Waiting an hour already, Leonardo Valbuena called his boss to say he’d be running late. He didn’t like being late.
When the clerk called his name, his wife stirred and Valbuena stepped up to the counter at the federal building in Cleveland. He expected to give proof of employment, renew his visa and return to being a carpenter in Akron, where he has raised a family for the past 11 years.
“All my life, in one second, collapsed,” he told Catholic social justice advocates on camera Feb. 24 as friends helped load his family’s belongings into a container that would arrive by sea sometime after they landed in Colombia.
Valbuena left Tuesday on a flight out of Cleveland with his wife and children, ages 16 and 12.
Attempts to reach Valbuena in Colombia through a third party have been unsuccessful. He did not speak with the Beacon Journal before leaving for fear that the government would renege on the deal not to prosecute in exchange for his “voluntary departure.”
Immigration enforcement agents in Cleveland pulled Valbuena aside that Monday morning in late January. They told him he would be jailed then deported — maybe tomorrow, maybe next week.
“I almost lose my balance,” he said in his video testimony in admittedly poor English. “I say, ‘Sir, I have my children in school. My daughter. My son. And my wife, she doesn’t drive’ … And they put me in a little cell, the same as you would see in the movies. This is the first time in my life I have been in a place like that.”
Federal agents took Valbuena, 43, down a private elevator, chained his feet to his hands and waist, and loaded him into a van with four men from Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador. “Jesus Christ will be with us,” he told them.
Five hours later, he joined the general population in cellblock H at the Seneca County Jail. He spotted a group of Latino men praying over a Bible in the corner. Around him he saw men from Jamaica, the Palestinian territories, Mexico, Honduras, Nicaragua and the United States.
“Many, many countries inside these walls,” he said.
In the week he spent behind bars, Valbuena arranged for plane tickets to self-deport to Colombia, and President Donald Trump signed executive orders to beef up border security, ban refugees and allow for the arrest of other immigrants who potentially have committed no crimes.
Valbuena left with his family Tuesday minutes after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) removed a tracking monitor from his ankle at the Delta Airlines luggage counter in Cleveland.
Social activists back in Akron have spread the family’s story across Facebook. Some members of city council referenced the family — not by name — on Monday while pushing for sanctuary status across Ohio. Members of the Archbishop Hoban High School community have expressed dismay that the swift proceedings have torn away a model student.
Leonardo’s daughter, Laura, is featured prominently in “I am Hoban” billboards in Akron and in ads on the school’s website. She fed the homeless, tutored her classmates. She was a model for how to treat others.
And the family’s abrupt exit offers insight into how immigration enforcers are deploying Trump’s new pecking order for removing immigrants.
Immigrant origins
There’s no evidence Valbuena committed a crime or had lost his legal status.
Officials from Homeland Security, the State Department and the Justice Department spoke in general terms to the Beacon Journal about immigration law and procedures. None addressed the Valbuena situation.
ICE did not talk about encouraging detainees to self-deport.
About half of immigrants without documentation, like Valbuena, came to America on a visa, according to the Migration Policy Institute. ICE told Valbuena his had expired before detaining him in Cleveland and hauling him off to jail.
In 2006, he left Colombia fearing for his life after being threatened by guerilla freedom-fighters.
He obtained his first visa, which allowed for travel, from a U.S. embassy in Colombia. He flew into Atlanta, then headed toward Akron, having been told about the International Institute here by friends in Colombia.
Upon a visitor’s entry, U.S. Customs and Border Protection workers stamp passports and visas with a date by which the holder needs to renew or leave the country. The Beacon Journal was unable to obtain the expiration date on Valbuena’s visa, but he said on the video that he had applied for political asylum and was in the process of applying for a green card.
In addition, he was issued a Social Security number for tax purposes, a driver’s license and a work permit — which he renewed regularly — while in the United States.
The other half of immigrants without documentation — those who enter the country without a visa — are considered to have entered the United States illegally. And only half of those are caught at the border.
Last year, 200,000 immigrants illegally crossed the U.S.-Mexico border without being apprehended, down from 1.9 million in 2005, according to an unpublished report prepared by the federally funded Institute for Defense Analyses. The Associated Press obtained a copy of the report.
With a record $14 billion spent to secure the border and fewer jobs to go around after the recession, the capture rate along the U.S.-Mexico border improved from 36 percent in 2005 to 55 percent by 2014.
New orders
Along with encouraging ICE to use local officers, Trump has called for 15,000 more border and enforcement agents — and new rules that allow agents more latitude in whom they target.
One of Trump’s executive orders reversed a 2014 memorandum by former Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, who prioritized enforcement first for suspected terrorists, gang members, felons and border crossers, then misdemeanors, visa abusers and new arrivals, and finally non-criminal aliens who lacked legal status.
“By finally enforcing our immigration laws, we will raise wages, help the unemployed, save billions of dollars, and make our communities safer for everyone,” Trump said Wednesday in a joint address to Congress. “We want all Americans to succeed — but that can’t happen in an environment of lawless chaos. We must restore integrity and the rule of law to our borders.”
The act of being undocumented isn’t necessarily a crime. Deportations are civil, not criminal, cases. As such, immigrants facing deportation are not afforded public counsel.
Immigration expert Elizabeth Knowles, who supervises the newly created Immigration & Human Rights Law Clinic at the University of Akron, estimates 90 percent of detainees lack lawyers. In Cleveland, where there are more advocates working pro bono cases, 30 to 40 percent have legal representation.
Knowles questions Trump’s new pecking order “to detain individuals apprehended on suspicion of violating Federal or State law, including Federal immigration law” — not necessarily breaking that law or violating a criminal code.
The old rules, Knowles said, directed limited resources to known threats, not the “low-hanging fruit” that are easy to find and could be nabbed to inflate deportation figures.
“That is a lot of what has thrown communities into fear,” Knowles said. “Rescinding the priorities in that memo and essentially saying there are no categories of priorities any longer throws everyone into the same situation. There’s no assurances that one person is less of a priority than another.”
“With a less targeted effort,” Knowles said, “it certainly does put our communities at risk by not being able to focus on those who are a danger.”
But Knowles, who continues to make defending the rights of immigrants her life’s work, pointed out that Trump and his Cabinet have made good on his campaign promise to disrupt with haste the free flow of immigrants without documentation.
Knowles’ former colleagues in San Diego, where she trained pro bono immigration attorneys and ran the American Bar Association’s Immigration Justice Project, are reporting that migrant farmers have stopped working the fields. Road checkpoints staffed 75 percent of the time last year are operated around the clock.
And border-crossers from Tijuana to San Diego have ceased their daily or weekly treks.
Doug Livingston can be reached at 330-996-3792 or dlivingston@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow on Twitter: @ABJDoug .