On a February afternoon, after pumping breast milk, Stephanie Villarreal sent her husband Juan Chavez Velasco to the hospital to drop off the milk at the neonatal intensive care unit for their 12-day-old daughter, who was born 10 weeks prematurely.
As Chavez, 35, drove from his home in Weslaco, black and white SUVs flashing police lights surrounded his car. He pulled to the curb, thinking they were after someone else. Then four U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents got out and one of them opened Chavez’s door.
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After confirming his name, the agent said, “Yeah, that’s our target.”
For the past 14 years, Chavez, whose family immigrated from Colombia to the U.S. in 1999, has been a recipient of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, referred to as DACA. The Obama-era immigration program allows qualifying young immigrants to receive renewable work permits and protection from deportation as long as they don’t commit any crimes.
He said he told agents he had DACA, and that he was a father of three young children, including a baby in the hospital who he still had not held since she was born.
“That doesn’t matter,” Chavez said an agent told him.
Since President Trump returned to office, his administration has begun to target DACA recipients for deportation as part of its mass deportation efforts. From January 2025 to November 2025, at least 261 DACA recipients have been arrested — 75 of them in Texas. And between 86 and 174 DACA recipients have been deported, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (The agency gave different figures to two different Democratic members of Congress who requested the information).
In President Donald Trump’s first term, the administration attempted to scrap DACA completely, before the U.S. Supreme Court overruled the administration’s move. Now that Trump is back in office, his administration has repeatedly claimed that DACA does not give protection from deportation.
“DACA does NOT confer any form of legal status in this country,” DHS has said in public statements. “Any illegal alien who is a DACA recipient may be subject to arrest and deportation for a number of reasons, including if they’ve committed a crime.”
Homeland Security didn’t respond to questions about Chavez’s case.
For over a decade, DACA recipients felt safe from deportation. The program was created as a temporary solution for young immigrants without a criminal record until Congress approved a long-term plan for the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country. Advocates say the Trump administration now seems to be ignoring the federal government’s promise to DACA recipients.
“Federal courts have determined that DACA’s protections are lawful and that active DACA status should convey protections from being targeted by immigration enforcement agencies — yet that is not happening,” Gaby Pacheco, president and CEO of TheDream.US, a national immigrant rights group, said in a statement. “These unlawful arrests must stop immediately.”
A DACA recipient can lose their status if they’ve been arrested or convicted of a serious or violent crime. There are currently more than 505,000 DACA recipients in the country, and more than 84,000 are in Texas, according to federal government data.
Democratic leaders say the Trump administration’s efforts to arrest and deport DACA recipients is concerning because many of them entered the country as children and have no criminal record.
DACA recipients “trusted the federal government when they came forward under DACA, passed background checks, and followed every rule DHS asked of them,” said Rep. Sylvia Garcia, D-Houston. “Now, under the Trump administration, ICE is targeting the very young people who did everything right. That is appalling.”
Family fled Colombia to Miami
Chavez said his parents fled Colombia with him and his older sister in 1999 after his grandfather was kidnapped by guerillas. At the time, violence between guerrilla and paramilitary groups led to thousands of civilian deaths and displacements. The family traveled to Miami on tourist visas then requested asylum.
“At first, I didn’t know we were moving,” said Chavez, who was eight years old at the time.
In 2001, they moved to McAllen, where Chavez’s mother was able to get a job as a physical therapist as their asylum case was pending. His father found work cleaning pools before getting a job as a custodian at a doctor’s office. Three years later, an immigration judge denied the family’s asylum case and the family was ordered deported.
But they stayed. Chavez said his parents were worried about the political violence in Colombia and decided it was better to stay in the U.S. where their kids were safe.
“It was just very violent in Colombia at the time,” he said.
As the years went by, Chavez’s older sister married a U.S. citizen who sponsored her for legal permanent residence. After she became a U.S. citizen, she sponsored her parents for green cards.
But Chavez had no pathway to legalize his status. His sister could have sponsored him too, but it can take up to 15 years for a sibling-to-sibling sponsorship.
Then in 2012, the Obama administration announced DACA, which allowed Chavez to pursue his career goals after college. He graduated with two degrees in biology and clinical laboratory science from the University of Texas–Pan American in Edinburg in 2013.
“It was perfect because I knew I was going to be able to work after college,” he said.
After graduating, he found work in hospital labs in the Valley. In November 2023, he was ordering a meal and met Villarreal, who worked at her family’s food truck. He asked her out on a date that day, and they married in February 2025, a month after Trump returned to the White House.
She had a son from a previous relationship. Their first daughter was born three months later. They bought a house in Weslaco, a city between McAllen and Harlingen, the following month.
After getting married, the couple went to a lawyer to ask about Chavez getting sponsored by his wife for legal permanent residency. Villarreal said the lawyer advised against it because of Chavez’s deportation order from 2004. The lawyer worried that despite having DACA, if Chavez opened a new immigration case, ICE would arrest him when he showed up for any appointments, Villarreal said.
President Trump had campaigned on deporting the “worst of the worst” — undocumented immigrants who have violent criminal backgrounds. But since taking office, the majority of immigrants being arrested for deportation have no criminal convictions.
ICE has also arrested immigrants at immigration courts and during routine appointments at ICE offices.
So the lawyer advised the couple to apply for his green card until after Trump left office, Villarreal said.
“There’s been a lot of limitations” living with DACA, Villarreal said. “Of course he can pay taxes but he doesn’t get the benefits that U.S. citizens sometimes take for granted, like he can’t vote or travel outside of the country.”
“There’s a part of me that’s missing”
Their second daughter was born prematurely on Feb. 6 and was sent directly to a neonatal intensive care unit. Chavez was arrested less than two weeks later and taken to an immigration detention center in Laredo.
“I’m scared to even think that I could get deported and not be able to see her,” Chavez said. “It feels like there’s a part of me that’s missing because it was taken away.”
He was let go from his most recent job after his work permit expired on March 10. He had filed for a renewal in November, but his application is still pending.
Villarreal has struggled to care for their children without her husband. Her 4-year-old son, who sees Chavez as his father, has struggled with his sudden absence.
Villarreal said she initially told her son that Chavez was away at work. But as days turned to weeks, she had to explain to him that he was detained by ICE.
“Can you pretend to be dad?” the boy asked her recently.
“Why, son?” she asked.
“Because dad would always play with me,” the boy said.
Villarreal has been on leave from work and has tried to visit Chavez with the children at least once a week. What is usually a three-hour drive from the Rio Grande Valley to Laredo can take more because she has to continuously pull over to feed and change her two youngest girls — their newborn was released from this hospital in March.
“Sometimes I wish there were three of me, one for each child, to help me with the kids,” she said.
Gabriel V. Cárdenas for The Texas Tribune
When they do get to the detention center, the family sits across Chavez, separated by a partition, and talk to him through a phone. During a recent visit, their 10-month-old reached out, placing her hand on the glass partition and smiled at her father.
“I can tell she misses me,” Chavez said.
Chavez’s lawyer is challenging his detention. In March, U.S. District Judge Diana Saldaña ordered ICE officials not to deport Chavez until his case is resolved.
In the meantime Chavez has said he has been struggling with kidney stones. He said he developed them in the detention center because he had stopped drinking the facility’s water, which tasted metallic.
His family has been depositing money into his account so he can buy bottled water in the facility. He can buy up to 20 bottles a week at $1.11 each, he said.
He said the food is bland and it’s uncomfortable to sleep on the thin pad over a metal bed frame. He is in a cell with 10 other people who share a shower and a toilet. He said he passes the time reading the Bible and joins a group who get together to sing worship songs.
“The conditions here are meant to put so much stress on someone so they agree to get deported,” Chavez said. “But I’m going to keep fighting because I deserve to be here, I see myself as an American.”