A day after Christmas, José Contreras Díaz received a letter from immigration officials asking him to report to an agent the following month to discuss his case. He was immediately suspicious.
“I had a strong feeling that this was a bait letter, for me to go in and get arrested,” said Contreras, who had been able to renew his work permit through Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, for 12 years without such a meeting.
Contreras, who grew up in Edinburg, still showed up at the appointment, and what he feared the most happened: he was arrested and deported within days to Honduras, a country he left when he was eight years old. But three months later, after a lawyer argued that Contreras’ deportation was illegal because his DACA was still current, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement flew him back to Texas — only to immediately put him in a detention center.
The 30-year-old was released eight days later, on May 7. Contreras said he is happy to be back in Texas to help raise his 2-month-old son — who was born while Contreras was in Honduras fighting his deportation.
“It has been the hardest thing my family and I have ever experienced, and words cannot fully capture it,” Contreras said after he was released. “But I am home now. I got to hold my son, Mateo, and hug my family again. After everything, looking forward to that moment is what kept me going.”
Contreras is one of dozens of DACA recipients the Trump administration has deported, but one of the few allowed to return. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security — the same agency that paid to fly him back to Texas on a charter plane — says it still intends to deport him again regardless of his DACA status.
He is at the center of a yearslong effort by the Trump administration to dismantle the program, created by the Obama administration in 2012, that gives recipients protection from deportation and eligibility for renewable work permits. Of the current 500,000 DACA recipients across the country, more than 80,000 live in Texas
After the U.S. Supreme Court halted the first Trump administration’s effort to kill DACA, the government is simply arresting and attempting to deport DACA recipients in Trump’s second term.
As part of its immigration crackdown, the administration has also paused some immigration benefits, such as U.S. citizenship applications, and ordered reviews of other immigration cases, including DACA renewals — causing a months-long delay in renewals that has caused some DACA recipients to lose their jobs when their work permits expired.
“There has been a coordination over the past year aimed at weakening the DACA program, piece by piece,” said Juliana Macedo do Nascimento, deputy director of Advocacy and Campaigns at United We Dream, an immigrant rights organization. “The DACA program is being killed by a thousand cuts.”
Federal judges across the country have ruled in specific cases that detaining and deporting DACA recipients is illegal if they hadn’t committed any crimes and their status is valid.
Those decisions conflict with an April ruling by the Board of Immigration Appeals, an administrative court within the Justice Department — an agency led by Attorney General Pam Bondi before Trump fired her last month — that DACA is not reason enough to halt a recipient’s deportation.
That ruling came after a federal judge and an immigration judge both ruled that the government illegally detained and tried to deport Catalina “Xochitl” Santiago, an El Paso DACA recipient married to a U.S. citizen who was arrested by Border Patrol at the local airport on her way to a work-related conference last year.
In a similar case, immigration officials arrested DACA recipient Luis Roldan Cerda on Feb. 17 and deported him to Mexico. Roldan was allowed to return to his wife and two children in McAllen after his lawyer sued the Trump administration claiming his arrest was illegal.
Since 2025, at least 261 DACA recipients have been arrested — 75 of them in Texas — and at least 86 of them have been deported, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
The detentions have alarmed DACA recipients who for the past 14 years believed that they would be protected from deportation if they don’t commit crimes.
Appointment turns into a deportation
When Contreras was 8, his mother decided she wanted to raise him and his sisters in the U.S. They left Honduras, crossed the border from Mexico into Texas and surrendered to an immigration agent.
The family was released with a notice to appear at immigration court. Contreras’ mother found an apartment in Edinburg and went to her first court hearing. They moved and notified immigration court officials of their new address, Contreras said, but his mother never got notice of a follow-up appointment.
He said when she later called the court, an official told her an order of deportation had been issued for her and her children because she missed an appointment.
For the next 22 years, the family laid low in the Rio Grande Valley, avoiding any type of trouble with the law so that they would not come across immigration officials. While his mother worked, Contreras graduated from high school and enrolled in college, hoping to earn a degree in chemistry.
In 2014, he successfully applied for DACA, allowing him to legally work, and renewed it every two years as required.
In 2022, he met his future wife at a local grocery store and asked her out for coffee. They eventually moved in together, and Contreras said he then quit college to work full time, first as a commercial driver, delivering meat to grocery stores, then in the oil fields, helping mix chemicals for drilling mud, he said.
He was working as a pool technician when he got the letter telling him he had an appointment with an immigration officer on Jan. 6. Under Trump, ICE was pursuing the mass deportation program the president had promised, and had arrested and deported scores of people across the Rio Grande Valley — many of them with no criminal records.
Contreras said he knew deportation was a possibility, but thought that immigration officials would give him a chance to appeal.
“If I didn’t go, I was worried that maybe they would raid my house while I was at work. So I said, ‘I have to show up or things could get ugly,’” Contreras said.
At the appointment, two immigration agents searched him and took him to a room where they told him he had a deportation order.
“What about DACA?” Contreras asked.
“The administration is choosing to do things differently,” he said one of the agents told him.
Within days, ICE deported him to Honduras on Jan. 11.
Life in Honduras
The first month after his deportation, he said he spent most of his days crying at his grandparent’s house.
“I would eat, and then cry, I would talk to my family, and then cry,” he said. “All I did was cry.”
He missed Valentine’s Day and his wife’s birthday. But what hurt the most was missing his son’s birth, he said. He would talk to his son, Mateo, through video calls.
He was determined to find a way back to Texas to meet his son.
He came across the case of 42-year-old Maria de Jesús Estrada Juárez, a DACA recipient from Sacramento who also was arrested at an immigration appointment and deported to Mexico.
De Jesús Estrada’s attorney Stacy Tolchin, sued the Trump administration claiming the deportation was illegal, and U.S. District Judge Dena M. Coggins ordered the government to bring her back, calling the deportation a “flagrant violation” of DACA protections.
Contreras called Tolchin.
Tolchin immediately wrote a letter to ICE telling them that Contreras’ deportation was illegal. She included Coggins’ order in the other case.
The U.S. embassy contacted Contreras last month and told him immigration officials would let him return to the U.S. He went to the embassy, where an official handed him an envelope with a charter flight itinerary and told him to go to the local airport on April 29, where an immigration official would be waiting for him.
At the airport, they handcuffed him and placed him on a direct flight to Harlingen.
“It felt like a relief because I was thinking, ‘I can get back to work, I can go back to my family,’” Contreras said. “I thought, ‘Texas is bringing me back.’”
Return to Texas
As soon as he got off the plane, an agent escorted him to a white van, telling him he was being sent to a detention facility, Contreras said.
“‘Are you kidding me? I already went through this,’ I said to myself,” Contreras said.
Tolchin said she talked to the ICE agent overseeing Contreras’ case, asking why the government would agree to fly him back, only to try to detain him again. The agent said someone higher in the chain of command made the decision and it wasn’t clear what would happen next, Tolchin said.
Contreras spent eight days in the Port Isabel Detention Center, where his younger sister visited him with his baby.
Mateo was asleep, wrapped in a white blanket and wearing a onesie that read “Hello, I’m new here.” Contreras said he rubbed his son’s belly and cheeks.
“Wake up my little warrior,” Contreras told his son.
Then Mateo opened his brown eyes and began to babble.
“I could tell he recognized my voice, it’s like he knew who I was,” Contreras said. “For that one hour that I was able to hold him, it was the best experience I’ve had in this whole situation.”
Later that week, detention staff told him he would be released.
He returned home on May 7, in time to spend Mother’s Day with his family.
He said he felt guilty not being able to buy his wife anything nice, since he lost his job while he was detained. His wife told him being back together was all she needed, he said.
Contreras’ future is unclear. He is still at risk of deportation. He will have to report to ICE agents periodically.
He said since being released from detention, it feels like the federal government is waiting for him to make a mistake so it can arrest and deport him again.
“I’m worried about my life being upended again,” he said.
Source link