Leticia vs. ICE: “They’re hunting people”

El Faro published this chronicle in Spanish on April 1, 2026.

February 16, 2026, night

As we make our way to The Bunker, driving a road that parallels the Mississippi River and the railroad tracks, Leticia Casildo’s cell phone rings. “Hoy en la mañana?” she asks. “Do you know how many people?” she asks. “That’s our reality now, hermana, every day. We have to be smart; they’re on the hunt,” she says, and her gaze drifts back out the van window. “What happened?” I ask. “They took people this morning outside Sam’s Club and in Bayou Blue,” she says. “A lot of people?” I ask. “No one knows; they hunt them down one by one.” I stop asking questions. It’s my last night in New Orleans and at this point, I’m used to listening to Leticia take calls like this — it’s an everyday routine, and hardly shocking given everything I’ve seen inside the homes she’s taken me to visit. They hunt them down one by one: a father, a son, a mother, an uncle.

We make our way back to The Bunker in silence.

February 11, 2026, midday

To get to Leticia’s house, we leave the city of New Orleans and drive about 30 kilometers down a highway, passing a U.S. naval base, some horse stables and storage silos, and hugging the Mississippi the whole way.

Leticia is on a Zoom call when we arrive, and the first words I hear when I enter the house are hers—she’s just noticed I’m there. Through tears she says in Spanish: “I can’t let them destroy so many families. At least I have privilege.”

Leticia is a 48-year-old Black Garifuna woman from Honduras with no legal status, a former agent with the Department of Criminal Investigation (the investigative wing of the National Police of Honduras), and now, an activist advocating for her fellow migrants in the United States. She moved to New Orleans to escape an unstable life in Miami, enticed by promises of plentiful work reconstructing the city after Hurricane Katrina, which devastated some 800,000 homes and caused an estimated $160 billion in damage when it hit land in 2005. The city needed hands. And when the United States needs hands, it temporarily forgets whether the person they belong to is documented or not. Leticia knows this all too well: she’s worked in kitchens, laundries, hotels, making tortillas (“for $30 a day, turning 100 pounds of masa into tortillas”). Together with her husband, Mario, she worked demolition and reconstruction in the aftermath of the hurricane. They earned more than they had in Miami, but it was grueling work—they encountered multiple dead bodies, reported them to the authorities, then went back to hauling away the wreckage: refrigerators that smelled like corpses, etc. In Crescent Park, where locals spend their afternoons jogging along the banks of the Mississippi, there’s a sculpture dedicated to the Latin American workers who helped rebuild the city—dedicated to people like Mario and Leticia.

“Bienvenido,” Leticia says, greeting me and wiping away her tears, moving from crying to the kitchen to finish cooking some fish and rice and mashing plantains with her hands to make tostones.

Mario, Leticia’s husband—also a former agent with the Department of Criminal Investigation of Honduras—watches us from the sofa. Gael, a skinny, dark-skinned three-year-old, plays with a toy car on the floor. Esdras, a 12-year-old Garifuna boy with skin as dark as Leticia’s, sits in front of a chessboard in the corner, waiting for an opponent. None of the children are theirs—they’re here because their parents are not.

“Come on in,” Leticia says. “We call this el Búnker.”

El Búnker—The Bunker—is a mobile home, but without the wheels, built instead on a foundation of stilts. Migrants here call them trailas, and they’re a more affordable option for owning your own home—for owning your own trailer, that is, not the land on which it sits. You can buy a two-to-four-bedroom traila for anywhere from $5,000 to $15,000, depending on the condition (since some look less like homes and more like smashed hamburgers).

Moving the unit from one place to another runs about $8,000, but the investment pays off in the long run because rent on the lots here, between the river and the railroad tracks, is about $400 a month—less than what someone would pay for half a basement in downtown New Orleans.

The Bunker is a lovely four-bedroom traila—big and beautifully renovated by Mario. It’s a cozy home, The Bunker, and aptly named because that’s exactly what it is: a place to seek shelter. I’ll learn this later on.

Leticia—who quips as she mashes plantains that the only good thing she got from her time with the police was her husband Mario—tells me they fled Honduras to “save their lives.” Gesturing at her husband with her mouth, she says: “He was the target of multiple assassination attempts, because he was the head of investigations in Trujillo.”

Unraveling the tangled web of corruption that ensnares the National Police of Honduras would fill hundreds of densely-reported pages, and the story would still be too short. But it’s worth noting that, in those days—at the turn of the century—before Leticia and Mario fled to Miami, Juan Carlos “El Tigre” Bonilla was already a prominent figure in “la corporación,” as the agency is known. Eventually, he rose to the rank of chief of police, until his career came to a sudden end thanks to a U.S. extradition order and a 2024 conviction in New York court for trafficking more than 450 kilos of cocaine.

“But like I’ve always said,” Mario interjects, “the biggest drug trafficker of them all is the United States.”

Leticia and Mario, together with their two young children, had tried to migrate to the U.S. in late 2001, but when they were robbed in Chiapas, Mario decided that Leticia and the children should turn themselves in to Mexican immigration authorities so that he could make the journey more quickly on his own, without putting them at risk. A year later, Leticia joined him, travelling alone and leaving their son and daughter behind in Honduras. That wound, which festered for years and has still not healed, even now that her children are adults living in New Orleans, continues to torment Leticia. During the years when her children were raised by other people, something between them broke, she says. Her children, who stayed behind in Honduras, and who, according to her, “went through some very difficult times,” have never completely forgiven her. This, she says, is one of the reasons she does what she does: so that other children won’t have to go through what hers did. “I still haven’t gotten over it; we spent eight years working like dogs just to barely survive ourselves and barely support our kids down there… that’s what this system takes from us—it takes so much from us, it takes our lives,” she says. Whenever she talks about it, she cries.

I remember the first thing she said to me, just a few minutes earlier: “At least I have privilege.” I still have no idea what privilege she’s talking about.

[rel1]

Leticia’s phone rings. She answers, then turns to me and says, “They took another kid in Kenner; he had a juvenile visa.” And then, for the first time, I hear fear in her voice. Leticia says, like someone asking about a kidnapper, “Were they in plain clothes, wearing hoods? In unmarked cars, like usual? And they didn’t care that he had a visa? Was the boy on his way to work? Well, that’s ICE for you, I guess—what can we do?” And then she offers the caller some advice on navigating bureaucracy in an age of hatred and persecution.

ICE: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, that specter haunting the lives of migrants, and now, with Trump’s return to power in January 2025, the vanguard of an anti-immigrant crusade the likes of which the country has never seen—at least not in recent memory. It’s a campaign designed to sow terror, to create a public spectacle, to be filmed and posted and to send a clear message: we don’t want them here. Or, for those whose labor we need: we want them scared, invisible, silent. Faced with a decline in undocumented crossings at the southern border—the result of skyrocketing smuggling fees and the terror unleashed under the current administration—Trump deployed agents across the country to round people up in the towns and cities where they live, hunting them down at their workplaces and homes and targeting people without as much as an infraction to warrant their detention.

Today, the government’s sights are trained, not on career criminals or even casual lawbreakers, but on anyone who looks like a migrant—it’s that simple, and that racist. Trump promised the largest mass deportation campaign in the history of the country, and if migrants aren’t coming to the border, his agents will come to their doors. These operations have already resulted in the deaths of multiple people—migrants, but also U.S. citizens killed while protesting the raids, their deaths dominating headlines. It’s a familiar story at this point: what started as a message of hate is no longer merely a message, but an official priority of government policy. In Joe Biden’s final fiscal year as president, ICE deported 271,484 people.

In the first twelve months of Trump’s presidency, according to the Department of Homeland Security, the country apprehended and deported some 675,000, with another 2.2 million opting to “self-deport”—an all-too-casual term, obscuring a complicated and distressing reality. Some organizations and migration experts, citing a lack of transparency, believe that the Trump administration may be inflating these figures to bolster its political narrative, however.

[newsletter]

The operations come with flashy names: Midway Blitz in Chicago; Metro Surge in Minnesota; Charlotte’s Web in that North Carolina city. Here in the state of Louisiana, the raids were dubbed Catahoula Crunch, and they began in December 2025, when DHS deployed roughly 200 agents across the greater New Orleans area, cordoning off entire neighborhoods with the stated goal of arresting 5,000 migrants and removing them from the country. Catahoula is a breed of dog native to the region, bred for hunting and herding, and “Crunch,” in this context, means exactly what it sounds like: to crush.

I didn’t come to The Bunker to report on an ICE raid. Catahoula Crunch had already wrapped up and was widely covered by numerous outlets. I came to the swamps of the Bayou to see what happens next—after the raids are over, after the spotlight shifts focus, far from the most recent murders, and on the cusp of the city’s biggest party: Mardi Grass, when the clubs pulse to the beats of blues and jazz and the city overflows with half-naked tourists in bright beaded necklaces, and Bourbon Street floods with booze and drunk revelers, far from Leticia’s bunker.

As Leticia makes lunch in the kitchen, I ask why the two children who aren’t hers—Gael and Esdras—are living here. “It’s an act of love,” she says. And I can’t think of a better way to describe it.

Gael was born in the United States. His mother is a migrant from Nicaragua who was apprehended in late November 2025, a few days before the launch of Operation Catahoula Crunch, in the nearby town of Kenner, as she was leaving a supermarket with her child in her arms. She was deported, and Gael was left in the care of a friend with whom his mother had migrated years prior, when she was pregnant with him. 

There’s a general consensus among migrants here that, if you get deported, it’s better to leave your kids in the care of friends or relatives than in the hands of Child Protective Services, where they can get lost in the bureaucracy and could spend months in custody before reuniting with their parents.

The woman who took over Gael’s care is also from Nicaragua, and she works every day from 11:00 a.m. to 10:30 p.m., cleaning a hospital. To care for the child, she had to juggle responsibilities and would often ask others for help, until one day, thanks to the solidarity network, someone put her touch with Leticia, who sent the family a package of food, milk, and diapers. Eventually, Gael’s foster mother asked Leticia if she would help care for the child. Leticia was afraid that during the woman’s nightly trips to pick up Gael at The Bunker, she might get detained by ICE, which patrols the New Orleans highways just like local police do, and is always on the hunt for more people. So, Leticia offered to assume the role of foster mother herself.

As she tells me this, Gael sits on her lap gobbling up little pieces of fish that Leticia feeds him with her hands, and smiling up at the woman he now calls “mamá.” Gael loves Leticia—that much is obvious: if he gets hurt, he runs to her crying; if he gets scared, he does the same. He does everything he can to stay in her arms or on her lap as long as possible, and will sometimes cry when Leticia has to leave without him. They’re currently in the process of obtaining his Nicaraguan passport, so that he can travel home and reunite with his biological mother, who lives in a rural area of Madriz, a department along the Honduran border where more than 72% of residents are campesinos surviving in conditions of extreme poverty—conditions exacerbated by the environmental reality of Central America’s Dry Corridor, which is at the mercy of constant droughts.

I ask Leticia how she broke the news to Gael’s mother that she would be raising her son for the time being. Her answer is as simple as it is profound: “It was a phone call. I told her, ‘You don’t know who I am, but I’m taking care of your son’… I wish someone would have done the same for my children when I wasn’t there, so that they wouldn’t have had to suffer.” Every few minutes, as Gael plays with his toy car in the living room of The Bunker, Leticia holds the phone to his ear so the boy can hear the voice of his mother, whom he also calls “mamá.” Leticia tells me: “En estos tiempos, solo el migrante salva al migrante.” It’s a phrase she often repeats: “In times like these, only migrants will save migrants.” “But,” she adds, using another phrase she tends to repeat, “oppression always finds allies among the oppressed themselves.”

“Will you miss him?” I ask. “He’s part of the family now—of course I’ll miss him,” she says, as she feeds Gael another bite of fish, staring at him intently and encouraging him to eat, telling him, “It’s chicken, mi amor.”

Esdras’s story is similar, but it involves his father. His mother left the family long ago. He was born in 2003 in Santa Fé, Colón, a Garifuna region on the Caribbean coast of Honduras. He stayed there until he was eight, and then migrated to the United States with his father. “My house is near the mountain,” he says, still, some four years after moving to this swampy state that now he’ll soon be leaving. To get here, Esdras crossed all of Mexico, walked for hours and hours, rode the train (“my feet almost froze because I lost my shoes on the train,” he remembers) and lived for months in Chihuahua, where he and his father applied for asylum. “My dad built schools in Chihuahua,” the tall, taciturn boy tells me.

Meanwhile, they also applied for asylum in the United States. Eventually, they got an appointment and walked across the immigration bridge in El Paso, Texas to wait for their court summons. Once in the U.S., they headed straight here, to Louisiana, to the town of Marrero, and they continued doing what they did best: building. Even Edras, at just 12 years old, already knows how to plumb pipes, frame walls, and mount plywood. As a child, he has already become what most migrants are: a worker. His father was taken by ICE in December, while driving to Mississippi for work. His car had Mississippi license plates, because undocumented residents can’t legally obtain plates in Louisiana. ICE knows this, so driving with Mississippi plates is like having a target on your back for detention—which is precisely what happened to Esdras’s father.

[rel2]

The man who had sold him the car had a deportation order, which was enough, under this senseless process—one of many such senseless processes—for his father to be apprehended and immediately deported to the country he had fled years earlier. Esdras was left without his father, stranded at the home of Sister Judi, a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, just like Esdras and his father; then he spent a few days at the home of Pastor Shelton. When it became clear that his father wouldn’t be coming home, the solidarity network once again recommended that they call a number: Leticia’s. When she answered, her response was similar to the one she had given when she first heard about Gael: I’ll take care of it. Ever since, for more than two months, Esdras has been living at The Bunker, waiting for his mother to be found so she can sign the documents necessary for him to get his Honduran passport and return to his father.

ICE’s hunting spree has forced people into absurd situations, like the one now faced by Edras, who migrated north without papers, but can’t migrate back south without them.

This afternoon, The Bunker is home to Leticia, who is putting the final touches on her Caribbean delicacies; Mario, an undocumented immigrant like her; Esdras, caught in a binational limbo at just 12 years old; and Gael, the boy with two moms. All of them are victims of ICE, or targets of ICE’s crackdown. I can’t avoid asking the question any longer:

“What do you mean when you say you have privilege?”

And Leticia responds with an answer I’m unlikely to hear from anyone ever again.

“Because I’m Black,” she says. “People assume I was born in the United States. They don’t think that about Mario, for example.”

“But you don’t have anything—not a single document or license.”

“I have the license that God gave me.”

February 11, 2026, after lunch

Our bellies full, we pile into the van and drive to another New Orleans neighborhood. The whole family is along for the ride: Leticia, Mario, and the kids, who are like their own. Leticia wants to introduce me to Olga, a migrant from Honduras.

Olga opens the door and welcomes us in like family, because Leticia is practically family. With Leticia by your side, even people living in a state of constant fear will eagerly open their doors. Olga arranges some chairs, offers us drinks, and turns the volume down on the show she was watching. She sits in the most uncomfortable chair, and after I introduce myself and ask if we can talk, she says, “Ask whatever you want.”

Olga, 45, and her ex-husband Héctor, 42, came to the United States nearly two decades ago, and they’re still undocumented. Their journey involved cramming into a trailer with 150 other people, sharing a single paint bucket as a toilet, surviving two days with no food or water, suffocation, public exposure. They endured. They arrived. They had two children here. They brought their eldest daughter from Honduras and arranged for her to cross the border at a port of entry and apply for asylum. Now she’s a resident. Undocumented parents, documented children: a divide that ICE knows well, and knows how to exploit.

Even after their divorce, Olga and Héctor kept in constant contact and shared the costs of raising their children.

On January 27, Héctor was returning home after dealing with a problem with one of the trailers he rents, when he noticed two vehicles trailing him. He called his son and told him what was happening, fearing the worst. He got home, parked his car, and got out with his hands up. The whole incident was caught on video.

In the video, five ICE agents tackle a man who is not resisting and pin him to the ground. They lift him up in handcuffs, and still, he does not resist.

Olga hired an immigration attorney who, after reviewing the case, told her it was a lost cause. Several weeks after his arrest, Héctor called from detention and told her two things. The first was that he was going to ask to be deported, that the detention center was full of people who had been there for far too long, paying lawyers who charged anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000 for five months of representation, and that his lawyer had already told him his case was hopeless. The second was: “Olga, hang in there, get ready, and get the kids their passports.” Two of their children are minors, and by “get ready,” Héctor meant: prepare for your deportation, which would require Olga to take the kids to a country they’ve never been to, and where they don’t even have passports. Even for Olga, it wasn’t exactly clear what Héctor meant by “hang in there,” but het best guess is that he was telling her to hang in financially: the house where Olga and her children live costs $1,300 a month in rent, plus taxes, about $200 for electricity, and about $115 for water. Last night, Olga went out to adjust the water pressure so that “it doesn’t come out so strong.”

Every migrant I spoke with in Louisiana pays taxes using their Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN), a number that exists exclusively to allow undocumented residents to pay taxes and, perhaps, in some utopian future when immigrants are granted amnesty, to prove how long they’ve lived in the country. But that’s not all: they also pay for life insurance, car insurance, and taxes on property and utilities. And if they own a business, they pay additional federal and state income taxes on that. Leticia and Mario, who live on the outskirts of a city in a trailer, estimate they pay about $25,000 in taxes each year. But even that doesn’t entitle them to a driver’s license in the state of Lousiana. And, adding insult to injury, the money they pay no doubt goes to fund the terror they’re enduring.

“Olga, you’ve been here for years. Is it worse now than before?”

“We’re afraid to even leave the house.”

And she tells me how, even though her shift at the hotel she cleans starts at 8:00 in the morning, she’s started leaving the house at 5:00 a.m., “when it’s still dark and they can’t see what I look like.” Because Olga looks like what she is: a woman from Central American. Which is to say: in this hunt, she is the prey. Her fear heightened in early December when Gregory Bovino, then the “commander at large” of U.S. Border Patrol, and one of the architects of the crackdown, toured the French Quarter and New Orleans’ immigrant neighborhoods for the launch of Operation Catahoula Crunch. The great-grandson of Calabrian immigrants, Bovino was known as the “sanctuary buster,” in reference to his desire to punish cities that had declared themselves sanctuaries for migrants. In New Orleans, Bovino and 15 other agents, many of them in balaclavas, strutted around as if on parade, while other agents spread out across the city, hunting for more people. They wanted to be seen. Like many of these operations, the one in New Orleans was announced in advance. Catahoula Crunch was planned in public, weeks before it happened, while Operation Charlotte’s Web was still underway. It’s like a tour of state terror: agents go from city to city, advertising each stop in advance. The Trump administration’s strategy oscillates, it seems, between a genuine desire to detain as many people as possible, and a commitment to spreading the message and terrorizing many more. “It’s a campaign of state terrorism,” Leticia often says. That night, Olga asked the manager of the hotel where she works if she could sleep there, because ICE had been let loose on the city. The manager said no. Olga and a coworker brought a couple of cots into the service room and spent the night there in secret. Olga didn’t sleep.

“Olga, why is it worth it to stay here and endure all this terror?

“Well, when you’re an adult, you don’t live for yourself anymore, you live for your children. I’ve seen a lot of things happen—I’ve seen it in my own country. I’ll give you the example of my niece and sister-in-law. My sister-in-law fled her country. Gang members killed two of her sisters. What am I supposed to do with my kids if I go back to Honduras? Why would I bring them there? So that a gang member can tell me, “Guess what? This kid has to work for us now.” No, I’m not going to take my kids there and put them at risk. There’s no work there. How old is Fabio? He’s 17 now. That’s a really hard age to be in Honduras. To bring him there, at 17, just so a gang can take him from me or kill him? It would be like they killed me, but I’m still alive.”

She cried as she told me all of this.

Javier, Olga’s cousin, was also deported in November. He had lived here for 20 years, working construction. Little by little, he was able to pay to renovate his home back in Honduras, but the house is in the Rivera Hernández neighborhood, one of the most violent areas of one of the most violent cities in the world: San Pedro Sula. “The house is right between MS and 18th Street territories. He has a house—a beautiful home that he had built—but right now, he’s living with friends,” Olga explained. When I spoke to him on the phone, Javier told me that he’s thinking about coming back, but that thanks to Trump, smugglers are charging $19,000 now—almost double what they were charging five years ago.

Olga’s brother has cancer. When ICE intensified its hunting spree last November, he stopped going to work. He shut himself in his trailer. Last week, he finally started leaving the house again, which means that now, Olga’s daughter—who is a legal resident—has to pick him up every morning before dawn, together with some of Olga’s other friends, and drive them all to work before the sun comes up so that they aren’t exposed in the light and ICE can’t see what they look like.

“Olga, what is your life like now?”

“We don’t leave the house anymore, we don’t have family gatherings, we don’t have anything. Nobody visits anyone. It’s everyone for himself. My sister-in-law made a Christmas dinner. I didn’t go.”

Christmas last year was during Operation Catahoula Crunch.

 “Where did you spend Christmas?”

“Here, locked up in my house.”

On the TV that Olga muted, Telemundo is playing one of those shows where contestants have to navigate a bunch of creative obstacles to reach a finish line, falling, bumping into things, and getting hurt along the way.

February 12, 2026, morning

A story dominates the morning news programs. Yesterday, in response to an order from a federal judge, the U.S. Attorney’s Office released body camera footage and 220 text messages from an ICE agent who, in October of last year, fired five shots at a 30-year-old teacher and U.S. citizen, Marimar Martínez, claiming that she had rammed his vehicle in an attempt to disrupt an operation targeting migrants in Chicago. The video evidence contradicted the officer’s account. Marimar survived. The messages that the shooter, Charles Exum, sent to his fellow ICE agents were obscene: “I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book boys.”

To be an immigrant in the United States right now—whether undocumented, or the child, sister, or mother of someone undocumented—means to live in constant fear. Stories and images of ICE’s daily acts of brutality and terror are everywhere: social media, group chats, television, newspapers, phone conversations—you can’t avoid it if you wanted to. Play a song on YouTube, and an ad pops up starring Kristi Noem, Trump’s recently demoted Secretary of Homeland Security, warning migrants not to come, saying, “We will hunt you down.” And, from time to time, as in the case of Marimar, images of U.S. citizens being gunned down by ICE while people around the country—people without a single piece of paper authorizing them to be here—watch it all on their screens, every day. It creates a state of collective panic that can lead to extreme situations.

I arrive at the offices of Familias Unidas en Acción, an NGO founded by Mario and Leticia in 2018 that provides legal advice, know-your-rights education, food distribution, and other services and programs for people who can’t leave their homes or go to work because of the climate of fear. Leticia is currently an advisor to the organization.

When we get there, we notice a truck parked outside. A man and two children are sitting inside. I’m in a vehicle with the Catalan photojournalist Edu Ponces. Neither the man nor the children get out of the car. We park in front of them and walk into the office, where we’re greeted by Miriam Romero, who coordinates the group’s mental health response program. She tells us that she had wanted to introduce us to Don Nelson but that, strangely—because he’s always on time—he hasn’t shown up. I mention that we saw a truck out front with a man sitting inside. She goes out and comes right back in. Smiling, she tells us that the man in the old Mitsubishi pickup is Don Nelson, with his two sons, and that when he saw “the white guy”—the photographer—he thought it might be ICE, so he decided it would be better not to get out.

Miriam tells me that the cases they’ve been responding to are heartbreaking. With its network of 150 volunteers, the group delivers food to people across the city—people who have installed cameras outside trailers that they never leave; people who, when someone leaves food for them, call the Familias Unidas volunteers to confirm that no one else is outside, just the food, then open the door, snatch the food, and shut the door quickly, like someone afraid of a virus floating around the city. They’ve seen families who are unable to look for work because of the raids, and have had to cram into a single trailer with as many as two other families, or stay overnight in the restaurants where they work for weeks on end, without seeing their children.

Don Nelson, who is also from Honduras, crossed the border in September 2023. He came with his two children and their mother. Now, the boy is five years old and the girl is three, which means that Don Nelson and his partner made the trek with one small child in their arms, and the other in the womb. After they arrived in the U.S., the mother left Don Nelson for another man, and the family still has no idea where she is, or how to find her. Don Nelson, who rents a room in a trailer—where he has to walk through another room to get to his—was left alone with the children, and every day would leave them in the care of a woman, for $50 a day, while he went to work building boats—until the day a piece of rebar snapped the tensioner and ripped part of his finger off, mangling his right hand and leaving him with injuries to his arm, which he can still barely lift. The company paid him compensation, and the family was able to survive on that. And with that—with what’s left of his compensation—he plans to finance his family’s return to Honduras. They leave in one week. This is what Trump supporters call “self-deportation”—an option that sounds absurd, until it isn’t.

A man who fled a life of hardship and starvation working as a tailor and motorcycle-taxi driver in San Pedro Sula, Honduras. A man who finally decided to migrate after gang members started extorting him in his neighborhood of El Provenir. This man, with what little money he has left, is buying three plane tickets and going back home.

“Why, Don Nelson?”

“Well, I’ve been looking at social media, and even though it’s not my family or friends of anything, I break down every time. I’ve seen so many horrible things on TV, how they’re rounded people up, how they’re treating them, how they don’t even give people a chance to see their families. I mean, they’ve even killed U.S. citizens for standing up for us. So, I’d rather leave and take the kids with me,” he says, turning to look at his children, who hug him, “than never see them again. I don’t have any family here who can take care of them.”

“Before Catahoula Crunch, did you and the kids get out of the house much?”

“I’d walk places so that they could come along and have fun, playing with their little ball. We’d go down to the harbor together to watch the boats.”

Don Nelson has every right to return home and avoid the risk of his children being taken away, but his decision is nevertheless another victory for Trump and his campaign of terror: a man who fled his country and traveled more than 5,000 kilometers to get here, who worked hard every day until the work broke his body, who hasn’t had anyone close to him taken by ICE, has decided to “self-deport” amid a barrage of images that hit him every day, through his phone and TV, reminding him that ICE is coming, for him, and to separate him from his children. And so, he’s leaving. Because it’s better to leave than be taken. And he’s bringing his children with him.

We hear a knock at the door. Miriam opens it and welcomes in a Honduran woman who is looking for help filing Honduran passport applications for her three children, and getting everything else in order in case she gets caught in ICE’s dragnet. She needs to find a job. She hasn’t worked since November, for fear of the raids. “I haven’t left the house,” she says. But now she needs to risk it.

February 12, 2026, afternoon

Tagging along with Leticia is like getting sucked into a whirlwind. She’s been organizing in the community for so many years that her phone never stops ringing, and the situations of hardship she deals with in this time of extreme persecution are endless.

In the French Quarter, Mardi Gras is in full swing and the streets are packed with more than two million visitors. It’s a riot of revelry and booze. But we’re heading somewhere else—to a grayer side of town, to Clearview, a working-class neighborhood in another part of the city. On our way, Leticia talks on the phone to a friend who’s preparing to join the colorful Mardi Gras parades—not as a participant, but as part of the convoy of Central American migrants who follow behind, picking up the trash left by the partiers. Leticia puts the phone on speaker and asks the woman if people are afraid ICE might arrest them. “No, even the police look out for us, because if we didn’t pick up the trash this city would be a dump… They don’t ask us for papers or anything, we just sign up on a list. Should I sign you up?” her friend asks. It’s quite the paradox: in a city where hundreds of migrants are suffocating in fear and malnourished, locked up in their homes, others are walking the city’s most touristy streets without fear—as long as they pick up trash and leave the streets clean for the city’s true guests, who will be back the next day for more partying.

We arrive at Yosselin’s house. The pantry in her makeshift kitchen is empty, except for some bread and cookies. Once again, the “Leticia effect” works its magic and she builds trust in an instant. Yosselin, who is 30 years old, migrated from Honduras with her husband and two young children. Here in the United States, she had two more kids, including a recently delivered newborn. One of the children who was born in Honduras has hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a condition that causes the heart to thicken, restricting blood flow and potentially leading to sudden death. They had hoped he would receive better care here than in the rural department of Olancho where they lived.

Yosselin’s six-year-old son Eliam has level-three autism—the most severe level, and a condition that requires constant specialized care to treat severe deficits in communication and social abilities. Eliam is not receiving that kind of care. Yosselin is barely surviving. ICE took her husband on January 12. Before that, they hadn’t left the house for two months. Catahoula Crunch put an end to their small business selling dairy products and food from a street cart—they would have been too easy a target for ICE. For those three months, the family survived off the solidarity of friends and networks like Leticia’s, which provided them with food. But after two months without paying rent, they were evicted from their home and moved in here, where they share space with Yosselin’s two sisters and their five children. Eventually, Yosselin’s husband decided to take the risk and took a painting job. He left the house for the first time, trying to make a few dollars, and was immediately detained.

Several studies suggest that perceptions of insecurity tend to be greater than the reality, but the events of recent months contradict that assertion. What happened to Yosselin’s husband is not an isolated incident; it is one of many similar cases. He stepped one foot outside and was taken.

I can barely track the story Yosselin is still telling. Eliam, the boy with autism, has climbed onto the table and is throwing things. Having strangers in the house is agitating him. Leticia and Mario are standing next to Esdras and Gael. Eliam can’t control himself and lashes out at the youngest child. Leticia hands Yosselin a basket of food. The boy’s screams bounce off the walls of the cramped house where 12 people share three bedrooms and two bathrooms. More screams. “Calmate, mi amor.” The boy just grabbed a stick and trying to hit Gael, who runs into Leticia’s arms. “He needs therapy, because he’s at stage three… Sí, mi amor, come here.” More screams. More children emerge from the bedrooms. The oldest is 18 and the youngest was born just 12 days ago. Her father hasn’t met her. ICE took him away. “Come on, sweetie, come on, calm down, let go.” Gael is crying. Eliam is shouting. I get in another question, almost shouting as well: “Are you living on zero dollars right now!?” She answers me, also shouting: “Zero, nothing, nada, yesterday we had nothing to eat, we went to bed without eating!... Cálmese, mi amor. We haven’t paid rent in a month, the landlord is trying to evict us. My sisters don’t have jobs either, they’re out looking for work right now, in demolition… Cálmese, mi amor… My husband doesn’t have a date for his deportation hearing yet… I’m afraid to go out to look for work, they’ll take me and my kids will be left alone… This isn’t a life. ¡Uy, esperate, hold on, no, cuidado, be careful!

We step outside. I take a deep breath. Yosselin stays inside. All nine kids stay inside. The two sisters might make it back inside. Or they might not.

February 12, 2026, evening

We get back in the car. Leticia guides our way. We’re en route to Kenner, the place where Catahoula Crunch started—a suburb near the airport and the site of ongoing raids since December. 

Behind every door that Leticia opens is another surprise. The door on Dawson Street swings wide and we’re met with the sounds of an evangelical service: 17 people shouting their faith in a room measuring three by four meters. They weep, they shut their eyes tight, they yell hallelujahs and cry glory to God, they sing. They read Matthew 26:36 and Acts 16:25, telling how Paul and Silas, despite being chained and beaten in prison, prayed and sang hymns to God. It’s a typical service. Daisi, the Salvadoran host, is the captain of Kenner’s Guardianes del Barrio (Neighborhood Guardians), appointed by Leticia as part of an initiative led by her and Mario that aims to identify points of contact for every ICE hotspot in the city—people to communicate information, warn of operations, or let them know if someone’s going hungry. I think Leticia brought me here to demonstrate the importance of catharsis for a community so beaten down, so confined. Gael is sleeping in the arms of Leticia, who sits on the sofa, next to the pastor, smiling at me like someone who knows that something is about to happen.

The service ends. The pastor asks:

“Does anyone have a prayer request, brothers and sisters?”

“I do,” one woman says, “for my son. He was detained yesterday.”

“For my sister’s son! He’s in detention!” another says.

The pastor lets me address the congregation. My voice echoes in the small room when I ask: “Does anyone else have family members who have been detained or deported?” A Garifuna man responds: “They deported a cousin of mine a few months ago.” The woman who asked for prayers for her detained son doesn’t speak. “I spent six months taking care of two children whose parents were both deported,” says another woman. “They show up and they’re gone, they grab one or two people and leave, then they come back,” says a man. “And has anyone in this beautiful community been deported?” I ask. They reply in unison: “Not one. And it’s not going to happen! Glory to God! Hallelujah!” They all cheer.

“Faith without work is fruitless,” Leticia tells the group with a soft smile as she says goodbye. Then she goes out to the car and unloads some of the boxes of diapers she brought to distribute to the neighborhood.

“Are you tired?” Leticia asks me. It’s just after 9:00 p.m. “No,” I lie. “Then let’s keep going,” she says.

Just eight blocks from the makeshift church, we pull up to the home of Xiomara. She’s also from Honduras, also undocumented, and is an asylum seeker. She opens the door with confidence once she sees Leticia. Xiomara and her husband have lived here more than ten years, and their story makes a pattern with the others: two months without work since the start of Catahoula Crunch, surviving off savings and solidarity since the patrols cordoned off their block—the epicenter of the operation, where Gregory Bovino himself made an appearance. I think Leticia brought me here to see how subtle and insidious the terror can be. Xiomara has taken the big trash bin that most Americans keep outside their homes and dragged it inside. She saw a video of a teenager being detained by ICE while he was taking out the trash, and ever since, she prefers to keep it inside and wait for an opportune moment before dawn to take it out. Xiomara’s Christmas tree is still up, and she still keeps the letter her son wrote to Santa nestled in its branches. They didn’t have any money in December, or, for that matter, any desire to go out and buy toys. So, Santa didn’t come that month—ICE came instead. That’s why they keep the letter there, as a promise that one day the hunting will end, and Santa can finally come.

February 13, 2026, morning

We keep pace with the train as it parallels us along the highway. We’ve just left The Bunker and are on our way to drop Esdras and Gael off at the home of a family friend, so that we can keep knocking the doors of the victims of ICE’s campaign of terror. Leticia’s network is comprised of scores of undocumented families, all enduring a similar reality. They keep each other informed and ask each other for support via WhatsApp groups, which serve as a daily archive of persecution and hardship, but also as a testament to the solidarity of what Leticia calls “los jodidos por los jodidos”: people getting fucked by fucked-up people. Chat topics range from requests for milk and diapers to reports that ICE was seen hunting on this or that highway.

We head toward Slidell, a city about 50 kilometers northeast of New Orleans that, together with Kenner, bore the brunt of Operation Catahoula Crunch. Thanks to its wide, open spaces surrounded by wetlands and coastal forests, Slidell is an ideal place for trailer parks, and there are hundreds of undocumented families living here. And so, ICE falgged the city as an ideal hunting ground and deployed scores of plainclothes agents in unmarked cars to pursue anyone they thought looked like a migrant: anyone with tools in their truck bed, anyone wearing painter’s overalls, anyone with dark-skin who looked like they were driving to a job site. ICE is not hunting criminals. That farce of Trumpian rhetoric fell apart at first glance in Louisiana. Above all, ICE is hunting workers.

We pull into the Roque trailer park and approach the home of another woman from Honduras, Melissa. Her husband was arrested on November 3. Almost all of the detentions I’ve learned about so far did not take place during Catahoula Crunch. The operation undeniably intensified ICE’s presence for a few days, but it would be a mistake to think that the crackdown began or ended with it. More than anything, the operation was part of a communication strategy for spreading terror.

Melissa’s husband was taken by ICE in the parking lot outside their trailer, where a group of plainclothes agents had set up sting operation, pretending to buy some snacks at a nearby gas station.

The couple migrated here six years ago, when Melissa was pregnant. Back in Olanchito, the municipality where they’re from, her husband had worked as a delivery driver for Pepsi. One day, during one of the many instances of extortion he experienced, gang members held him captive for several hours, demanding more and more money. So, he decided to leave his country, hired a smuggler, and entered this one without permission. Like many others, Melissa and her husband tried to legalize their status and went to court, but the pandemic brought the world to a halt. When they tried to resume the process, they were told their case had expired.

I ask Melissa why her husband was detained, and she tells me it was because they thought he looked suspicious. “Suspicious of what?” I ask. “Of being Latino,” she says, without a hint of sarcasm.

Melissa is now a single mother with three children (ages 16, 12, and 8), and she survives on whatever the support network can provide, and by draining her savings. She no longer walks her kids to the road where the yellow school bus picks them up—in front of the gas station where her husband was arrested, just 200 meters from her trailer.

Recently, she entrusted the pastors at Rey de Reyes Church with a letter of guardianship for her children, who also have their Honduran passports. Everything is in order for a likely future: Melissa’s detention and deportation.

In the meantime, she takes all possible precautions: every morning, a neighbor who has papers walks her children to the bus stop.

“La solidaridad,” says Melissa. “Los jodidos por los jodidos,” repeats Leticia. We say our goodbyes and make our way to another trailer park, to witness the work of the solidarity network on full display.

The Tanami trailer park is only a few minutes’ drive away, and is even bigger than the previous one, with about 150 homes. We’re greeted by a Central American woman who has lived here since Hurricane Katrina. She’s the community captain appointed by Leticia for this trailer park, but she prefers not to have her name published. Fear runs deep in Slidell—so much so that the community has implemented a system: in the mornings, at around 4:00 a.m., before the sun rises, residents with legal status go out on “patrol,” as the captain puts it. 

They drive the highways and main roads around downtown Slidell and monitor the freeway that connects the city to New Orleans. If they don’t see any suspicious cars parked or driving around on patrol, they type “clear” in the group chat and everyone rushes off to work. If, on the other hand, they do see agents, they post an ice cube emoji. When that happens, no one leaves the trailer park, even if it means losing their job.

Community members have also installed cameras around the trailer park to monitor ICE activity, and they rely on the solidarity of some local Arab and Indian business owners, who alert them whenever they see suspicious cars drive past their stores. The community has created a kind of clandestine surveillance and communication network, with a decidedly less-than-clandestine purpose: getting to work. “And that’s just the group for this trailer park,” says the captain. “We have bigger groups operating at other trailer parks.”

Despite these efforts, ICE has still managed to take a lot of people. The captain steps out of her trailer and starts pointing and explaining: that the woman in the gray trailer is the mother of a little girl with a hearing impairment, that she hasn’t left her home in months because she’s a single mother and if she gets deported, her daughter will be left behind; hat the woman is still traumatized from an experience she had with the sheriff’s deputies—who also help ICE with their hunting—when they pulled her over and nearly smashed her car window, but she started screaming that the girl had a disability, so they let her go; that the brown trailer is empty; that the Mexican man who lived there was taken by ICE; that the little green trailer over there, “la verdecita,” is empty too; that they took the uncle and the father of a 17-year-old boy who lives in the two-bedroom trailer next to hers; that the boy is living alone now and only eats “because the neighbors feed him”; that he ran out of money and had to go back to working construction; that he doesn’t care much if ICE catches him because, after all, he doesn’t have anyone left in this country. “Since November, they’ve taken about 25 people from this parking lot alone,” the captain estimates. And then there’s Mr. Mendoza, who was taken by ICE with his wife, another Honduran migrant, leaving behind their three little dogs, Chaparra, Chiquis, and Capuchino.

The captain, who has keys to Mr. Mendoza’s trailer, calls him in Honduras and asks for permission to let me onto his property. The scrawny little dogs jump around and bark when they see us enter the backyard. Evidently, the neighbors have kept them fed. Los jodidos por los jodidos. But Mr. Mendoza’s 43 chickens, on the other hand, could not be contained. No one knows where they are now. From inside his trailer, I call Mr. Mendoza—Israel Mendoza, 49 years old. He tells me that he lived in Louisiana for 20 years, that he worked construction, that he had an open asylum case and a work permit, and that none of this stopped ICE from detaining him and his wife on November 4, on a piece of private property in Mississippi where he was installing a roof. Israel tells me that he wants to return to his trailer in Slidell. “I’d like to come back, but the smuggler is charging $17,000.”

At a certain point, following Leticia around becomes overwhelming. Behind every door is a new tragedy. And then, just when it seems the next story can’t possibly be worse, she tells me, matter-of-factly: “Tomorrow we’re going to visit the baby who’s about to die, whose dad was deported.”

February 14, 2026, late afternoon

On our way to Metairie, New Orleans’ largest suburb, we pull over in the parking lot of an Ideal Market, where Leticia and Mario pick up some beans, rice, and milk purchased by a local parish. Solidarity never sleeps, because ICE never stops hunting.

This morning, Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban migrants, said at a security conference in Munich that, “in a pursuit of a world without borders, we opened our doors to an unprecedented wave of mass migration that threatens the cohesion of our societies, the continuity of our culture, and the future of our people… Mass migration is not, was not, isn’t some fringe concern of little consequence. It was and continues to be a crisis which is transforming and destabilizing societies all across the West.”

We continue southeast, to Chalmette, a community that centuries ago was the site of one of the city’s largest slave plantations. Today, it’s a sprawling residential area with large homes and spacious lawns.

In one of these homes lives Melisa Pérez, a Guatemalan woman and the mother of two eight-year-old twins, whom she brought with her to this country about four months ago, when she and her husband migrated from the department of San Marcos where they lived. Melisa also has a 15-month-old baby.

Her baby has Pompe disease, a degenerative condition that affects one in every 100,000 children worldwide and causes weakness in the skeletal, cardiac, and respiratory muscles. The baby’s heart lacks the strength to pump blood. His lungs can barely do the work of breathing. The survival rate for infants with this condition is very low. Her son has a terminal diagnosis, but the geneticist who treated him connected Melisa with groups that support people with Pompe disease, and thanks to this support, she has been able to continue her son’s treatment—treatment that she otherwise would never be able to afford. Melisa says that no one in Guatemala knows how to treat Pompe disease. Many of the doctors she spoke to had never even heard of it. And even if they did know how to treat it, the medications her baby needs to survive cost about $1,000 a week. And she doesn’t know whether the U.S.-based organizations that are helping her now would continue to do so if she gets sent back to Guatemala.

Melisa is on her own now. Last December, at the height of Operation Catahoula Crunch, her husband and brother—her only close family here—were detained in Kenner, the epicenter of the crackdown. ICE ambushed them at work and forced them down from the roof they were repairing. Melisa’s uncle moved in to help her cover the cost of living. He was detained a few weeks ago.

Melisa can’t leave to find work. If she gets taken, her baby and her twin girls will be left alone. For now, she lives in this house, where a Guatemalan migrant she met in Florida offered to let her family stay in one of the bedrooms. Melisa doesn’t know how long this generosity will last. She has nowhere else to go. “The doctors tell me my son is going to die, but I see him full of life,” says Melisa. “All I want is to leave this place,” she says, sobbing. But for now, her son’s life and her desire to go home are at odds. 

We climb the stairs to the second floor, to see her son. He’s moving his wide-open eyes back and forth, taking in his surroundings, like any other baby. He’s in a crib, hooked up to three machines: one that suctions mucus, one that keeps his heart pumping, and one that keeps him breathing.

February 15, 2026

In the city’s French Quarter, tourists and locals party on Bourbon and Frenchmen Streets, strolling to sounds of ear-splitting music that blares from every direction, the clubs competing in decibels. Mardi Gras is in full swing. The partiers, as part of their yearly ritual, will leave more than 1,000 tons of trash in their wake—mostly plastic necklaces tossed from Creole-style balconies to anyone who flashes their breasts or butt. At the end of the street, a group of Latino immigrants trail behind the parade, picking up the garbage, sweeping it up with brooms, shoving it into a bin, packing it down. There’s no more room. The bin is full.

March 26, 2026

Today, Leticia handed Gael over to the woman who will take him back to Nicaragua, to reunite with his mother in the foothills of the mountains in the department of Madriz where they live. Leticia has spent most of the day crying. She dropped Gael off today to avoid making a scene of their separation at the airport tomorrow. In other words, to do what she’s been doing this whole time: making Gael’s life less difficult, happier, keeping him out of ICE’s sights. I send her a message, asking how she’s doing. She replies: “I have mixed feelings, but believe me, I’m happy my little boy will finally be in the arms of the mother who gave birth to him. He should never have been separated from her. Mario and I will be left with the purest and most sincere love we’ve experienced in a long time. I already miss him. My sadness is overwhelming, but so is my joy, because I have a son now who was born from my heart.”

*Translated by Max Granger