Taken by ICE moments after securing a path to legal migrant status: A Honduran's story

This story was updated on April 16 at 10:15 am.

For a fleeting moment last Tuesday, Jessica Rodriguez and Josué Aguilar Valle thought their anxieties were over.

At the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) facility in Kendall, they’d just been told Aguilar's path to legal immigrant status had been approved. His marriage to a U.S. citizen — Rodriguez — was deemed valid. He had a good, taxpaying job and no criminal history.

For Rodriguez, a Miami native and receptionist at a law firm, it meant a brighter future for her, Aguilar and their 2-year-old son Joshua.

But then: “The USCIS officer that was interviewing us told me that me and our two–year-old son had to be escorted out," Rodriguez recalled to WLRN.

"And I’d say about two minutes later, our attorney came out and she told me that Josue was being detained by ICE.”

ICE are federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents — and they took Aguilar to the notorious Krome Detention Center for migrants in far west Miami-Dade County, leaving his wife Rodriguez stunned.

“I don’t understand," she said, fighting back tears, "how they can give us such good news and then just rip it away, you know?"

Aguilar is 26. He came here 12 years ago over the U.S. southern border as an unaccompanied minor, fleeing gang violence in Honduras. Finding refuge with documented migrant relatives in South Florida, in 2018 he graduated from Miami Beach Senior High School, where he played soccer.

But his attorney, Valerie Crespo of the Legal en USA firm in Coral Gables, points out there was one potential problem.

“He had an order of deportation against him from 2018," she said, back from the days when Aguilar had been a teenager seeking asylum after the vicious maras, the criminal gangs that still rule whole swaths of Honduras, had tried to recruit him in his coastal city of Puerto Cortés.

So, technically, because of the seven-year-old deportation order that had yet to be executed, ICE could detain him.

ICE says it does not comment on pending immigration cases. Still, in the past, migrants with Josue’s sort of clean and productive record were rarely targeted for arrest.

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What’s changed, says Crespo, is the arrival of the Trump administration this year and its sweeping crusade to deport undocumented migrants.

"I could understand if Josué had committed crimes or was an unemployed burden on the state or had only recently crossed the border as an adult instead of as an unaccompanied minor years ago," Crespo told WLRN.

"But he's proven for more than a decade that he's a law-abiding contributor here."

So while the Trump administration had said that criminal migrants would be the priority of his mass deportation campaign, Crespo says:

“Right now I believe they're only focused on getting the deportation numbers, rather than evaluating who really deserves being deported and who doesn’t.”

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem drove that priority home last week in a White House Cabinet meeting, when she suggested a greatly exaggerated number of deportations as President Trump’s goal.

“You have 20, 21 million people that need to go home," Noem told Trump, "because they’re here breaking our laws, and we need to facilitate that.”

Immigration experts say Noem’s claim of 21 million undocumented migrants in the U.S. is almost twice the actual 11 million.

Either way, Crespo says the Trump administration’s deportation obsession means people who thought their immigration cases were still open are now more than ever at risk of being detained at status appointments like the one Aguilar went to last week.

“When we were moved to another room after his I-130 was approved," Crespo recalled, referring to the process that involves undocumented migrants married to U.S. citizens, "there were the ICE officers, three of them, waiting for him.

"I had advised him beforehand that this could happen, because I had seen it happen already with other clients this year.”

"Right now they’re only focused on getting the deportation numbers rather than evaluating who really deserves being deported and who doesn’t.”

Crespo pointed out that, like any immigration attorney, she is bound to counsel her clients to comply with the law.

And as Rodriguez argues, she and Aguilar were doing things the right way, by the book: Proving through the I-130 process that Aguilar was genuinely married to a U.S. citizen, with a U.S. citizen child; and that he’d come to the U.S. as a refugee from Honduran gang violence that, a decade ago, had given the country the world's highest homicide rate.

“The only way that we could move forward with legalizing Josue’s case," Rodriguez said, "was with our I-130 approval.

"We couldn’t miss the interview.”

Staying underground

But because of what happened to her husband, and what’s happened to so many like him since Trump took office in January, more and more migrants are now missing their interviews and court hearings — and staying underground.

Crespo says she and other attorneys are noticing that immigration judges are getting exasperated as a result.

“Yesterday I had a hearing and my client didn’t appear," Crespo said. "And the judge told me, 'That's the 15th person today who didn't appear.' Now they’re not showing up.”

Protesters outside the Krome Detention Center in west Miami demonstrate on March 29, 2025, against this year's spike in migrant arrests. (1140x760, AR: 1.5)

At last week's cabinet meeting, Trump and Noem discussed the administration's efforts to convince undocumented migrants to self-deport through a new app they call CBP Home. Once they're back in their home countries, Trump and Noem insisted, then Homeland Security will help them facilitate a legal return to the U.S.

They insist this is the track undocumented migrants — especially those like Aguilar who had deportation orders in the system — should have taken and should be taking in the future.

But immigration experts say that while the "self-deport" benefits idea sounds positive on the surface, few migrants at the moment will trust Trump to keep his word on it after hearing of one controversial detention after another like Aguilar's.

That's especially true, they add, after ICE recently deported hundreds of Venezuelans to a brutal high-security prison in El Salvador, the CECOT, even though most if not many were wrongly accused, with no due process, of being criminal gang members.

Migrants see that even those with legal residence in the U.S. are being wrongly expelled to the Salvadoran lockup — like El Salvador native Kilmar Abrego Garcia of Maryland.

The Trump administration has admitted Abrego Garcia was mistakenly accused of being undocumented and having gang affiliation. But Trump and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele this week stubbornly — critics say cruelly — refused to agree to release from the CECOT despite a U.S. Supreme Court order to facilitate it.

Migrants are also wary after watching Trump try to cancel legal immigration pathways like Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and humanitarian parole, which would effectively turn lawful migrants unlawful overnight — and eligible for his deportation dragnet.

With so many migrants being detained or driven into the shadows, there's also a risk for Florida's economy.

Undocumented migrants in the state pay an estimated $2 billion in taxes each year — and they help sustain critical sectors like agriculture, construction and hospitality.

"I think this is a situation of limbo for everybody right now," said Frandley Julien, an immigration attorney in North Miami. And that means not just migrants but the private sector."

Aguilar himself is a manager at a Miami Beach restaurant.

Waiting for his fate

Meanwhile, he has since been moved from the Krome Detention Center to the Broward Transitional Center for migrants in Pompano Beach.

Crespo has filed a stay of removal to prevent his deportation back to Honduras — and Rodriguez waits for word of his fate in their North Miami home with their toddler son.

If he is indeed deported, his chances of ever being able to return to the U.S. legally are slim.

If he's not deported, he can either return to Honduras on his own and, through U.S. consular services there, make what's known as an I-824 application to legalize his status; or he can make an I-485 application here in the U.S. toward the same end.

Crespo said she's confident a judge will grant the stay of removal given Aguilar's exemplary record and family situation. Still, in the Trump era, she and Rodriguez know nothing is that predictable anymore.

“We don’t know anything at this point," Rodriguez said. "They wouldn’t tell him.”

It’s an uncertain situation many more families in immigrant communities like South Florida will likely have to get used to for at least the next four years.

UPDATE: Wednesday morning, Jessica Rodriguez reports she was informed in a phone call from another Broward inmate that her husband Josué Aguilar was moved to another migrant detention facility Tuesday night, but she does not know which one.