Paulo Sosa Garcia and Ramona Cecilia Silva were heading to work in Inver Grove Heights, Minnesota, on Monday morning when federal immigration agents pulled them over and arrested them. By the next morning, they were detained in El Paso, Texas.
Tomas Martinez Gregorio was driving his wife, Daisy Martinez, and their six-year-old son, Jayren, to a hospital in Brooklyn Park when federal agents pulled them over and took Gregorio. Jayren never made it to his tonsillectomy appointment.
About 3,000 federal agents are either operating in Minnesota or on their way to the region – seeking to arrest immigrants in what the Trump administration said was its largest enforcement operation thus far. More than 2,400 people in Minnesota have been arrested in recent weeks – and many have been swiftly moved to detention centers out of state, or removed from the country.
Some had valid visas and a right to be in the US, according to local leaders who have been responding to constituents affected by the raids and lawyers representing immigrants. The Guardian has confirmed that several refugees with legal status have been arrested in recent days after the Trump administration said it would “re-examine thousands of refugee cases”.
Many have been arrested in their neighborhoods – at home, on their way to work, at department stores and restaurants, outside schools and places of worship.
Their families are grappling with the aftermath.
“I just want for my parents to come back home,” said Cecilia Sosa, the eldest of Sosa Garcia and Silva’s three daughters.
Sosa Garcia and Silva came to the US from Mexico in 1999, and had been in a years-long process to obtain legal residency, according to their daughter. Five days before they were detained, they had been told that their case had been approved to move forward. Now their daughters are instead working to raise funds for lawyers’ fees to get them released from detention – posting a video on TikTok saying they are “living their worst nightmare”, which includes footage of their parents’ car on the side of the road with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) vehicles around it.
After nearly three decades in Minnesota, Cecilia Sosa’s parents started a cleaning business together in the last few years and had “flourished”, making connections and friends, she said. Their youngest daughter is 19, and they helped her with college expenses, and were caregivers for Cecilia Sosa’s grandfather, who just had a brain tumor removed.
Now the daughters have had minimal contact with their parents since 12 January. Sosa Garcia was able to call his daughters’ aunt to inform the family that he and his wife were detained. Silva sent a text message to one of her daughters telling her that she was detained and asked the family to call a lawyer. The couple are now being held separately at Camp East Montana at Fort Bliss, a massive tent facility in El Paso where human rights groups have alleged that detainees face physical abuse and unsafe conditions.
“I am not ready for them to leave,” Cecilia Sosa said. Her nine-year old son, whom her parents were helping her raise, asks frequently about them, she said: “We need them here.”
Daisy Martinez, whose husband, Tomas Martinez Gregorio, was detained on New Year’s Eve, said she has also struggled to explain to her son what happened to his stepfather. “He says every single day: ‘Can we get Tommy back?’ He tells his teacher: ‘Can you please save Tommy?’” she said.
The other night, her son told her he’d dreamed that his stepfather was back – and he was sad to wake up. “It just breaks my heart to hear a six-year-old say that they don’t want to wake up,” Martinez said.
Martinez and Gregorio had been married recently, in November. He is undocumented, from Mexico. Although Martinez is a US citizen, the couple had decided not to apply to adjust Gregorio’s immigration status during the Trump administration because they worried that an application would draw attention to him, and ICE would try to target him for deportation.
As more and more federal immigration agents deployed to the Twin Cities in December, Martinez had worried about Gregorio. Still, they hadn’t expected three cars with ICE agents to corner their vehicle as they were driving to the hospital.
Martinez tried to talk them down – but the agents, who were armed, demanded that Gregorio get out of the car. Video footage that Martinez recorded, reviewed by the Guardian, captured her pleading with them to let Gregorio go, and an agent telling her that her husband had a DUI on his record.
Later, an immigration agent told her that her husband did not in fact have a criminal record – and Daisy said she hasn’t been given a reason for why exactly her family was targeted.
When Martinez tried to chase after her husband, who was being ushered into an agent’s car, several other agents tackled her against the car and pinned her arms behind her, she said.
“And then they left,” she said.
Martinez then noticed her son shaking and screaming in the back seat. She briefly blacked out. When she came to, she called her cousin.
“We were two minutes away from the hospital,” she said. “We never made it to the surgery.”
Panicked, Martinez and her cousin tried to find Gregorio by tracking the location-sharing feature on his phone and realized he had been taken – like many immigrants arrested in the region – to the ICE facility at Fort Snelling, a former military fortification in south Minnesota. After that, he was transferred to a county jail in Sherburne county, a 40-minute drive from the couple’s home.
In the weeks since, she has been scrambling to figure out how to get her husband released – and how to parent and survive without him. He worked in the insulation industry and had made a good salary, allowing Martinez to work part-time and focus on childcare, she said.
Ever since agents tackled her, she said, an old injury on her foot has been acting up, making it difficult for her to walk or stand for long periods. That, combined with insomnia and the trauma of Gregorio’s arrest, has made it difficult for her to do her job as a part-time supervisor for a fast-food chain.
“I’m the child of an immigrant, I’m the wife of an immigrant,” she said. “My son was born in Mexico … so I’m basically the mom of an immigrant,” she said. “And [ICE] made me feel like my citizenship doesn’t matter any more. My social status doesn’t mean anything, my passport doesn’t mean anything.”
Still, she said, she tries to watch out for her friends and neighbors without citizenship. In the past few weeks, she has been making regular runs to the gas station to fill up their cars, making grocery runs for whoever needs it. Each time she hears or sees cars that may belong to immigration agents, she rushes outside to check who they’re after.
“I basically tell everyone here: ‘I couldn’t save my husband, but I could probably save you,’” she said.
