CHICAGO — M.G.’s heart pounded. His palms were slick with sweat. 

He and 100 others had just boarded a deportation flight with no clue where it would take them. M.G. was relieved to be out of detention, where he’d spent the previous eight months. But he was nervous not knowing the destination of the flight. 

When immigration officials finally announced where it was headed — El Salvador — M.G.’s stomach dropped. 

He panicked. 

He couldn’t go back to El Salvador.  

He had been tortured there. One of his family members had been murdered there. 

Gangs there would kill him, he told the officers onboard. 

“They told me ‘We don’t care. We’re going to send you there,’” he said in Spanish.

M.G. didn’t give up. He argued with the officers, insisting they call a supervisor. Finally, they relented. They checked his status and found he was protected by a previous legal ruling and took him off the plane.  

Under that ruling, U.S. officials could not send him back to El Salvador, though they could send him to a different country — known as a third-country removal — because he had not been granted asylum here. 

But first, after arguing his way off that 2025 deportation flight to El Salvador, M.G. was returned to detention in the United States, where he’d already spent more than a year locked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

He said his ICE detention was the “most difficult time of my life because the conditions in that detention center were horrible.”

M.G. was caught up in several new trends arising under under President Donald Trump’s aggressive agenda to deport millions of immigrants. From August 2024 to August 2025, the number of people in the United States granted asylum dropped by about 50 percent. Third-country removals became more common. And large-scale immigration raids led to a spike in the number of people in ICE detention. 

Trump’s changes to the immigration system are ensnaring those who are most vulnerable, his lawyer said.

M.G. was one of more than 40,000 people in ICE custody around the start of the current fiscal year. His story illustrates how thousands of people are shuffled through courts in Chicago and other cities while locked up by immigration authorities and waiting to learn their fates.

“These people are truly afraid of returning to their home country,” said Guadalupe Perez, M.G.’s lawyer with the Office of the Cook County Public Defender. 

“And it’s these folks who are now languishing in detention because this government has decided to find a loophole to keep them from being released into the United States.”

‘Safety Is Really What One Looks For’

To protect his safety, this story does not use M.G.’s full name. He said if he’s identified he could again face torture or death in his home country. 

M.G. grew up surrounded by gangs that formed in the aftermath of El Salvador’s brutal civil war in the 1980s and early ’90s. 

While he remembers violence and uncertainty, he also recalled happier moments spent with family and playing soccer with school friends.

“We’d play in the street, and at school we had tournaments too,” he said. 

Still, bloodshed was common, with members of gangs like Barrio 18 and Mara Salvatrucha, known as MS-13, largely perpetrating the violence. 

In 2013, when M.G. was in his early twenties, gang members abducted and killed someone in his family. 

Because of the trauma related to the killing, and fear he or his family could be identified, M.G. didn’t share many details. He and his aunt demanded justice, he said. Gang members took notice and retaliated. 

Gang members kidnapped him and took him to a police station, where they held him for a few days, M.G. told his lawyer. There, they beat him. He saw cops coming and going but they did nothing to intervene. That’s part of why he was afraid of returning to his home country, he told her.

The violence he endured was “extensive” enough that it left scars on his body and his mind, Perez said.

When he recovered enough to make the journey, M.G. fled El Salvador and headed north. But that attempt to start a life in the United States was cut short when immigration officials caught him shortly after and sent him back to El Salvador. 

M.G. repeated that journey at least seven times over the next decade, he said. It usually ended the same way: He would set out to start a new life. Immigration officials would catch him and order him deported or he would choose to voluntarily depart to Mexico. 

He tried to seek asylum by explaining why he left El Salvador, but each time the United States turned him away. 

“I’m not a bad person. I’m not a delinquent. I’m not a criminal,” he said. “I’ve always been a decent person — honorable and honest and a worker. I arrived in the United States searching for a better life.”

But getting to the United States presented its own challenges. He tried to cross through Arizona, but after a 12-day hike in the blazing July sun, he was relieved when immigration officials picked him up near Phoenix.

“I’ve seen people die. It was incredibly hot. We reached a place with tons of rattlesnakes, and we were terrified,” he said. “I had to surrender since we’d been without water and food for three days.”

But, on the Texas side, “there are a lot of kidnappers and it’s one of the more perilous crossings you can make,” M.G. said. 

In 2023, he crossed into the country again, but this time he made it to California without being picked up by immigration officials.

He tried to build a life in Los Angeles, but work was hard to come by as an undocumented immigrant. So he left for Lexington, Ky., where got a job harvesting tomatoes.  

Slowly he began to settle in. Happy and comfortable, for once he felt safe.

“That safety is really what one looks for,” M.G. said. “The economy is only a small part of it. In reality, what someone like me looks for is a place to live in tranquility and secure in the knowledge you’ll be okay.”

He made a few friends. He began learning English, supplementing some of what he’d learned back in El Salvador. Finally part of a community and able to work, he felt “really good.” 

He took long walks around the city. Friends invited him to play Pokemon Go in nearby parks, where they’d run around together “catching” the virtual Pokemon characters. 

“We got together in the parks and there were so many people from so many countries, and I lived in peace — I lived quietly, and I lived safely,” he said. “Those are beautiful memories that I have from then.”

The tranquility abruptly ended about a year and a half later. 

A Stone On The Highway, A Year In Detention

In August 2024, M.G. was driving by a construction site when a rock hit his windshield and left a small crack. 

A week later, a Harrodsburg, Ky., police officer pulled him over for having a cracked windshield, then arrested him when he discovered M.G.’s social security and permanent residency cards were fake, the arrest report shows. 

M.G. was soon in ICE custody, where he would stay for the next 14 months. 

“I can’t believe that something so small could impact my life so greatly,” M.G. said. “I can’t turn back the clock, though. I have to look forward.”

Officials transferred him from one detention center to another — from Kentucky to Wisconsin, where he sometimes lived in squalid conditions.

He was preparing to voluntarily depart again to avoid waiting for what other detainees said could be two or three years. But during a hearing, a Chicago immigration judge told him free legal representation was available to him. 

The Midwest Immigrant Defenders Alliance connected him with Perez, a Cook County assistant public defender, to help him make his case to remain in the United States. 

Having a lawyer, Perez said, could have helped M.G.’s previous bid for asylum. 

“It wasn’t that he wasn’t eligible for asylum, it’s that he couldn’t tap into [legal support] the first time around, and by the time that he got an attorney, he had the previous removal orders that automatically disqualified him,” she said.

M.G. illegally entered the United States six times over seven and a half years, according to a DHS statement.

In recent years, U.S. officials have rejected a larger share of asylum claims. 

Last year through August, 19 percent of people who applied for asylum in the United States were granted it, down from 38 percent the previous year, according to federal data obtained through a FOIA project launched by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC. 

But M.G. still had one option, Perez said.

A (Temporary) Lifeline 

Perez told M.G. that he was eligible for a protection called withholding of removal that could at least keep him from being sent back to El Salvador.

Over the last five years, immigration judges have granted more people withholding of removal and a similar type of relief called deferral of removal, including 3,869 people in 2025, according to records from the Congressional Research Service and data obtained through TRAC.

To qualify, M.G. and Perez had to prove that if the United States deported him back to El Salvador, he faced at least a 51 percent chance of being harmed by its government.

That’s a dramatically higher bar than the one set in asylum cases, which require a chance of being harmed of at least 10 percent. 

For protection under the international Convention Against Torture, M.G. also had to show that he would be tortured — not just harmed — if he returned, according to public guides created by the Florence Project, a nonprofit focused on inequities in the immigration system. 

To convince a judge to grant M.G. some kind of protection, Perez gathered testimonies from M.G.’s family as well as supporting documents, including a death certificate for the family member who was killed and newspaper articles on gang violence in El Salvador. 

She leaned on the most visceral evidence she had: photos from a forensic examiner who’d logged the “extensive” scars on M.G.’s body from the torture he experienced in El Salvador, Perez said. 

She also tapped an expert to show the “clear” link between gangs and police in the Central American country and its connection to M.G.’s torture and his fear of persecution. 

With Perez’s help, M.G. was in and out of virtual court hearings for about four months before winning his case and being granted the withholding of removal protection. 

The ruling may not have been a ticket to stay in the United States, but it gave M.G. hope that he might be able to settle somewhere safe and begin building another life.

At the time, M.G. was very happy and grateful for Perez, who he said “did a great job — and thank God.” 

“After we decided to take a certain path, thanks to her experience and knowledge, we were able to win,” M.G. said. “It was a simple victory, you might say at first glance, but it took a lot of work.”

An ‘Increasingly Difficult’ System

The ruling was a victory on paper but it changed little for M.G.’s immediate circumstances.

He was excited for his future after the judge’s decision, but Perez warned that getting him out of detention could still be difficult.

Since the Trump administration’s surge of immigration-related arrests, officials have held some immigrants in detention for longer durations. 

And communicating with ICE — an essential part of securing M.G.’s release or figuring out if he would be removed from the country — has become “increasingly difficult” too, Perez said.

“In all manners, like even ensuring that our clients have appropriate medical attention, it becomes difficult,” Perez said. 

In a statement, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said immigrants in detention have “access to phones to communicate with their family members and lawyers.

“It is a longstanding practice to provide comprehensive medical care from the moment an alien enters ICE custody,” the statement reads.

What This Story Took

Over four months, Rachel Hinton spent days observing asylum proceedings at Chicago Immigration Court and interviewed former immigration court judges, immigration experts and attorneys with the Cook County Public Defender’s Office. She collected public records and analyzed five years of data on immigration court outcomes and DHS detention rates. Hinton also spent weeks communicating with M.G. via WhatsApp calls and messages until he stopped responding and the messages went unread.

But in cases like M.G.’s, when immigration judges don’t order people to be released, DHS officials are now letting fewer people out of detention than they used to, the American Immigration Council found. 

Perez said M.G. and other immigrants she’s worked with feel like the lengthy detainments in facilities with terrible conditions are a punishment for fighting their cases. 

“It’s up to the discretion of ICE — they can release you the next day once [you’re] granted withholding, and under previous administrations we would see people released within a week,” she said. “Essentially they could choose to release anyone whenever — they just no longer choose to do so.”

After receiving his court ruling, M.G. was detained in facilities in Dodge County, Wis., Leavenworth, Kan. and Texas, while the government decided where to send him. Officials kept him from calling Perez or reaching out for other legal help and wouldn’t let him access the facility’s commissary, he said.

The days stretched into weeks, then months. 

​​Some days officials told him he’d be sent to Chile. Other days they said somewhere in Africa. Sometimes officers told him he wasn’t going anywhere, that he’d be in detention forever, M.G. said.

“I think that’s what’s so unfortunate about M.G.’s situation,” Perez said. “When we took the case, I told him, ‘Even if we win, you will be detained, but it’ll only be for a little bit,’ because traditionally, people were released after the two and a half months – at the most. And I think with him, that guardrail [kept] changing.”

Data maintained by ICE shows the average time detainees spent in an adult detention facility increased from around 47 days in October 2024, before Trump’s reelection, to around 51 days last September as immigration officials began large-scale raids in cities. 

Officials with the Cook County public defender’s office say M.G. is one of at least five people they’ve represented recently who were granted either withholding of removal or deferral of removal. 

All were held beyond the guidelines laid out by immigration law — in most cases for six months or more after a judge granted them protection. 

M.G. would be detained for a total of 14 months, most of it after the judge’s decision.

A Brief Respite

As Perez continued to negotiate for his release, M.G. languished in the detention facility. 

“They didn’t let us bathe. There weren’t any clean clothes,” he said. “They took me there as a way to punish me.”

In DHS’ statement, the spokesperson said immigrants in detention are “provided” three meals a day along with clean water, clothing and bedding. 

In early August, the day after he hit six months in detention since the judge’s decision, M.G. filed a habeas petition, a legal action increasingly used by detained immigrants to seek release or a review of their detention. 

In October, U.S. District Judge John W. Lungstrum denied his appeal for release, citing M.G.’s multiple removals from the country. Shortly after, officials put M.G. on that plane to El Salvador. 

The nightmare he’d spent more than a year trying to avoid — and had a judicial order to prevent — almost became a reality.

M.G. remembered telling the immigration official onboard, “You can’t disobey a judge’s orders.”

“That’s when I think they called their boss who told them to bring me down from the plane and put me back into detention,” he said.

M.G. said he felt “ambushed.” 

He feared that if he’d been sent back to El Salvador the government “would take reprisals against me, that they’d lock me up in that place where one has no right to an audience, an attorney, or any rights to anything,” he said. He was referring to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, a maximum security prison known as CECOT where, last year, the Trump administration sent some immigrants, including Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

Although M.G. managed to get off the flight and was once again in ICE detention, his stay there was brief this time. 

A few weeks later, in November, immigration officials deported him to Mexico. 

Perez and others say that Trump’s increased use of third-country deportations is pushing the boundaries of the nation’s international “obligations” by sending migrants to countries where they may experience torture. 

Though legal challenges to that policy are winding their way through the courts, M.G. and others are being sent to countries where they have no connections, may not speak the language and may still experience torture or harm.

“Every step of the process is meant to obstruct their access to any meaningful due process mechanism,” Perez said.

‘I Can’t Find A Country To Belong To’

Immigration officials deported M.G. to Villahermosa, a city in southern Mexico that the United States has quietly made a frequent destination for deportations since Trump’s return to office. 

M.G. said he figured he’d be able to arrive with his documents stipulating his legal protection from the United States and “just start a new life in Mexico.” 

M.G. started to imagine a future. It was full of uncertainty, given the challenges, but it was something to look forward to. If he could get asylum in Mexico he imagined he could have a more stable life. 

Instead, officials there detained him for 36 hours after he arrived — then gave him 10 days to leave the country, he said.

The order to leave Mexico blindsided him. 

“I felt like, ‘What the hell?’” he said. 

Despite the order to leave, he sought asylum there with Perez’s help. But at a hearing in early spring, Mexican immigration officials denied him asylum and deported him back to El Salvador. 

Perez said she spoke briefly to M.G. after he arrived there, but hasn’t been able to get in touch with him since. Messages to M.G. from Block Club went unseen and unanswered. 

Perez said she plans to continue to try to help M.G. — if she can reach him. 

In February, when he still thought he could make a life in Mexico, he shared his dream over a WhatsApp call. It’s something he said he wanted people to know about him.

It included a move to Guadalajara or Monterrey. A family. And, someday, an animal shelter — a place for stray cats that had nowhere to go.

“I’ve had a dream since I was young to build a refuge — a center to help cats who live on the street, who don’t have anyone, that’ve been abandoned by people … and are malnourished,” he said. “I was thinking, if the opportunity presents itself and I can find the resources … that’s what I’d want to do.”

As of publication, it’s been two months since Block Club or M.G.’s lawyer have been able to reach him. 

Reporter Alex V. Hernandez contributed to this story.

This Story Was Produced By The Watch

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