A Portland Family Says Their Dad Was Wrongly Arrested by ICE. Now He’s Lost in Immigration Detention.

On October 15, Juan Barbosa Gomez and his wife arrived at Columbia Park in North Portland for their routine walk, unaware that they were about to enter a legal twilight zone. Suddenly, their car was surrounded by masked federal law enforcement officers, who whisked Barbosa away.

For the past two weeks, Barbosa, a 60-year-old grandfather from Mexico, has been incarcerated in the federal immigration detention system, and his family says there’s been a terrible mistake. They say he has a valid work visa and no criminal record. He’s lived in the U.S. for more than 30 years, working as a welder.

“His record is clean,” says Sydney Smith-Mason, who was taken in by Barbosa’s family at a young age and considers herself something of an adopted daughter. “He’s a good guy.”

“Juan himself has been a little bit of a father to me as well,” Smith-Mason continues. “He helped me when I was purchasing my first car, making sure that everything was all good and checking things out. I would go to him to ask for certain advice on things. He’s been a big part of my life.”

Barbosa’s family has been unable to secure his release or even find out any information on his case. He’s been transferred to three different detention facilities in under two weeks and doesn’t show up on ICE’s online detainee locator. The transfers made it difficult for his family to keep track of him or keep his commissary fund filled, and more importantly, it has short-circuited their attempts to find an immigration attorney to look at his case.

Barbosa isn’t the only such alleged wrongful ICE arrest in Portland. The local TV news outlet KOIN 6 reported that another Portland-area grandfather, Victor Cruz, was arrested by ICE officers on October 14 despite having Temporary Protected Status, a valid work permit, and no criminal record.

“They’re not taking criminals, they’re racially profiling us,” Cruz’s daughter, Atziri, told KOIN 6. “They’re hard working, honest men who provide for their families—and their families are left looking for a lawyer and having massive financial strains and not knowing where our future lies.” 

Cruz and Barbosa’s families both describe a due process nightmare trying to clear the names of their loved ones after they were swept up in the Trump administration’s mass deportation program. To handle the surge of tens of thousands of detainees, the administration is relying on a secretive network of federal, state, and local lockups. To encourage detainees to self-deport, the administration holds them in miserable conditions and shuttles them between facilities, making it hard for them to mount a legal defense. This raises massive constitutional issues: People are being imprisoned for weeks without transparency, without adequate access to legal counsel or means to challenge their detention, and without basic information on the case against them.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and ICE did not respond to multiple requests for comment on Barbosa’s detention, his legal status, or the reasons for his detention.

KOIN 6 obtained cell phone video of Barbosa’s October 15 arrest taken by a bystander. In the video, Barbosa’s wife, Maria, tells the bystander, “He had documents!”

Although agents said they had a warrant, “no paper was shown,” Barbosa’s other daughter, Irlanda, told KOIN 6. “They also didn’t care to validate his status,” she said.

Barbosa was taken to an ICE detention center in Portland.

“The cuffs that they put on him were so tight that he lost feeling in two fingers for several days,” Smith-Mason says.

His family would only find that out later, though. They quickly discovered that getting Barbosa out—or even figuring out where he was—would be a massive struggle: He could only speak to his family in brief phone calls.

“During this time, the family was being told nothing,’ Smith-Mason says. “We were told to go online to the government ICE detainee locator website. We tried to input his information. We were not able to locate or find him anywhere in there.”

In the middle of Wednesday night, unbeknownst to his family, Barbosa was transferred to another detention facility in Tacoma, Washington. Smith-Mason says they found out on Thursday morning when she and Irlanda went to the Portland facility to try and find out how to get Barbosa out. 

The family was able to put money on Barbosa’s commissary account in Tacoma. However, in the early morning hours of Saturday, October 18, Barbosa was moved again and dropped off the grid, until he popped up in an Arizona detention facility on the 19th.

Then, at 4:00 a.m. on Monday, the family got a call from Barbosa saying he was about to be put on another plane, to where he did not know.

Reason confirmed that Juan Barbosa Gomez does not appear on ICE’s online detainee locator. Smith-Mason has only been able to find him using GettingOut, a third-party app to message inmates and deposit money into their accounts.

“I just started searching every single state that I possibly could through this phone service, searching all of the facilities through there, because again, I was not able to find him anywhere on any type of a detainee locator,” she says.

When Smith-Mason finally found Barbosa, he was halfway across the country in the Adams County Correctional Center in Natchez, Mississippi. (GettingOut currently shows Barbosa as incarcerated at the facility and provides an “A number” used to identify federal immigration detainees, but that number does not return any results on ICE’s online detainee locator.)

Because of jurisdictional issues, Barbosa’s family now has to find an immigration lawyer or legal aid group in Mississippi to challenge his detention. And that’s not easy during an unprecedented surge in immigration arrests.

“When I am finding organizations and people to call, I’m running into a little bit of a problem with there just being such a high volume of help needed,” Smith-Mason says. “Right now, a lot of these places are at the capacity of people that they can help, or their voice mailboxes are simply full, so I can’t even leave a message or a point of contact for them to reach back out.”

Barbosa’s family has started a GoFundMe to try and raise money for his legal defense. In the meantime, they say he is enduring wretched conditions.

“He has been chained from feet to stomach to hands, like he’s in full shackles,” Smith-Mason says. “At a lot of these places he’s saying that they’re being held in one room, like 50 men held in one room that is cement. Cement walls, Cement floors. There’s no furniture in there, so no beds or anything.”

In a few instances, Smith-Mason says, Barbosa was denied water because he hadn’t purchased a cup from the commissary.

These descriptions are consistent with reports of overcrowding and squalid conditions in ICE detention facilities around the country. This summer, federal judges ordered federal officials to drastically improve conditions in ICE holding facilities in New York and Los Angeles. Those orders were in response to lawsuits alleging overcrowding, medical neglect and lack of showers, and no access to legal counsel.

A former detainee at the Krome detention center in South Florida told Reason he spent four days in an overcrowded holding cell with 50–60 other people.

The American Civil Liberties Union released a report this month detailing mistreatment and neglect of pregnant women in ICE detention.

Barbosa’s family is worried about his health and says he has diabetes. But it’s also taking a hard toll on the family. Barbosa was the primary breadwinner, and his absence has been hard to explain to his grandson.

“His grandson is six years old, and he’s trying to figure out how to navigate through this difficult time, with his grandmother in distress and his whole family right now really going through a hard time,” Smith-Mason says. “It’s a really, really hard time trying to deal with that and keep normalcy for him as well, especially because grandpa has been a constant in his life since the day he came home from the hospital.”