” must renew their status every two years to remain eligible for deferred action and employment autho- rization. DACA protected Celis and his siblings as they grew up in Plano. He graduated from Plano Senior High School and moved to Los Angeles for film school. After graduating, he returned to Collin County, where his dad had built a home big enough for Celis and his nephews to live. He started a podcast with his best friend that was gaining traction, and “life was pretty good.” When Trump took office, Celis worried more for his parents than for himself. His DACA status wouldn’t need to be renewed until October 2025, but his parents were still undocumented. “We knew that things were changing quick, especially here in Texas,” Celis said. “We were just keeping more of a low profile. I mean, we still did our own thing. We still went out, we still did things, but we knew we had to be more careful.” Unbeknownst to Celis, he was already on ICE’s radar. For several years after returning to Texas, he’d struggled with his mental health, and that culminated in a 2024 arrest for driving under the influence. It was a wake-up call, Celis said. From that moment on, he realized he was “on the wrong path.” He began attending intensive therapy, served his required public service and com- pleted his probation. It was at his third pro- bation hearing in August 2025 that he was approached by an immigration agent and told, “The laws are changing.” “That’s when they started handcuffing me, and they got their badges out that said ICE,” he said. In initiating his deportation plan, Trump has promised to go after “the worst of the worst.” That has not necessarily been the case, though. According to internal Depart- ment of Homeland Security documents ob- tained by NBC News, less than 14% of the immigrants arrested last year by ICE had charges or convictions for violent offenses. Forty-six percent of detainees had nonviolent offenses on their records, like Celis, and 40% of those arrested had committed no crime other than civil immigration violations. DWI and DUI charges were the third- most common criminal charge among indi- viduals arrested by ICE, with nearly 30,000 detainees identified. The DHS document specifies that a person’s most serious crime is listed within the internal data system. FBI data suggests that between May 2025 and May 2026, 686,583 Americans were ar- rested for driving under the influence. For most first-time offenders who do not cause injury, there may be a stint in jail, a fine, a temporary license suspension and probation. For Celis, it cost him the life he’s always known. He has never attempted to excuse what he did to get arrested originally, but he found out what his parents always meant when they warned his mistakes wouldn’t be weighed the same as his friends’ in the most unforgiving way. “By the time I got arrested by ICE a year [after my arrest], I had been in therapy for a full year. And I think that prepared me for what was going to be coming,” Celis said. “I did make a mistake, and I’m always going to regret that mistake … but I also think it shouldn’t have erased 23 years of my life. It was the first thing, the only thing I had on my record.” A Financial Cost For weeks, Chih-Ming “Petey” Feng has wondered what happened to his car. It’s a black 2022 Toyota Corolla, and if anyone sees it, he’d like to know. Like Celis, Feng spent 23 years in the United States only to have his life upended by a years-old DWI charge that he’d thought was taken care of. He was a cook at some of Dallas’ highest-profile restaurants before he was picked up by ICE at an immigration check-in. After that, he spent four months bouncing between Texas detention centers, where he struggled to understand the intricacies of his case, his rights, how to communicate with the outside world and how to access funds to buy basic commissary goods. | UNFAIR PARK | Illustration by Tom Carlson / tomcarlsondesign.com >> p4 “THERE’S JUST NO WAY I COULD BE THE SAME PERSON I WAS BEFORE.” -JONATHAN CELIS
