Before his first asylum hearing on June 10, 25-year-old Jafet Santiago Diaz called a rapid-response immigration hotline. He was wary of the possibility of arrest, having seen news of detentions one week prior.
The hotline operator suggested he go. Diaz had no criminal record and worried that a no-show would justify arrest, according to Juan, a close friend of Santiago’s who has asked to only be identified by his first name.
At Diaz’s Tuesday asylum hearing in San Francisco, a federal prosecutor moved to dismiss his claim, a new ICE tactic which leaves immigrants at risk for detention and expedited expulsion as they leave the courtroom. But Judge Jeremiah Johnson declined to dismiss Diaz’s case; instead, he scheduled Diaz’s next court date.
It didn’t matter. ICE agents swiftly detained Diaz as he left the courtroom around 1 p.m. In video shared with Mission Local, ICE agents can be seen escorting Diaz out of the courthouse as a crowd of protesters gather.
According to immigration advocates, at least three other men were arrested Tuesday afternoon by federal officials; their identities are still unknown.
Juan, who has since spoken with Diaz, said that by end of day on Tuesday, Diaz was in Bakersfield, at the Mesa Verde facility, a for-profit detention center that has been racked by hunger strikes and grievances of mistreatment in recent years. Mesa Verde confirmed Thursday that Diaz was in their custody.
Diaz is from Villavicencio, Colombia. He is gay, and came to the United States in February 2024 after receiving death threats because of his sexual orientation.
He arrived in the United States last year, coming through El Paso, Texas, before turning himself in to border patrol and immediately applying for affirmative asylum.
“I’m so afraid of going back,” said Diaz during Tuesday’s hearing. “I fear for my life.”
“He was following the rules that were in place at that moment,” Juan said. “He didn’t break the law. He showed up.”
Diaz had studied economics and graphic design at a university in Colombia, said Juan, but had to flee before he could get his degree. Diaz wanted to go back to school, so he could get a stable job relating to design. In the meantime, Juan said, he was waiting to start English classes at a San Jose school in August.
As Mission Local previously reported, DHS has been employing a new legal tactic to detain asylum seekers, by dismissing their cases and arresting them as they leave the courtroom.
When federal prosecutors moved to dismiss Diaz’s case on June 10, this dismiss-and-detain strategy appears to be what they had planned. The judge denied the motion, but ICE still arrested Diaz as he left the courthouse.
According to Kate Mahoney, senior staff attorney at the San Francisco Immigration Legal Resource Center, a recent decision by the Board of Immigration Appeals allows for federal authorities to indefinitely detain anyone who was arrested within two years of entering the country. Mahoney said that this includes most affirmative asylum seekers like Diaz, who turned themselves in at the border to initiate their proceedings.
That means that asylum seekers can be held without bond until their cases end. With a backlog of some 3 million pending cases, the process of asylum can take years.
According to Mahoney, this extended detention forces asylum seekers into an inhumane decision. “Do I want to be in jail for months, potentially years, while I wait for my case to be resolved?” she asked. “Or do I want to give up?”
Inside detention centers like Mesa Verde, where Diaz is located, it’s much harder for asylum seekers to connect with their families or lawyers. “It’s really the government using its levers of power to make it much, much harder to move forward with your case,” said Mahoney.
“Secretary Noem is reversing Biden’s catch and release policy that allowed millions of unvetted illegal aliens to be let loose on American streets,” wrote one senior DHS official to Mission Local. “This Administration is once again implementing the rule of law.”
For Diaz, this rule of law has become a new reality. Since arriving at the Mesa Verde detention center, he’s been communicating via tablet with Juan and Patricia, a Colombian woman who has been renting him a room in her apartment in San Jose.
“He doesn’t take drugs, no alcohol.” said Patricia, who asked to only be identified by her first name. She spoke to Mission Local from her apartment balcony, saying she was afraid after Diaz’s arrest.
“He was a peladito,” Patricia said. “A little kid.”
According to Patricia, Santiago made his money doing odd jobs — gardening, cleaning bathrooms — while waiting for his work permit. “He had to survive in that way,” she said. “Doing the work that nobody wants to do in this country.”
According to Juan, Diaz is looking for a lawyer to represent him, with the help of immigrant support groups.
Juan said that they didn’t have the resources to hire a lawyer for Diaz’s first asylum hearing. “We thought nothing was going to happen, so he went alone.”
Diaz drove by himself to the San Francisco immigration court on Tuesday, June 10, confident that he would be driving back later that day. His friends searched for the car all of Wednesday, unable to locate it. On Thursday, they came back and found it. The car sat abandoned for two days, racking up $93 in fees. Diaz couldn’t come back to get it himself.
Additional reporting by Margaret Kadifa.
This is additional interesting information. So he has not been deported at all. Detention while an asylum case is pending has always been common (or at least not uncommon). Franky, it’s nuts to me why they would not release someone like this pending the resolution of the case as he does not appear to be a flight risk. But thousands upon thousands of undocumented immigrants claiming asylum have been held in detention under previous administrations as well. This is a dumb policy but it’s a far cry from grabbing people in court and deporting them.
It’s the picture of fiscal stupidity and pandering to the far right: They arrest him, and put him into a facility that probably costs the government thousands per person per week.
3,000,000 asylum cases on backlog?
Arrest Senator Alex Padilla?
Overrule Governor Gavin Newsom & call out guard troops??
Arrest an asylum seeker who shows up for his appointment without a lawyer?
Send that asylum seeker to Mesa Verde Detention Center??
Is this America??
Colombia legalized same sex marriage and adoption rights in 2016. To claim asylum because there is no safe place to go in the entire country of Colombia is absurd. There likely as many places in the US that this individual will face prejudice as there are in Colombia. It’s time for immigrants to stop skipping the line, and to play by the United States’ very clear immigrants rules. If i pulled the same stunt in Colombia, i would be lucky to face similar, and not worse treatment.
Your thinking defies logic or reality. The article very clearly stated that he _was_ playing by the “rules” – which, by the way, are far from clear or consistent. If you had read the article, you would have learned that in fact, it seems like ICE are not following their own rules.
Upshot: He came here illegally and worked at jobs people here legally could do.
“the law matters” – I agree with you on that one. However, the system only works if the government, and those in the government, also follow and are accountable to the law. Otherwise we’re living in a dictatorship.