Alberto remembers his journey to the United States in 1990 well: He sprinted across the border from Tijuana to San Isidro, California.
“I was really skinny, and I could run,” said Alberto, now 59, who is using a pseudonym to protect his identity. “It was an adventure.”
While he ran, his wife and their two sons, ages one-and-a-half years and four months, sat in the backseat of a car, posing as the family of the coyote that Alberto paid to smuggle them across the border.
When the husband and wife finally reunited in Los Angeles, money was tight. They could barely make ends meet and did not have a stable place to live.
While Alberto worked an under-the-table job at a car wash, he learned how to get a legal work permit: volunteering as a confidential informant for immigration enforcement.
He soon started as an undercover informant for federal agents. This meant working short stints at farms across the Central Valley, collecting names of undocumented workers working on the ranches in exchange for fake green cards.
He had to prove himself to be loyal and hardworking, he said, and worked without pay under the premise that, someday, he would be able to get a green card.
After a couple years cutting his teeth, he was given a temporary work permit — though not a green card — in exchange for his government work; Mission Local reviewed a copy of that work permit. With that, he got a bona fide job as a janitor at a local hospital, and started to support his family.
Now, after 36 years building a life in Fresno — becoming a surgical technician, buying a home, and paying taxes — he, too, has been swept up in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
In October, Alberto was arrested at a green card interview, which he had finally set up after years without any kind of legal status. He was released but then re-arrested at another scheduled immigration appointment in Fresno a month later, court documents show.
The second time, Alberto was put in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center near Bakersfield for close to four months.
Over the last year, the Trump administration has used a wide array of tools to push forward its agenda to deport immigrants like Alberto.
From dismantling legal pathways to citizenship to arresting immigrants without due process, the “deportation machine” — as some academics and critics call it — has swept up thousands of people who for decades had been safe, including those who once worked for the very system now detaining and deporting immigrants.
Alberto, the onetime informant who’d helped federal agents arrest other undocumented immigrants, never imagined it would happen to him.
“I understood I would be protected,” he told Mission Local. But he wasn’t.
Working as a confidential informant in the San Joaquin Valley
Alberto started working as an informant in 1992, around two years before he received temporary employment authorization.
In 1994, when he got a work permit from the immigration agents, he quit his under-the-table job at the car wash and took an over-the-table position as a housekeeper at the Sierra Community Hospital in Fresno.
Alberto said his boss at Immigration and Naturalization Services — the precursor to ICE — showed up at his new job, making an informal agreement with his supervisor at the hospital that every so often, Alberto would be allowed to take time off to go continue to “work” at the ranches, the government’s code for his informant duties.
Mission Local was not able to independently verify this agreement.
In 1996, when Alberto had been working for about four years as an informant, his boss gave him his most dangerous assignment yet. He was tasked with infiltrating farms, where rancheros, who managed the undocumented fieldworkers, were offering them fake green cards for working the fields.
The setup was simple, if grueling: His superior at INS would give him a ride to the farms, which were in the Central Valley, from Sanger to Dinuba to Three Rivers and Alberto would pose as an undocumented worker looking for work in exchange for a (fake) green card.
He lived among the ranch hands and endured long hours in the fields, working under the hot sun with little water. The laborers paid for their housing on the farm, along with water, transportation and food, often burritos.
Alberto felt conflicted about his role, but justified the work: He believed the ranch operators were exploiting their workers. “Those guys do a lot of wrong things,” he said.
He feared he’d be killed on assignment, leaving his wife and two young children alone. But the arrangement was his best shot at getting permanent status, he felt.
On one of these undercover missions, Alberto said he discovered the identity of a “really dangerous” ringleader.
When Alberto brought back the name of the ranchero leader and the make and model of his vehicle to his boss at INS, he thought it would be the ideal time to ask outright for his green card: Up to that point, he had been doing work on spec, and the promise of a green card was dangled in front of him by federal agents, he said.
Instead, Alberto remembered his boss laughing in his face, but then telling him, “Let me see what I can do.”
He got something: A renewal of his temporary legal status, though no green card. And he was “paroled” for the second time into the country in 1996, according to an employment authorization card from the time reviewed by Mission Local, which allows immigrants to work legally while the status is in effect.
“Welcome to the United States of America,” Alberto recalled the Border Patrol agent saying after signing his new work permit.
Alberto said after that, INS never called him to work as an informant again.
Immigration attorneys say these kinds of tactics are common: INS, and today ICE, make promises to their informants that are rarely kept. Visas are dangled in front of those working for the government as a kind of bad-faith tactic.
It’s not just green cards. There is a special immigration visa, an “S-Visa,” known colloquially as a “snitch visa,” that is meant for people like Alberto who have provided information to law enforcement; Alberto has since applied for one. The government never responded, his attorney said.
Unlike parole — which is a temporary legal status without a pathway to citizenship — an S-Visa can provide a route to a green card and, ultimately, citizenship.
But Jeffrey O’Brien, a San Francisco immigration attorney who has been practicing for 17 years, said he has only seen a handful of successful S-visa applications in his career. They are exceedingly rare.
Angela Warren, Alberto’s San Francisco-based attorney, said her staff submitted an S-visa request when he hired her to help him get a green card in the summer of 2024. The government never responded.
Alberto’s former supervisors at INS are now retired, and his attorney said she has been unable to reach them to verify his work for the agency.
The American dream
Alberto now owns a home in a typically American suburban neighborhood in Fresno.
He lives with his wife, has a pool, a boat, and a second home he rents to one of his two adult sons. He has three grandchildren, and they take family trips to Disneyland and go fishing. He regularly attends a local evangelical megachurch.
Alberto still works for the same hospital system where he started as a housekeeper more than 33 years ago, and worked his way up: First cleaning rooms, transporting patients between procedures, sterilizing surgical instruments, and finally becoming a surgical technician.
He never became a doctor, but his role is now highly technical. Alberto works in a Level II Trauma Center, a 24/7 emergency unit meant to handle critical injuries, and ensures surgeons have the right equipment for operations like a limb salvage after an accident. He also trains upcoming technicians like himself.
He owes it all to his INS-sponsored work permit: Even after it expired in 1997, Alberto managed to stay at the hospital. He never changed jobs, and the hospital never questioned his legal status.
He also didn’t travel out of the country, focusing instead on building his life here.
“The United States is the place for the dream I have,” he said.
Broken promises
When Alberto’s mother fell ill two years ago, it was the first time he considered going back to Mexico. But without travel documents, it was risky. He no longer had active legal status; his work permit had expired decades earlier. Crossing a border could get him caught.
Alberto remembered sitting on his couch, feeling discouraged and depressed that he would not be able to see his mother before she died.
He now had money saved from his decades working at the hospital, so he decided to hire an attorney, and to try again for his green card. He was eligible through his U.S. citizen son.
“I save lives every day, and those guys can’t give me a permit to go see my mom,” he remembered thinking at the time.
Under previous administrations, his likelihood of success would have been much higher.
Under the Trump administration, however, green-card approvals have been delayed amid funding cuts and the gutting of the United States Immigration and Citizenship Services, the administrative agency tasked with processing immigration related applications. Alberto decided to try anyway.
“I worked without permission because it was my only means of survival,” Alberto wrote in his green card application. Now, he wanted to do it the right way.
The arrests
In October 2025, Alberto and his lawyer showed up to a scheduled green card interview at a field office in Fresno.
During the meeting, instead of filling out forms or answering interview questions, the USCIS officer paused the meeting due to “technical difficulties,” and left the room.
When the meeting resumed, “two ICE agents, heavily armed, burst through the doors of the interview room,” handcuffed Alberto and arrested him, according to court documents.
Arrests at immigration appointments have become increasingly common. In San Francisco, at least 539 immigrants were arrested at appointments in the first 10 months of last year.
“You should be able to apply for a government benefit without going to jail,” Alberto’s attorney Warren said.
Warren promptly filed a habeas petition for his release, arguing that his arrest was unconstitutional. A judge agreed, and Alberto was released after spending four days at the Golden State Annex detention center near Bakersfield, records show.
But a month later, he received notice from ICE that he had an immigration check-in appointment. Although his lawyer said that it was not a stipulated part of his green card process, she advised him to show because the consequence for failing to appear is a deportation order. He was again arrested.
His lawyer filed another petition seeking his release. But this time it was denied, and he was again sent to detention at Golden State Annex. This time he was inside for nearly four months.
“They say it is a detention center, but it is not. It’s a jail there. You can’t do anything,” Alberto said. “The restroom is the only place you can go without asking.”
Alberto said he was stuck inside his cell, except for the two hours a day when immigrants are allowed outside to run and walk. In the end, he spent much of his time in the library, reading books; he worked his way through a math book and read almost the entire Bible, he said.
In February, Warren successfully petitioned for Alberto’s release on bond. Because of a class-action lawsuit, she was able to make the case that Alberto, who has lived in the country for 36 years, was entitled to seek release on bond under stronger detention protections than those for recent arrivals. He was released with an ankle monitor.
“When I go and talk to the patients, they say, ‘What are you doing wrong?’” he said his patients ask him when they see the ankle monitor. It’s the same question he asks himself: “What did I do wrong?”