Even now, almost three months later, the sound of clanking metal reminds him of the chains that were lashed to his hands and feet after the immigration agents pounced on him in court, that rubbed his ankles until they bled in a sweltering holding facility, and that bound him on the plane that flew to Ecuador and left him in the country he had fled only months earlier.
“I felt like the most wanted person in the world,” he told The Free Press. “As if I had killed, kidnapped, or raped.”
There is no sign that any of those things are true. What is true is that changes made by the Trump administration to increase its deportation numbers have ended one of the last certainties that asylum seekers hoping to live legally in the United States could count on: their day in court.
For decades, the government seldom arrested anyone who showed up in immigration court. Then Donald Trump promised to deport one million illegal immigrants by the end of this year. That brought jarring changes to the immigration courts that decide whether to grant asylum to immigrants who claim that they would be endangered in their home countries, or a reprieve to those who are fighting a deportation order.
Immigrants who follow the rules and appear in court now come face-to-face with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, who have been seen with lists bearing the names of immigrants scheduled for court hearings.
