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At eleven minutes to eight o’clock on the morning of January 27th, in Corona, Queens, Manuela, a twenty-three-year-old undocumented immigrant from Ecuador, was about to wake up her daughter when she received a string of panicked WhatsApp messages from her husband, Iván. “Mami, migración got me,” Iván, who is also undocumented, wrote. It was one of seventeen frantic texts, punctuated by typos and sobbing emojis, in the course of three minutes. “My God.” “Noo, my love.” “Pay my phone bill.” “Please. Mami.” “Please. Mami.” “I don’t have.” “Signal.” “They were just outside.” “They grabbed me.” “Three of them.” “And they’re taking me away.”
He had stepped out of the house only minutes earlier, and was heading to his job with a roofing contractor, when he walked right into a group of federal agents near Roosevelt Avenue. Iván was clearly terrified. He had never been convicted of a crime, Manuela told me, but he did have a deportation order to his name. He’d missed a scheduled immigration hearing, early last year. Manuela said that his hearing date had been changed but they had not been notified; it’s likely that his notice to appear had arrived at an old address.
When Iván was detained, his mind leaped to Manuela and Nicole, their three-year-old daughter, who lived with him in a rented semi-basement room up the street. He sent Manuela the texts so that she would know what had happened to him, and in the hope that she would pay his cellphone bill. It had been due a day earlier, and he was evidently desperate for his phone to continue working so that he could contact her later from wherever ICE had taken him. In fact, immigration authorities routinely remove migrants’ phones and other personal belongings; Iván wouldn’t be able to respond to any messages or calls after being apprehended.
With the notable exception of the harrowing arrests at immigration courthouses downtown, the scale of ICE activity in New York City hasn’t been close to what has been seen in such places as Minneapolis or Southern California. Still, neighborhood coalitions in Queens frequently share reports of active federal agents in migrant-dense areas, including Corona, East Elmhurst, and Jackson Heights. A video recently shared with the news outlet The City shows agents busting into an East Elmhurst home and threatening a mother who was holding her baby. “Put your fucking hands up, stupid,” one agent says. In a predawn raid in Jackson Heights, scores of militarized agents from the Department of Homeland Security descended with assault weapons on a residential building, removing a man and woman from their apartment. ICE is said to frequently use the parking lots of a CVS Pharmacy and a TD Bank on Northern Boulevard as staging areas, and the agency appears to be most active in the early morning, when men like Iván are on their way to work.
Manuela’s life had turned in an instant. A foot of snow had just fallen in New York City, and the morning was frigid, but she had otherwise been preparing for a normal day: she would walk Nicole to a free preschool run by a Catholic Charities center, and she would continue her search for a job. Now her husband wasn’t coming back. She knew nothing about where he was being taken or how to reach him. Frantic and crying, Manuela called her mother, a middle-aged farmer in the remote central highlands of Ecuador, who, from so far away and not knowing where else to turn, sent a WhatsApp audio message to me. In 2024, I was reporting an article about Ecuadorian migrants for this magazine, and I had interviewed her and Manuela, who was then preparing to join Iván in New York.
“Yes, good morning, good morning, may God bless you, how are you?” Even in this emergency, Manuela’s mother began her voice note, in Kichwa-accented Spanish, with a series of formal salutations. “My son-in-law was in Queens, New York, and he was caught by migration, and he was taken away. My daughter is crying. He was taken just now, over there in Queens, New York. . . . You wouldn’t have a way of getting a lawyer, would you? Please help me.”
Manuela and I had kept in touch occasionally since her arrival in New York, in August of 2024, but it was challenging to keep track of her. She changed phone numbers a couple of times, and sometimes my messages went unanswered, or they were never delivered at all. Mostly, I learned something new from her if she reached out first—about where she was living, who she was spending time with, or how she and her little girl were faring.
After receiving the message from Manuela’s mom that day, I wrote to Manuela on Facebook Messenger, the only way I was sure of getting through. “What happened?” I asked. This time, she responded within seconds. “My husband was caught by immigration,” she confirmed, before adding, “Buenos días.” Switching to her latest WhatsApp number, she sent me a screenshot of the final messages Iván had texted her. She also sent photographs of documents that had been generated when he first crossed into the country, illegally, in April of 2024, and was intercepted by U.S. Border Patrol officers in the desert near Sasabe, Arizona. Printed on one of the sheets was his A-number, short for alien registration number—a unique numerical code assigned to non-citizen immigrants, including undocumented border crossers and green-card holders. Manuela could now use Iván’s A-number to search for him in ICE’s online detainee-locator system. But at first the system produced no results—he hadn’t been processed yet. Some four hours had passed since Iván was detained, and Manuela still had no idea where he was.
At the same time, she was facing a growing list of responsibilities and decisions, with few resources to inform her choices. Chief among those questions was whether she should stay in the U.S. to wait for her husband’s case to be resolved. Would he be deported quickly or held indefinitely? Would he be sent to Ecuador or somewhere else? She did not have the money to wait for more than a few days. She had only five hundred dollars in cash, and eight hundred dollars in rent was due in five days, on the first of February. Iván had finally found some steady work, but Manuela had struggled to find work ever since arriving in the U.S.; mostly, she’d looked after Nicole. Without her husband, she was essentially alone in the country, and had no close family to lean on; both she and Nicole were also undocumented, though their immigration cases were still in progress, and she had a court date scheduled for April. “I don’t know if I should go to Ecuador or not,” Manuela told me. Her mother was encouraging her to use the little money she had to buy plane tickets for her and Nicole. “But others tell me to stay, and to wait for him to try to make it back to this country. . . . I don’t know what to do. . . . I’m not working, and that scares me the most.”
At around one o’clock that afternoon, Iván finally called her. He said he’d been told that he would be deported to Ecuador in eight days. By the evening, he was in an ICE preliminary holding area at Federal Plaza, in downtown Manhattan. “He said that it’s very bad in there, and he doesn’t want to stay locked up,” Manuela told me. Later that night, I asked her if she had decided what to do. “I’ll drop off my daughter at preschool,” she texted, close to midnight. “And see if I know anything new about my husband.”
The next morning, Manuela seemed more hopeful. “I want to get a lawyer to see about getting him out of there,” she texted me. She had spoken with some of Iván’s relatives who lived in the Bronx. They wanted to find legal help, which she understood was very expensive—not to mention the fact that, given that a removal order for Iván had already been in place for nearly a year, his fate was likely sealed. But after all they had been through as a couple—surviving separate journeys from Ecuador and forging a new life in America for themselves—Manuela was not ready to give up so easily. “I want to provide a better life for my daughter,” she told me.
The little that Manuela knew about how to navigate life in the United States came from what other migrants had told her directly, and from what she saw on TikTok and Facebook (which wasn’t always reliable). Even more than other Indigenous Ecuadorian migrants I have come to know over the past several years, she lived a particularly precarious life in New York. Manuela, who had limited formal schooling, had trouble writing—this was clear from her texts, in which she constantly used “k” for “que” and “a” for “ha” and combined and misspelled most words. This made even the simplest bureaucratic tasks very difficult. She’d never found her way to the sort of nonprofits that offer legal services to migrants in the city, learning that they existed only after her husband was detained.
She and Iván still owed more than fifteen thousand dollars to a financial coöperative in Ecuador that had lent them more than twenty thousand for their treks through South and Central America and into the United States. Both of their families—Indigenous Puruhá farmers—were incredibly poor. Iván had left first, after his mother had developed an aggressive cancer; he was determined to find the money to pay for her treatments. “He left to save his mother, but she died when he was still on his way,” Manuela told me. By then, he had already walked across the Darién Gap, and was somewhere in Mexico; he couldn’t turn back. Manuela and Nicole, then just two years old, followed him once he’d safely arrived in New York. Avoiding the Darién Gap, they flew from Peru to Colombia to El Salvador; after she and Nicole made it to Mexico, they were locked up by smugglers, who extorted the family for an additional thousand dollars to insure their safe passage.
Amid the vast wave of new migrants and asylum seekers looking for work in New York, Manuela and Iván struggled to earn enough money. Before their first winter set in, they moved to Rochester, where Manuela became a housekeeper at a hotel. But their marriage nearly buckled under the pressure. In January, 2025, Manuela sent me a message asking how she and Nicole could get to Chicago, where a cousin lived. She had decided to separate from Iván, she said, because he spent a lot of time drinking with male friends, despite her objections. But she had no way to leave, and they were still living together. “I just want to go away,” she said. An uncle in Queens intervened to mitigate the crisis. “He didn’t let me separate,” Manuela told me. Her parents also did not want her to leave Iván. So she stayed. A few days later, she posted on WhatsApp a video of her husband and daughter, decorated with numerous praying-hands emojis. “We all deserve a second chance,” she told me, by way of explanation. “But if he doesn’t value it, in time I could end up separating after all.” By June of 2025, they had moved back to Queens. When they returned to the city, they found Iván’s removal order waiting for him, signed by a judge.
After her husband was detained, Manuela imagined what would happen if she went back to Ecuador. It certainly wouldn’t solve her financial problems: her family would never be able to pay back their debt. The financial coöperative would take her father’s truck, which had been used as collateral. She feared that her family might even end up in jail. “That’s why we don’t want to go back yet,” she continued to insist. “I’m going to get my husband out.”
Whatever hope she had of his quick release began to fade by the afternoon of his second day in detention. Iván called Manuela again, to say that he’d been transferred to a new facility, in New Jersey. The online locator system had updated to show that he was now being held at Delaney Hall, a notorious, privately run detention center in Newark. He told Manuela that she urgently needed to deposit money in his detention account, so that he could keep calling her with updates. He provided her with a telephone number and a PIN for making the deposits. She didn’t have time to find a piece of paper, so she scribbled the numbers down on the wall, above the light switch in her room. “I have no idea where I have to go to make the deposit,” she told me. I didn’t know, either.
She eventually found her way to a money-transfer office near 103rd Street, and deposited twenty dollars. With the exception of taking her daughter to and from the day-care center, it was the first time she had left her room since Iván’s arrest. They spoke again on the phone. He told her that he had offered her name and other information to the ICE agents, because he thought that it would make it easier for them to all leave voluntarily together. Manuela wasn’t happy about this—she worried that agents would now track her down and arrest her, too.
The rest of the week passed with little new information from Iván’s calls. By the third day, Manuela learned that he was being fed very little; he hardly had an appetite, though. He was very cold from sleeping on the floor, and had started feeling sick. “They don’t even give him a blanket,” she told me, after his only call of the day. (A D.H.S. official denied that there were hostile conditions at the center where Iván was being held, saying “ICE has higher detention standards than most U.S. prisons that hold actual U.S. citizens.”) Manuela wasn’t making any headway on finding a lawyer; in truth, she told me, she didn’t even know where to begin. Manuela passed the days in her room, fielding calls from close relatives in Ecuador and from more distant ones in Queens, all of whom asked her for updates that she couldn’t provide. Despondent, she downloaded the CBP Home app, which the U.S. government uses to pay migrants to self-deport. She filled out her information, and waited for a response.
On the fourth day, a Friday, I received a voice message from Manuela that suggested she had begun to resign herself to calamity. Her rent was due in two days. “He’s still in New Jersey, they’re still not taking him out,” she said. “In any case, I want to buy the tickets to be able to leave, because this country is only going to get more difficult, more than anything with the current President. There’s no chance of me staying here. I don’t have the resources for a lawyer.” (Later that weekend, I put her in contact with an immigration attorney I’d met through previous reporting. The attorney told her that there was no clear remedy for her husband’s situation.)
A cousin began looking into buying tickets to Ecuador for her and Nicole. He collected four hundred and twenty dollars in cash from her. (Manuela didn’t have a bank account in the U.S., let alone a credit or debit card to purchase a flight online; when I asked her, she didn’t seem to know about travel agencies in the neighborhood which would let her pay for everything in cash.) By the start of the weekend, the matter seemed to be settled: she and her daughter would leave on Monday night, arriving in Quito at five the following morning.
Manuela told me that she was now certain of her decision, whether or not she received money from the U.S. government in exchange for leaving. “I cannot stay here anymore, because there is no way that my husband will get out of jail,” she reiterated. I called Manuela’s mother, who confirmed to me that she and her husband planned to leave their small town at midnight and drive all night in order to be at the airport when their daughter arrived at dawn.
That Friday afternoon, when Manuela had picked Nicole up from day care in Corona, she had told the teachers that her daughter would not be returning, because they were leaving the country. The day-care center gave Manuela a letter confirming Nicole’s enrollment, in case she needed it, and said that she was welcome to come back if their plans changed. But Manuela knew, at that point, that they would not stay in America without Iván. Nicole had a strong attachment to her father, and she never wanted to leave his side. Whenever the little girl asked where he was, Manuela only said, “He is working,” and Nicole accepted that answer for the time being. Before leaving the day-care center, Manuela filled up a cloth Target bag with Nicole’s school supplies and some artwork, and the two of them walked home between tall piles of snow.
“Something happened with my flight,” Manuela wrote to me on Sunday afternoon, the day before she planned to depart.“My cousin, he bought the flights for me and my daughter, but now he doesn’t want to give me the tickets,” she explained. Only after she called an uncle, to see what was the matter, did her cousin finally return her cash—it seemed that no tickets had been purchased in the first place. “I think he wanted to take my money,” Manuela said, though she wasn’t sure why he’d do that. Her plan had fallen apart. On WhatsApp, her mother reprimanded her for being too trusting of others—even of relatives. Manuela was angry with her cousin, and got very emotional just thinking that he might try to take advantage of her when she was in such a dire situation. She contacted her landlord, an Ecuadorian homeowner who lived upstairs. He told her that she could stay for an extra week, rent-free, because of her circumstance, but then she would have to go.
Five days had passed since Iván was arrested. According to the detainee-locator system, he was still in New Jersey, but he’d stopped calling as frequently. Manuela, who felt more alone than ever, only wanted their American nightmare to end. She had already sold or allocated most of her furniture—a television, some bedsheets, a dresser—to other migrants she knew. A pink rolling suitcase was packed with what few clothes that the family owned. This was what remained of the tiny life Manuela and Iván had tried to make for themselves in New York City. An Ecuadorian and American flag, which she and Iván had bought at a ninety-nine-cent store when they first arrived in town, blocked the basement’s small windows so that no one could see her inside.
On February 9th—the day after Manuela was supposed to leave her apartment, and almost two weeks after her husband’s arrest—she and her daughter flew to Quito. The first leg of her flight, to Panama, was delayed nearly two hours on the tarmac at J.F.K. Manuela gazed out her window for a long while, feeling a mixture of emotions. She missed her parents, who would be waiting for her when she arrived. She wondered if the U.S. government would ever send her the money for leaving. And she thought of Iván, who had been transferred yet again, to a detention center in California. She wasn’t sure when she would see him again, or where. ♦
