Sonia can still hear her daughter’s frightened voice crying out over the cellphone speaker, “What do I do?! What do I do?! Do I open it?!”
“Roll down the window! Roll down the window, now!” she heard men shout in the background. The booming sound of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers knocking forcibly on her daughter’s car window sent them both to tears.
It was that May 22 phone call that changed everything.
Sonia was on a call with her daughter, Sofia, who was leaving work during an evening shift break when she was blocked by several black vehicles emblazoned with “ICE” in gold letters. She was quickly surrounded by uniformed, masked officers pointing guns toward her on the street just outside her Central El Paso workplace.
Sonia rushed to the scene. Sofia exited the car and was swiftly handcuffed. In a moment of grace amid the chaos, Sonia said, when she arrived, officers allowed her to hug her daughter before taking her away.
“I had every emotion possible – anger, fear, sadness, guilt – a lot of guilt,” Sonia said in Spanish.
She’d brought her daughter from Ciudad Juárez to El Paso to trick-or-treat on Halloween 25 years ago. But following a family medical emergency, they never left. “It wasn’t our intention to stay, but things happened and we found ourselves building a life here. (Being arrested) wasn’t something we thought about much – until recently with all this happening.”
El Paso Matters agreed to use pseudonyms for the women, who fear retaliation for telling their story.
Sofia was among the nearly 3,500 people who were apprehended by ICE in the El Paso region this year through Aug. 5 – roughly as many as in all of 2025, according to ICE data obtained by the Deportation Data Project and analyzed by El Paso Matters. The program, an initiative of the University of California, Berkeley, collects federal data through the Freedom of Information Act.
More than half those apprehensions came in June and July, the data show.
The surge in arrests mark a major escalation of immigration enforcement under President Donald Trump’s mass detention and deportation efforts. The administration has broadened whom ICE could arrest and where – leading to increased and less targeted apprehensions at traffic stops, work sites and immigration appointments.
The aggressive tactics have drawn criticism – and lawsuits – from immigration experts, human rights groups and lawmakers who question their legality.
“At this point, this enforcement has not been targeted toward criminals, but it’s been using a broad net and fishing expeditions,” said Fernando Garcia, co-founder and director of the Border Network for Human Rights based in El Paso. “I would even call them hunting expeditions.”
The Department of Homeland Security in a statement said that “those who are here legally and are not breaking other laws have nothing to fear.”
In all of last year, just over 3,800 immigration arrests were reported in El Paso County and southern Doña Ana County. In 2023, fewer than 800 apprehensions were reported in the region as the southern border saw record-high migrant encounters before the COVID-19-related Title 42 restrictions ended in May that year. Title 42 allowed migrants crossing between ports of entry to be rapidly expelled without the formal detention process.
This year, apprehensions in the El Paso region were highest in June, with about 1,030 reported, followed by July with just over 800. Each of those months saw more apprehensions in the area than all of 2023.
Nationwide, nearly 255,000 ICE arrests, including transfers of people in custody of other law enforcement agencies, have been reported as of Aug. 5 this year – more than 63,000 in Texas, the data shows. In July alone, nearly 50,000 people were arrested by ICE nationwide.
DHS in its statement dismissed the data, saying neither it nor ICE have verified the Deportation Data Project’s “accuracy, methodology or the analysis” of its figures.
DHS largely stopped reporting immigration enforcement data after Trump took office in 2025, so organizations like the the Deportation Data Project have had to sue for information. The organization on its website notes that not all the data it receives is 100% accurate as the federal agencies have released multiple versions of its figures – often with missing, incorrect or inconsistent records.
The administration has maintained its targeting enforcement against “the worst of the worst,” with DHS in its statement saying most ICE arrests are of illegal aliens charged or convicted of a crime in the United States.
But according to ICE data provided to the Deportation Data project, most of the people apprehended in the El Paso area this year don’t have criminal records.
The majority of people apprehended in the El Paso region by ICE this year – about six in 10 – don’t have a criminal record, according to the data. That compares with about four in 10 of those arrested in 2025.
Sofia, 35, is undocumented and among those with no criminal record. She didn’t have a deportation order. On the day of her daughter’s arrest, Sonia said, ICE agents
acknowledged so. They showed her an administrative warrant for people suspected of immigration violations issued by ICE and not a judge.
“‘No se preocupe,’ dijo, ‘Ella no tiene nada. No ha hecho nada,’” Sonia said, relaying that an agent told her not to worry because her daughter hadn’t done anything wrong. “So I said, ‘Then why are you taking her?’ And he said that because despite that, she still had to go before a judge.”
Sofia spent just over 50 days at the ICE Otero County Processing Center in Chaparral, New Mexico, and was released under bond. She was ordered to wear a GPS monitoring device and undergo regular check-ins with a deportation officer.
She was reunited with her mom and two children, ages 11 and 16. Sonia notes that the children are U.S. citizens, as was Sofia’s husband, who died in a car accident just six months earlier.
Now Sofia has an immigration hearing Friday where a judge can issue a final removal order.
“She’s nervous and she’s scared,” Sonia said of her daughter, who won’t likely have legal representation at her hearing.
Sonia said the family cannot afford private attorneys, especially after Sofia’s husband died, and that legal aid organizations are no longer taking new cases after the Trump administration suspended federal funding.
Critics say mass arrests are indiscriminate, designed to create fear
Immigration experts and human rights advocates say the roundups are indiscriminate and designed to create fear.
David J. Bier, director of Immigration Studies at the Cato Institute policy research organization, said the wide net being cast is about increasing arrest numbers rather than catching criminals.
“They’re targeting people who are going to work and carrying out their daily lives, and that means that they’re passing on opportunities to track those people who manage their serious offenses,” Bier said. “And so there’s a lack of prioritization. It’s much easier to get big numbers, so let’s go to a place where there’s lots of people.”
Bier said he doesn’t believe the administration’s goals of deporting 1 million people a year are realistic, but said that won’t stop it from continuing on its mission to arrest, detain and deport as many people as possible.
In its statement, DHS said since Trump came back to office in January 2025, it’s arrested and deported nearly 1.1 million people.
In the El Paso region, about 2,030 deportations and voluntary departures were reported so far this year compared to 3,027 in all of 2025 – and five-and-a-half times more than in 2024, according to the Deportation Data Project figures analyzed by El Paso Matters.
In one case, Cristy Maryori Villafranca-Trejo, the wife of an Army sergeant stationed at Fort Bliss, was deported to her native Honduras on Aug. 24 after being apprehended by ICE at an El Paso Walmart in July.
‘Your world falls apart’
Many of those being arrested are people with valid work permits pending asylum claims or who are in the process of becoming legal residents.
“Your world falls apart in seconds when you realize you’re not only being arrested, but can be deported and torn away from your family,” a woman who asked to be identified as Maria said in Spanish.
Maria, 39, has lived in El Paso for about 18 years. She said she came to the United States from Ciudad Juárez on a visitor visa and stayed to flee violence and extortion from criminals targeting high-earning professionals such as her husband, a Mexican doctor who is a naturalized U.S. citizen.
Over the past seven years, she has been seeking legal status, spending nearly $17,000 on processing and legal fees, she said. For a year and half, she had to wear a GPS monitoring watch and underwent home visits while her case made its way through the system.
On Sept. 9, 2025, she dropped off her children at school early to ensure she made it to her immigration hearing on time. It didn’t go as planned.
Maria said the immigration judge told her he had to order her deportation under the new administration. She asked to appeal, so her removal order was automatically stayed – or paused – for 30 days while the paperwork was filed.
But as she exited the courtroom, she recounts, about seven law enforcement agents in plain clothes and face masks surrounded her, handcuffed her and took her to the El Paso Processing Service Center. The officers, she said, told her that immigrants who wanted to appeal their deportation orders had to remain in detention while their case was in the court system.
Whether mandatory detention for immigrants while they fight their cases in court is legal is being debated in the courts.
Maria remained detained through Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Day, she notes, missing holidays with her husband and her four U.S.-born children. She was lucky, she said, that her family lived just minutes away from the processing center and could visit often – a luxury most others detained didn’t have.
She was released Jan. 20 with an ankle monitor she says is now a daily accessory.
“Yo creía que al salir iba a ser ya mi final. Pero no. Cuando yo salgo, yo empiezo a luchar con mi cabeza porque salí con mucho estrés postraumático. Tuve que tomar terapia familiar. Tuve que llevar a mis hijos a terapia porque estaban sumamente dolidos,” she said.
“I thought I’d be out and that would be the end of it. But when I got out, I started to fight with my own head because I had a lot of post-traumatic stress. I had to go to family therapy,” she said in tears, her voice cracking. “I had to take my children to therapy because they were extremely grief-stricken.”
Garcia, of the Border Network for Human Rights, says one of the biggest consequences of the ICE arrests is family separations.
“Families are being separated, children are being left behind,” he said. “That’s leaving families traumatized one-by-one but as a whole, the community is suffering.”
In some cases, immigrant children are also being detained.
In April, Jesus Eduardo Reyes Hermes was arrested outside his South-Central El Paso home while he worked on a car. Agents also detained his 11-year-old son, identified as J.R.C. in court records, despite them both having pending asylum claims.
The boy in July asked for voluntary deportation to be reunited with his mother in Venezuela after living in El Paso three years. The boy told El Paso Matters he believes his father’s arrest came after a neighbor called ICE on the family over a noise dispute.
Garcia noted that he’s seen more people arrested after being turned in by neighbors, friends and even family members that’s deepening a social divide.
Still, he said, the administration’s deportation strategy is based largely on racial profiling.
“People are being approached because of how they look. We have seen U.S. citizens being questioned, detained and deported because they were racially profiled,” he said.
Despite uncertain futures, hope remains
Sonia, whose daughter was arrested in May, said they don’t know what the future holds.
They know her daughter could be deported. Her grandchildren – who are still grieving the loss of their father – are having difficulty coping with the idea of being separated from their mother or having to be uprooted to live in a country they hardly know – even if just across an international bridge, she said.
“We try not to think about it – but at the same time, we have to think about it,” Sonia said in Spanish. “The fact that she’s out now quite frankly is a miracle. Maybe it helped her that she knew English and knew how to speak up and defend herself. Maybe it was God’s will that she’ll be able to stay and keep living her life here.”
Maria, who serves as an immigrant rights advocate, said she’ll continue to fight for herself as well as other women still in ICE detention.
“Seguimos levantando la voz por ellas,” she said. “Todo ese miedo que quizás tengamos se convierte en coraje y lucha. … Porque si no hacemos nada por los que están adentro encerrados, ¿cómo vamos a lograr un cambio social?”
“We continue to raise our voices for them. Any fear we may have turned to anger and fight. … Because if we don’t do anything for those who are still locked up, how will we achieve social change?”
Asked what she takes from her experience, Maria said sternly through tears: “Aprendí a valorar más mi vida, mi familia. Aprendí a valorar mi libertad.”
“I learned to value my life, my family, more,” she said. “I learned to value my freedom.”
El Paso Matters CEO Robert Moore contributed to this report.
The post ‘Why are you taking her?’ ICE arrests surge in El Paso region as families feel the impact appeared first on El Paso Matters.
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