Detention and Deportation As Seen Through a Family Group Chat

On Feb. 15, Carlos Enrique Itriago Arevalo put on a mint-green softball uniform, ate a bowl of cornflakes and rushed out the door to his rec league game. It was early, just after 7 a.m., and his wife and 9-year-old son were still asleep.

He was in such a hurry that he forgot his phone. He didn’t make it past the gates of his Florida housing complex before multiple Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents pulled him over.

Carlos never made it to the game. His teammates began to worry, calling and texting him several times that day.

Carlos knew he fit the profile of a “criminal alien” the Trump administration had pledged to target. Not long after coming to the United States from Venezuela, he had been convicted of fraud. But he had served his sentence and, years later, had been granted relief from deportation in the form of Temporary Protected Status.

“I was never worried about it — about being deported — because I had T.P.S.,” he said.

About an hour after his arrest, Carlos called his wife, Emily, from the ICE offices in Jacksonville and told her what had happened. He warned her not to put herself or the rest of their family, all recent immigrants from Venezuela, at risk by coming to see him.

In the family group chat, Emily was despondent.

The Itriago Arevalo family, like many recent immigrant families, is extremely close. A walking path of turf patches connects their two family homes. One was shared by Carlos, Emily and their son; the other by his parents, two brothers, sister-in-law and niece.

Most of them had overstayed their visas and later sought protection from deportation under the Biden administration, which offered new legal pathways for Venezuelans fleeing their nation’s political and economic crisis.

President Trump had promised a sweeping crackdown on undocumented immigrants and a reversal of many Biden-era protections, including the extension of T.P.S., which Republicans had opposed. But Mr. Trump was barely a month in office when Carlos was arrested. The Supreme Court would not allow the administration to proceed with ending the program’s protections until May.

The family was not sure whether Carlos’s criminal record meant he had been specifically targeted that Saturday, or picked up randomly.

Over the next few months, as Carlos was moved to three detention facilities across three states, the family members kept one another updated about his situation through text and audio messages on WhatsApp.

These messages, shared with The New York Times, show a family caught up in Mr. Trump’s aggressive immigration enforcement. (The messages were translated from Spanish and in some cases condensed for clarity.)

They grappled with the turmoil of Carlos’s abrupt detention and the threat of his deportation. They watched what was happening to other Venezuelans and worried about what it could mean for their own status. They struggled to understand the law, and how to help Carlos without endangering themselves.

2016 – 2024

Separation and Reunion

Carlos first came to the United States in 2016 when he was 25, leaving behind Emily and their son, who was barely 10 months old. Venezuela was on the brink of economic collapse, and Carlos said he needed to find work. He got a tourist visa and planned to stay for just a few months.

His visa did not allow him to work legally, but he got a job as a dishwasher at a pizzeria in Brooklyn. He returned on the same visa in April 2017, heading to Chicago for another dishwashing job. “That’s when I met some crazy people,” he recalled.

Within a few months, Carlos was arrested in Jacksonville with a group of others accused of using A.T.M. skimming devices to collect credit and debit card numbers to make fraudulent purchases. He knew it was wrong, but said he had used some of the stolen money to send food and other items back home.

He pleaded guilty to three felonies and was sentenced to five years in a Florida prison. From there, he applied for asylum, saying he feared returning to violence in Venezuela. His case was denied, and in December 2021 a judge ordered him removed.

Back in Venezuela, the economic and political situation continued to deteriorate, and most of Carlos’s immediate family emigrated to the United States. His brothers came in 2018, and his parents in 2022. They all applied for asylum, too.

When Carlos was released from prison in January 2022, he was promptly picked up by immigration authorities. But deportation flights to Venezuela had been halted, and after a few months in detention, like many nonviolent offenders, Carlos was released. He said he went to his first check-in with ICE that June but was told to reschedule, and then he never heard back.

He got a job off the books painting houses and soon started his own house-painting business. He grew a small social media following by posting photos and videos of his jobs in the familiar H.G.T.V. before-and-after style. “When I work, I am four people at once,” he joked.

Later that year, Emily and their son crossed the border in Brownsville, Texas, and turned themselves over to immigration authorities. They were given a notice to appear at the ICE offices in Jacksonville.

In 2023, President Joseph R. Biden Jr. extended T.P.S. for Venezuelans in the United States, citing unsafe conditions that would make it difficult for them to return home. Everyone in the Itriago Arevalo family applied.

Carlos thought T.P.S. would be a long shot for him. The application asked about prior felony convictions, and he marked “Yes.” When U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services followed up to request more information about his criminal history, he provided more details. He included affidavits from each member of his family, attesting to his changed character and the importance of remaining in the United States with his wife and young son.

Everyone but Carlos was approved for T.P.S. in 2023. “I felt calm and confident that I could have protection in this country and to do things correctly,” Emily recalled.

T.P.S. allowed the rest of the family members to live and work legally. They found jobs — construction, landscaping, cleaning — and Carlos’s son and niece enrolled in public school. They paid taxes and saved up for family trips to Florida’s amusement parks. They settled into life in America. They let themselves relax.

Almost a year later, in September 2024, they were surprised when Carlos received his approval letter in the mail. The document contained a guarantee:

While you are under Temporary Protected Status, you will not be removed from the United States.

Feb. 15 – March 22

Life in Detention

When Carlos was detained, his family thought he might have a chance of being released — or at least not deported — because of his T.P.S.

Carlos said lawyers from the A.C.L.U. and the University of Miami law school visited him and other detainees at Baker County Detention Center, but no one agreed to take his case. “I explained that I had T.P.S., I gave them my T.P.S. number,” he said. “They said, ‘Oh we’ll check it out, we’ll let you know.’ ”

Immigration lawyers who reviewed Carlos’s case at the request of The Times said this was most likely because it appeared the protection had been granted in error — felons are ineligible to receive T.P.S. Legally, they said, the government was still required to reopen the case and withdraw his status before deporting him.

Carlos studied to learn his rights, spending much of his time in detention researching on the tablets available to them and taking detailed notes, which he later mailed to Emily.

In one letter, he described how crowded the facility had become.

Since 3/10/2025 overcrowding has begun in the detention center where dormitories have a capacity of 32 people, they have been taken up to 40 people, with people sleeping outside the cells without a right to privacy, bathing or going to the bathroom.

Carlos said that detainees were frequently mistreated and that guards routinely pepper sprayed and hit them, accusations a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security denied.

Since 2017, more than 135 complaints have been reported documenting mistreatment and abusive conditions at Baker, according to the A.C.L.U. of Florida.

Laundry and hygiene is completely gross. Soap and detergent are not used in clothes, which is why clothes and sheets are brown, so you can’t see the dirt. NO SOAP, NO DETERGENTS!

“Baker is worse than any place I’ve been,” Carlos said. “I tell everybody, I prefer to be in prison than in Baker.”

Carlos called Emily every day. They talked about how their son was doing, and how Emily would manage the rent — about $1,000 a month — on her income from cleaning houses. They decided she would have to rent out their second bedroom.

All the while, his family kept working to find him a lawyer. But they were quoted fees of $5,000 to $10,000, sums they said they could not afford.

March 22 – April 14

Florida to Louisiana

After an initial wave of arrests in February, many Venezuelans were lingering in immigrant detention as the country reversed course on whether it would accept deportation flights. Carlos spent more than a month at Baker in limbo.

By early March, the family said they had given up trying to find him a lawyer.

Then on March 15, Mr. Trump issued an executive order invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a wartime law he wanted to use to — without a court hearing — detain and deport Venezuelans accused of being gang members.

A week later, Carlos was awoken at 5 a.m. and told to pack up. A cellmate from Baker called Emily to let her know.

Carlos was being transferred to Richwood Correctional Center, a private detention facility in Monroe, La., about a 10-hour bus ride away.