Migrants face a choice: Wait years for a hearing, or agree to be deported now

CALEXICO, Calif. — When ICE agents pulled her over in Phoenix in August, Dugeys Perez was on her way to deliver a McDonald’s order for UberEats.

She had lived in the U.S. for a year and a half with temporary protected status granted by the government, sending money home to Venezuela, while hoping courts would grant her asylum.

Instead, that day, agents handcuffed her and drove her away, leaving her car on the side of the highway with the McDonald’s bag still sitting inside.

She went first to a detention center in Eloy, Arizona, then, two weeks later, was transferred to the Imperial Regional Detention Facility in Calexico, two hours east of San Diego.

ICE agents explained to Perez that there was no hope for her release. She would need to fight her asylum case from prison, and she would not be able to continue to work and send money home. Her next court date was slated for 2028. 

But while she waited in detention, she said, agents arrived to tell her there was another option. 

They placed a piece of paper in front of her, already printed with her name and case number. Sign it, and the whole ordeal would be over. 

The paper was labeled “Withdrawal of Application for Admission.” It was a legal agreement for her own deportation.

Perez is one of more than 700,000 Venezuelans who arrived in the U.S. from 2021 to 2024, seeking asylum. 

Many, like Perez, described threats of extortion from local gangs in their home cities. Many completed an initial “credible fear interview,” proving to a border agent that they were afraid to live both at home and in every country they had traveled through, including Mexico. 

After the migrants’ release into the United States, American courts would determine whether they deserved permanent protection. In the meantime, under a standing order from the Biden administration, the Venezuelans had long-term permission to live and work in the U.S.

But after regaining the White House in January, President Donald Trump signed new executive orders that stripped most of these asylum seekers of their work permits, financial assistance and protection from deportation. 

ICE agents — already under pressure to meet a new weekly deportation quota — began arresting hundreds of Venezuelans alongside other asylum seekers across the country. Agents found them outside immigration courtrooms, at routine check-ins, and sometimes — as with Perez — simply on the road to or from work.

This summer and fall, federal judges in several states have ruled the arrests “defy logic” and “offend the ordered system of liberty that is the pillar of the Fifth Amendment.” In some cases, court filings lead to an immediate release from detention.

But the pattern of arresting these asylum seekers without probable cause or evidence they are a danger, legal experts and migrant advocates say, provides a roadmap to deny potentially millions of people their right to due process.

“The Department of Homeland Security is really manipulating the legal system and creating new policies that are not in step with what the law says and are not in step with what a generation of judges have interpreted those laws to say,” Hayden Rodarte, a lawyer with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights said. “There’s a fracturing of the rule of law.”

With the Trump administration’s announcement that it would pause all asylum decisions — in the aftermath of the shooting of two National Guard members last week in Washington, D.C. — the outlook for future asylum proceedings became even murkier. The backlog of asylum cases already extended a decade into the future

So most detainees like Dugeys Perez, without access to an attorney, seemingly have two options: wait indefinitely for their cases to resolve, or agree to self-deport. 

Once detainees sign that agreement, they give up their asylum claims, as well as the chance of legally returning to the United States for a decade. 

Running out of options

Imperial Regional Detention Facility is a tan, square complex near the end of a desert highway. The entrance is lined with neat curls of razor wire and rows of cacti. 

There, detainees share bunk beds in an open hall that holds 60 people, their every movement scrutinized by a guard and five cameras. Due to overcrowding, some of the migrants sleep on thin mattresses laid out on the floor. 

Some of the migrants in the detention center have lived in the United States for decades, while others only recently arrived. People from every continent, teenagers and grandparents, rotate through a small patio that offers the only opportunity to see the sky. Most have never been accused, much less convicted, of any crime other than crossing the border without a visa. 

“I never thought I’d be detained. The people who are actually committing crimes are still out there,” Perez said, under the fluorescent lights of the visitation room in October.

Perez is in her 30s, with shiny black hair and tattoos dotting her arms. The navy blue color of her shirt and pants indicated she was in the low-security group. Detainees with criminal records wear orange and red. 

Life in Venezuela was unsustainable, Perez explained. She worked at a bakery that paid her just 20 dollars a week, while food prices climbed to absurdity. Finally, she left her 10-year-old son with her parents and fled, in hopes of sending money back to support him. 

Like thousands of Venezuelans, she endured a 4,000 mile trek through the perilous Darien Gap, over Central America, and up the length of Mexico, a journey that, at times, exposes many to robberies, sexual assault, or kidnapping for ransom. When they arrived at the border, some crawled under razor wire, dodged tear gas deployed by drones, or were forced to camp out at the border wall for days or weeks before they were processed by Border Patrol officers.

Life in the United States was not what she expected. “It’s like every time you breathe, you’re charged a fee,” she said. Still, working in Arizona, Perez managed to send $100 each week to her son. 

But as the weeks extended into months in the detention center, Perez worried her son, who relied on her gifts, would not have enough to eat. 

In her first week inside, Perez said, she spent more than $500 on phone calls. Management & Training Corp., known as MTC, a Utah-based private prison contractor, runs the facility, and inmates are charged up to $50 per call.  

Perez explained that she and many other Venezuelan detainees did not have lawyers, and were left to represent themselves in the convoluted process of arguing an asylum case. Their options are years of imprisonment, or returning to a place — Mexico or Venezuela — where they fear kidnapping, extortion, and assault. As if in a domino effect, they were losing hope. 

Twice during her three months in detention, Dugeys Perez said, she met with ICE agents, who placed a paper in front of her with a pen. It was an agreement to self-deport, already printed with her name and case number. 

If she signed, Perez would be deported to Mexico within a few days, and banned from entering the United States for 10 years, with a penalty of between 2 and 20 years in prison and a $150,000 fine if she tried to cross the border again. But if she refused to sign, she would remain in detention. 

The ICE agents, Perez said, did not attempt to persuade her to sign the deportation order. They simply left her with the paper on the table.

‘Don’t you want to go back?’

Other Venezuelan asylum seekers said they were encouraged or coerced to sign.

Adriana, a 20-year-old woman who asked to be identified by her first name because she feared retribution from the Department of Homeland Security, says she was coaxed to sign with “pretty words.” 

“They said, ‘Don’t you want to go back to your country and see your family?’” she said. There was no mention that she would most likely be sent to Mexico instead of Venezuela. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has accepted thousands of Venezuelan deportees who never intended to settle in Mexico. 

“They play with your mind,” she said.

Adriana, was arrested at a routine check-in at the ICE office in downtown San Diego, despite bringing two lawyers with her. Upon arrival at the detention center, she was placed in solitary confinement for two days. “The room was so small, it was just me and the toilet,” she said. 

Unlike Dugeys Perez, Adriana had family on the outside advocating for her. Desperate to ensure her release, Adriana’s aunt took $10,000 out of her 401(k) to hire a lawyer to fight the case. 

Alondrimar, a 23-year-old asylum seeker, said she was physically coerced. ICE agents arrested her after an immigration court hearing related to her asylum case. In the basement of the court building in San Diego, Alondrimar alleges, the agents attempted to force her hand.

“They said the document was just a routine thing, something having to do with the consulate, but I saw the word ‘deport’ on it,” she says. “I didn’t have to be very intelligent to know what it was. It was obvious it had nothing to do with the consulate.” When Alondrimar asked to read the document in Spanish, which is the legal right of anyone detained, she said the ICE agents refused, and told her to learn English. 

“There were five of them [ICE agents] in the room and they started holding my arm and trying to force my hand into the fingerprint ink, so they could put my fingerprint on the paper as a signature. I started screaming saying ‘I don’t want to! I don’t want to!’ just in case there was anyone listening,” she said. 

The event was particularly painful for Alondrimar, whose asylum case rests on her experience of assault by police officers in Venezuela. 

“I’m an immigrant, not a criminal,” she said. “They shackled my wrists and my ankles and snatched my passport from my hand. It was humiliation.”

During her time in detention, Alondrimar says ICE agents attempted to get her to agree to sign her own deportation order by promising her, along with several other asylum-seekers, a check for $1,000 and free airfare, gifts that were not legally guaranteed in the document she would sign. 

Rodarte, the civil rights lawyer, said he and other lawyers representing immigrants in detention have noticed a pattern.

“All these legal documents need to be interpreted and explained to the person that’s being arrested. We’re not seeing that happening across the board. They’re laughing at people when they ask for explanations. They’re laughing at people when they ask for resources. And they’re even laughing at people when they rightly claim a fear of returning to their country,” Rodarte said.

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to requests to comment on the accusations of physical and verbal coercion by ICE officers. Instead, a representative for DHS asked Times of San Diego to provide sensitive information, including the name, identification number and date of birth of the migrants interviewed for this story.

Though class action suits have been filed in several states in an attempt to protect asylum seekers from arrests after immigration court hearings, as the law stands, each migrant must file their own lawsuit arguing that their detention was unlawful. This is done through filing a petition for writ of habeas corpus, which both Adriana and Alondrimar’s lawyers submitted. 

According to public records collected by the volunteer group Habeas Dockets, filings of these habeas petitions have risen exponentially this fall, with 4000 petitions filed this year, and nearly half of those in October alone. 

Because these arrests are so clearly against the law, the detainees who submit habeas petitions are typically released within several days, immigration attorneys say. 

“In reality, anyone can file their own habeas petition, and it costs only 5 dollars,” Brian McGoldrick, an immigration lawyer in San Diego, said. “But you have to have 5 dollars.”

Most Venezuelans who are detained have never heard of a petition for writ of habeas corpus. 

“I was one of the only people there [in the detention center] with a lawyer,” Alondrimar said.  

Still, the petitions are complex, and foreign to many lawyers who practice immigration law, a separate system from the federal courts.

Dugeys Perez, with no money left to send home or hire a lawyer, confronted the papers on the table and made her decision. 

Making her decision 

In October, Dugeys Perez signed the motion to apply for voluntary removal to Mexico. 

Two other Venezuelan women in the detention center promptly gave up hope and followed suit. “There was no right choice,” Perez said. “So there’s nothing to regret.” 

What would happen next, Perez said, was a “nightmare” of “unjust cruelty, that no one deserves.” 

Perez was deported in the same clothes she wore when she was arrested months before. She was also given a plastic bag with her cellphone, a pair of flat, rubber-soled slippers from the detention center, and a copy of the document certifying her “voluntary removal with prejudice,” signed by a judge. 

She was dropped off at the San Ysidro border crossing between San Diego and Tijuana, where Mexican officials boarded all the Venezuelans onto a bus. None of them knew where they were headed. For four days, the 30 migrants remained on the bus, where they were given meals of bread and water. Perez said her boyfriend, who was also deported in the same manner several days later, had such swollen feet after getting off the bus that his shoes no longer fit. 

The bus left the migrants in Southern Mexico, in the small city of Villahermosa, Tabasco, hundreds of miles east of the larger migrant hubs like Tapachula and Mexico City, where they could find greater resources. Villahermosa has only one shelter, which only allows migrants to stay for two nights.  

The Mexican government began leaving periodic groups of deportees, primarily Venezuelans, in 

Villahermosa in 2023, in an attempt to spread out the workload among local government offices. But migrant advocates say the policy is part of a greater pattern which the United States uses the governments of Mexico and other neighboring countries to make it difficult, if not impossible for migrants to reach the border. Leaving migrants in a secluded area like Villahermosa, with no legal means to travel and no resources, ensures they will not be able to make it back north. 

Dugeys Perez was left at the Villahermosa bus station with no money and no ID – her passport was back in Phoenix. She would need to wait weeks before she could apply for a safe-conduct certificate that would allow her to travel elsewhere in Mexico. 

Exhausted, Perez decided she did not want to remain in Mexico and get a job. She wanted to go home to Venezuela. “I don’t feel safe here, and I don’t know a single person. I need to go home,” she said. 

But the waiting list for deportation flights from Mexico to Venezuela is thousands long. Some Venezuelan migrants have been waiting months or years for an opportunity to return home. 

One of Perez’s fellow detainees, Maydelis Pereira, was sent directly from the United States to Venezuela on a rare deportation flight, because she had a leg injury. After just two weeks home, she began hearing reports that U.S. officials were considering plans to invade. 

“We live just 10 minutes from the Caribbean coast, so we’re afraid, but there’s nothing we can do to prepare for it,” Pereira said. “We can just trust in God. That’s all.”

With $400 pieced together from Western Union deposits from friends back in the United States and immigrant advocacy organizations, Perez bought a plane ticket from Villahermosa to Cancun, where she hoped to catch a flight to Bogotá, Colombia. 

At the airport, Mexican immigration officials said she did not have the necessary paperwork to travel, turned her around, and sent her back to the bus station.

Lillian Perlmutter covers immigration for Times of San Diego and NEWSWELL.