Bulwark Takes - ICE Tore Their Family Apart. But It Didn't Kill Their Love.

Episode Date: June 5, 2025

Andrew Egger and Adrian Carrasquillo discuss Adrian’s story on a real family caught in the immigration system, where a sudden ICE raid tore their lives apart, leaving a wife behind to navigate fear, lawyers, and an uncertain future. See the full report and what happened to the family here: https://www.thebulwark.com/p/love-in-the-time-of-self-deportation-part-one?r=5i9ljr&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false

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This free virtual event brings together leaders like Senator Heidi Heitkamp, Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Governor Andy Beshear, and others for real talk and real solutions. Together we'll tackle the most urgent issues facing rural America. Register today or learn more at ruralprogress.com. Hi, this is Andrew Egger with The Bullwork.

I'm here with my colleague Adrian Carraschio to talk about his new huddled masses newsletter on immigration, Love in the Time of Self-Deportation. We're in such a weird situation right now where a lot of people who have previously been in a penumbral state as far as their immigration status is concerned are getting scooped up, getting deportation orders, getting imprisoned by the new administration. And that's causing a lot of different issues in a lot of different ways.

Today, Adrian, your new newsletter is focusing in on one family in particular that's been swept up in some of this stuff. Can you just talk to me a little bit about these people and what they're facing right now? Yeah, I've been sort of fascinated with the self deportation concept just in general that now, you know, there's the first they said they were going to go for criminals and gang members. Obviously, we know that they've expanded beyond that and they're getting people who've lived here for a long time.

So they go after an immigrant who's from Colombia and had a deportation order from 2019. But when he checked in with ICE every year, it was no issue. He signed some papers and he was out until next year until he had to return. But now his wife, his wife is affected. She's a U.S. citizen. She's from California. They live in Tennessee now. And so I was fascinated by what could happen that would basically be your country saying, sorry, we're deporting your husband,

which means if you wanna be with your family and with your two and a half year old son, you need to leave the only country that you've known that you're a citizen of, which I thought was pretty crazy. Can you just tell me a little bit about the couple, how they met, what situation they're in right now? I was interested, obviously, the story says

that it's about love and I wanted to tell a love story because I wanted to know the ways that people meet and these sort of tangled different ways at different points in their lives. This was during the pandemic and she said she had gotten out of, so we call her Emily in the story, we call her Diego to protect their identity. She told me that she had gotten out of a long marriage and frankly, she was struggling financially. She was looking, she needed a job. She was delivering for Grubhub and DoorDash and her and her 20 year old

daughter were going hungry at times. Right. So, you know, in comes, she goes to pick up food at a restaurant and she meets who would be her future husband, Diego. And it's just clear that he's flirting with her and he like offers her to come back later and he'll give her a burger, um, which she does. And then she sort of stays away for a while because she knew that he was flirting and she didn't want to get into this.

And I sort of love the idea that then she said one day, screw it. I'm giving this guy my number and return back to the restaurant. And so they talked all night, they started dating and they moved from California to Tennessee. And I think that's where some of the trouble starts where you're now not in a liberal California. And so he was, um, one time stopped by police two blocks from their house and he had, and then they said marijuana possession. Of course, she says, the police officer said he was driving fine.

So why'd you stop him in the first place? And she says that since they moved to Tennessee, he's been pulled over by cops more, which she attributes to racism. So, you know, he had this he had this charge and he had actually come. He's been in the U.S. for 12 years. He had come in 2013. He had applied for asylum. It was denied. But they sort of let him out to do these yearly ice check-ins. And then when he went in for his yearly check-in in February, they were none the wiser. They had no plans of leaving. They had just bought a Honda Prologue EV, you know, five months ago.

And so they had no plans that this was going to be any different than the past years they have since he's been doing his check in, except this year they brought him to a back room, they did change him. They sent him to Louisiana from Knoxville, Tennessee, and he was deported within a few weeks. Yeah, yeah. So just talk me through a little bit of the kind of then decision tree for the rest of the family for Emily and like what were they looking at What and essentially how how have they decided to move forward? Yeah, that's one of the things we talked about it. I think I would be so upset and so hurt, you know, that this is the country that I'm from and now I have to leave. And so it was

sort of interesting the way she said it to me, she said like, ultimately, it was no decision at all. Like, she said that they on their own would sort of be bad parents, but together that they're perfect, you know, that he's sort of very playful and maybe doesn't have as many rules for the son and that she's very like keep the trains running. But that together it's a family, right? And so she said for that reason there was no question at all. I think in the dark moments when she went to the nine- drive to Genoa, Louisiana, I mean, this is part of what the administration does as well, which is that these Louisiana

detention centers, which are like known for human rights abuses and also for being inaccessible, they want it that way. They want it to be difficult for family and lawyers to go find and track down the person that they're trying to ship out of the country. And so when she spoke with him, he thought he had lost his family. He thought she had given up on him because he didn't hear. She was looking for him. She was trying to find out his ice locator went dark. And so she had no idea where he was. And then ultimately her decision was I want to keep the family together. She had considered other countries, but she's going to go to Columbia and she's going to be with her husband or with her baby.

That's such an insane, insane story. I wanted to drill in on a couple of other little things here because one of them, one thing that really struck me was how you mentioned her father. I'll just quote from you here. Emily's father, a Vietnam veteran and a diehard Trump fan got along well with Diego, so well that he officiated at their wedding in January 2023. I think that's such a striking little detail of the way that the abstract notion where Donald Trump's broad strokes, immigration policies still pull really well for a lot of the electorate. Like, yeah, of course, like illegal immigrants shouldn't be here.

They should be deported and we should, you know, do that at scale and as quickly as possible. A lot of people kind of buy that in the abstract and at, you know, at the 30,000 foot level, who then when it comes down to the actual individual human beings involved, it feels very different for a lot of them. Absolutely right. I think that we have already seen, we've seen enough polling, we've talked about it ad nauseam. There was certainly anger about the way that Joe Biden handled the border and they wanted the border to be strengthened. But beyond that, there were so many polls and

so many stories that have come out where Americans weren't really supporting some mass deportation effort that was going into schools or hospitals or churches or taking out their neighbors or the parents of their kids friend from school. And so, you know, this is exactly that, right? And I thought it was important to talk about the Trump supporters in her life that are sort of like, well, what's going on now? Her father, who clearly was a Trump supporter, a diehard Trump supporter, and ended up thinking that Diego was just an amazing guy and he was there for her when her father got a brain tumor

and when he died last year. You know, that's family, right? That's what we're talking about here. And just to see the way that this family has been affected and those ripple effects, because then she also talked to me about a lovely Baptist couple neighbors of hers that are 81 and 82 years old and didn't have kids of their own and

and her and her husband were like kids to them and he was showing the husband had a garden and and they just love the the son and she told me the wife has cried since she found out that they're that they're having to leave so you know again just the way that these affect real people and then those ripples that are now pulling in Americans, US citizens as well. I did want to ask also just kind of from the opposite side of it, maybe I don't know if you'd call it devil's advocate or what, but when I'm reading this story and I'm looking at, you know, that we're talking about a guy who has had, you know, a deportation order from a judge since, you know, long before Donald Trump got in, since the

first Trump term really, and that that has been deferred. As a layman, I see that. I'm like, well, that doesn't seem like a particularly sustainable or stable situation either. To have this pre-existing system where the courts are churning through these people and a lot of people are in limbo and they're like, I guess it's fine for now. And I guess, you know, nobody's, nobody's deporting me yet and I can continue to live my life and I can even, you know, continue to put down roots and things here. I don't know. I don't know what, what, what to really ask about that, but it's, it doesn't seem like the pre-existing situation was exactly ideal either, right?

No, I mean, there's a reason that Democrats or Republicans have agreed for a generation that the immigration system is broken. And when I speak to, you know, immigration lawyers about this stuff, they say, there's a way to do this, you bring a lot of resources to immigration judges and to immigration courts, and then you're able to do the work that's supposed to be done for these incredible backlogs and things like that. I mean, it's it's like we always know this about Donald Trump.

It's always just sort of like black and white. Everybody's out. Well, these are these complex matters. And, you know, what he's done with immigration is just sort of like chip away and destroy the foundations of things like asylum and legal immigration and different programs, refugee programs that he has just sort of decided that he wants to get rid of. And so of course, you're right. There is the other way of doing this and following the law and sort of being smarter with an

immigration system that perhaps is not as permissive and is about law and order. And then that's going to be hard. And that's going to and then maybe the flip side of that will be that some Americans won't like it the way that that's being done. But I think it's pretty clear that the sort of way that Donald Trump is doing everything with mass deportation has all of these unintended consequences as well. You don't really get into this in the piece, but it's the thing I've been noodling on with the big, beautiful bill that has this massive expansion for border enforcement money

in terms of hiring more ICE agents and creating more detention centers and just a very small kind of marginal increase for the exact what you're talking about right now, the backlog, the immigration judges to work through all of that. I want to get back though to the family because obviously that's the main focus of this particular story is just kind of the human plight that these people are going through. And I guess just what's next? I mean, like they've decided that they're going to follow him to Colombia, as you said. Logistically, what does that look like? I

mean, I assume she and their son will still be US citizens. Are there any obstacles on the other end for establishing residency there? Or I mean, what's what what what does their family kind of need to do in order to be reunited here? I think that Diego has been working on his side on the you know, getting a job getting a license if the US had let Him keep his license. It would have been easier in Colombia to get his license. He's going through six weeks of driver's ed He got a motorcycle license. She got him a motorcycle so he can get around She's getting a passport for her son And so they're gonna head there in June

So they're gonna head there very soon and you know I will say that like I also have you know a part two of this love in the time of self-deportation Story coming out with another family a different they're going somewhere else and, you know, a Latino family. It's not a Latino immigrant. So, you know, again, it's like when you bring up the stuff of everything that's going on with this big, beautiful bill and how that's going to increase the, um, the detention resources and, and surge all these resources for mass deportation efforts, we know that everything that's going on is only going to get worse in terms of some of those unintended consequences. So on Friday, we'll have another family as well and what they're dealing with.

Well, thank you for continuing to follow this story. Thank you for continuing to surface all of these all of these stories of these people that we would I mean, I feel like I write about national politics. And if I didn't write about it, a million other people would write about it. And the stuff that you don't write about, if you weren't writing about it, who knows if we'd ever hear these stories at all. So thanks for doing it, Adrian, and thanks for coming on to talk about it. Thanks so much, Andrew.

I appreciate you. Thanks as well to all of you guys out there for listening, for following along. We hope you subscribe to the Bullwork feed. Head over to thebullwork.com to get Adrian's huddled masses newsletter. Thank you all, and we'll see you next time.