It was bright and cool that day in May when a team of federal agents knocked on Miguel’s door, shattering an otherwise idyllic spring morning in this hardscrabble Southeast Memphis neighborhood.
The armed agents would later write in reports that they were checking on the safety of immigrant children. But they soon turned their attention to Miguel, 22, who came to the U.S. with his father when he was 11, fleeing the unforgiving poverty and violence of their native Central America.
Despite Miguel’s protests that he had legal documents, the agents handcuffed him. His mother too, distraught and crying, was cuffed.
Though she was quickly released, Miguel was arrested, spending more than a month in a crowded detention center run by a private company with political ties to the Trump administration. A judge later placed him on supervised release. Now, as he works to support his seven younger siblings, he wears an ankle monitoring bracelet owned by a subsidiary of the same company while his case winds through immigration court and a maze of uncertainty.
“Today, we’re here talking,’’ Miguel told a reporter. “Tomorrow you might hear that I have been deported. I am afraid.”
Miguel had no previous arrest history and was under no suspicion of criminal activity, facts reflected in the arresting officers’ reports.
His arrest and detention highlight a number of concerns about aggressive methods used in President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown and the motives behind it. Among those concerns, protections once afforded to vulnerable children and young adults like Miguel are now being pared back.
Though Miguel entered the country as a child without authorization, since 2022 he’s been enrolled in the Special Immigrant Juvenile Status (SIJS) program. It offers a path to permanent legal residency to youths who have been victims of abuse, abandonment, or neglect. Critically, Miguel received a grant of “deferred action,” a legal protection that is supposed to inoculate him from deportation until June 2026 but is now being phased out by the Trump administration.
“It is pure harassment,” said Miguel’s attorney, Skye Austin, who fears the government will run out the clock on her client’s time-limited protection. He faces discrimination and possible violence if returned to his homeland, and should be granted asylum, she said.
Miguel is not alone. Nationwide, numbers of young people with deferred action are being arrested and deported as part of a sweeping enforcement effort that immigration attorneys say is illegal.
“This is part of a very concerted effort to shoot first — or break the law first — and ask questions later,’’ said S. Ellie Norton, senior staff attorney for the National Immigration Project, a nationwide membership organization of attorneys, advocates, and community members.
“The government knows that the only way that these kids can really challenge their unlawful detention is by bringing a federal lawsuit, which is just incredibly difficult for people to do if they don’t have the resources to hire a qualified attorney who can litigate a complicated lawsuit like this.”
According to arrest reports reviewed by the Institute for Public Service Reporting, agents encountered Miguel in his driveway as they were conducting wellness checks on “Unaccompanied Alien Children” across Memphis. Those checks involve unannounced home visits by armed agents, nominally to ensure that immigrant children are safe from abuse, trafficking, and other harm. But a growing number of immigrant advocates say the Department of Homeland Security is using wellness checks as a pretext to encounter and arrest as many immigrants as possible, including guardians who are undocumented.
“These wellness checks are not really to check up on the kids,’’ said Casey Bryant, executive director of Advocates for Immigrant Rights in Memphis. “They’re to see who and what status the guardians are in.”
Many critics see racism and cruelty as factors driving these actions. But some point to another motive: steering profits to the president’s friends and supporters.
Following his arrest by agents with Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), a division of DHS’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Miguel was confined for five weeks in the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Jena, Louisiana. The 1,160-bed facility is operated by The GEO Group Inc., a private prison company that serves as ICE’s largest contractor.
Miguel was later placed on supervised release and fitted with an ankle bracelet owned by BI Incorporated, a subsidiary of GEO Group.
To date, GEO Group has earned an estimated $6,500 in taxpayer funds for housing and monitoring Miguel, who is one of nearly a quarter-million immigrants currently in detention or under supervised release — functions ICE provides with assistance from private contractors. For GEO Group, the immigration crackdown has led to a surge in revenue. Records show the firm collected more than $600 million in the second quarter of this year alone, a 5 percent increase over the same period last year.
Critics say those profits are tainted by a series of cozy relationships between GEO Group and the Trump administration. For one, GEO Group’s executives, political action committee, and wholly owned subsidiary donated nearly $2 million to Trump’s campaign, inauguration celebration, and related organizations.
“The increase in arrests, detention, and deportation of our neighbors [by] this administration is tearing apart hard-working families and harming our communities,” said Lisa Sherman Luna, executive director at the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition. “Tennesseans don’t want to see families torn apart, but this cruelty on the taxpayer dime is happening because those in power know that if they can blame and divide the people they can continue to hold on to power and also help their friends and lobbyists make billions of dollars.”
Neither GEO Group, ICE, nor the Department of Homeland Security responded to a series of email and voicemail messages seeking comment.
Questions surround arrest
Miguel can’t get the images of his arrest out of his head. Standing in his driveway, with metal cuffs on his wrists, he watched as federal agents restrained his mother, a diminutive woman who speaks little English. “Honestly, I felt anger as a son,” Miguel said. “Well, one gets angry.”
Miguel says the agents came to his home asking for his 17-year-old brother, who was in school at the time. Arrest paperwork shows the encounter happened as HSI agents were “conducting UAC checks in Memphis” — wellness checks on “Unaccompanied Alien Children”. In his brother’s absence, the agents interrogated Miguel and arrested him.
“Me sentí como que pues como un criminal,” Miguel said in his native Spanish — “I felt like a criminal.’’
According to Miguel, when he asked why he was being arrested, an agent said only, “You are going to be removed from the country.”
Returning to his homeland could be very detrimental to Miguel, said Austin, his attorney. Miguel is a member of an indigenous Central American tribe that is marginalized and oppressed, she said.
“It’s very hard for anyone from his tribe to find jobs and … the government doesn’t protect them,’’ she said. “There’s been murders of indigenous people.’’
Miguel and his seven siblings all have Special Immigrant Juvenile Status, or SIJS, a classification designed to protect undocumented minors from deportation if they have been victims of abuse, neglect, or abandonment. According to court records, the children’s father abandoned the family when Miguel was a teenager.
Passed by Congress in 1990, SIJS gives these youths a pathway to obtain a Green Card to establish permanent residency. Critically, a 2022 policy by the Biden administration allowed SIJS recipients to receive “deferred action,” a temporary form of prosecutorial discretion. Under deferred action, authorities delay taking any removal or deportation actions for a specified period of time. Deferred action gives an SIJS enrollee time to wait out the long backlog of applicants seeking a Green Card.
Miguel was 17 when he obtained a court order declaring it was not in his best interest to return to his homeland, a critical step in obtaining SIJS status. He received SIJS status and a grant of deferred action a year later. A copy of his 2022 notice of deferred action shows he received protection from deportation for four years — until June 2026. All of Miguel’s siblings also have received deferred action.
Now, however, the Trump administration is moving to dismantle the Biden policy that granted deferred action protections for SIJS youth, citing widespread “fraud and abuse.” U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said in a 36-page report that it had uncovered “significant national security and public safety concerns” within the program including the granting of protections to hundreds of “known or suspected” gang members.
The Department of Homeland Security announced in June that it was eliminating deferred action for new SIJS enrollees. The policy change isn’t intended to immediately affect SIJS enrollees like Miguel who already have deferred action, according to immigration attorneys interviewed for this story. A June 6th announcement by DHS’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said that SIJS recipients with deferred action “will generally retain” that protection, although they cannot renew it once it expires.
Yet ICE/HSI agents appear to be making a different interpretation.
An HSI agent acknowledged in Miguel’s arrest report that he had deferred action yet said agents proceeded with the arrest because “no applications to adjust status have been filled at this time.” Adjusting status refers to the process of acquiring permanent residency through a Green Card. To do that, an SIJS recipient must file a separate application.
However, Miguel has been barred from doing so because of the long backlog of SIJS immigrants seeking visas. The date when Miguel can apply is believed to be months away though the exact period of time is uncertain.
Memphis immigration attorney Andrew J. Rankin likened the situation to a Catch-22.
“He can’t file through no fault of his own due to government visa backlog,’’ said Rankin, who has no connection to the case.
Deferred action has always been a form of “administrative grace” but has become extremely fragile under Trump, Rankin said. Grants of deferred action historically have been withdrawn only when the recipient did “something to merit revocation, like committing a crime,” he said.
“Prior to this administration it was honored. It meant something,” he said.
It’s unclear how many youths with SIJS protections have been arrested, but lawyers with the End SIJS Backlog Coalition say they’ve received about 50 reports from across the country.
“Not only are they unlawfully detaining and deporting [SIJS deferred action recipients]; they’re stripping them of their ability to ever get the permanent protection that this whole journey was supposed to be leading toward because a SIJS youth has to be in the United States to apply for lawful permanent resident status,’’ said Rachel L. Davidson, director of the national End SIJS Backlog Coalition.
Detention in Louisiana
After he was cuffed, Miguel found himself in the back of an unmarked SUV, heading to an immigration holding facility near the airport. Miguel said he continued to plead his case, telling the agents about his SIJS classification and protection from deportation. After waiting three hours inside a cell, officials from the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center picked him up.
“They cuffed me with chains around the waist, the hands, chains on my feet,” he recalled.
Miguel said he sat in shackles in the back of a minivan during the 319-mile drive from Memphis to the detention center in Jena, Louisiana. There, he was stripped of his possessions, given a blue jumpsuit and toiletries.
Miguel said officials then tried to get him to sign a voluntary departure that would have sent him back to Central America, an assertion confirmed in HSI’s arrest report. Miguel said the forms are in English and detainees are not always made aware of what they are signing.
According to Austin, this is becoming a common practice: “Unfortunately, being detained is inhumane, and I can very much understand why some people would just sign the paperwork just to get out of there.”
There were 6,034 voluntary departures nationwide in August, according to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. In contrast, 943 were recorded in August 2024.
Miguel describes the detention facility as a large room with white walls, a few tiny widows, bathrooms, sinks, and pay phones. About a hundred men slept in bunk beds with the lights on throughout the night, he said. During his five weeks at the facility, the beds were rarely empty.
Surge in GEO’s revenue
The center is one of about 100 detention or prison facilities operated by GEO Group, a publicly traded firm headquartered in Boca Raton, Florida. The company reported $636.2 million in revenue for the second quarter of 2025, a 4.8 percent increase compared to the same quarter last year — a surge that came as the Trump administration began ramping up its immigration crackdown.
George Zoley, GEO Group’s chairman, said during an August earnings call that the need for beds increased at 21 of the firm’s facilities during the second quarter.
“[It’s] the highest level of ICE utilization in our company’s history,” Zoley said.
GEO Group’s “ICE utilization” involves more than just detention beds. It involves tracking devices, too.
A June 9th ICE memo suggests the 183,000 immigrants under the Alternatives to Detention program should be fitted with tracking devices “whenever possible,” The Washington Post reported in July. Currently, Miguel and 24,000 other immigrants are wearing electronic ankle bracelets, a number that is expected to increase as national immigration enforcement intensifies.
GEO Group subsidiary BI Incorporated manufactures GPS ankle monitors and has been contracting with ICE’s Intensive Supervision Appearance Program for 20 years. According to ICE’s website, the daily cost for one of these devices is estimated at $4.20 per person.
For Miguel, living with one of these ankle monitors is a struggle.
“Walking with it is painful, and honestly it bothers me. It’s uncomfortable,” he said.
The stigma surrounding the tracking device has also taken a toll on Miguel. Out in public, people stare at him as if looking at a hard-core criminal, he said, reminding him he is still not free.
“I still feel tied up,” Miguel said.
GEO Group and ICE’s partnership
As GEO Group’s revenues have surged, so have questions about ties between the company and members of Trump’s administration.
The Washington Post reported in May that Trump’s Border Czar Tom Homan earned at least $5,000 in consulting fees from GEO Group in the two years prior to his January appointment as Trump’s border czar. “Ethics rules do not require any more specific disclosure, and the amount Homan received could be far higher,’’ The Post reported.
In late August, three Democratic members of the House of Representatives sent a letter to Homan inquiring about his ties to the company. The document alleges the border czar was influential in the appointment of David Venturella, a former GEO Group executive, as one of ICE’s top officials overseeing contract management for immigration detention centers.
The congressmen allege in the letter that Homan’s past consulting for GEO Group and his involvement with Venturella “raise serious concerns about potential conflicts of interest.”
The letter says Homan should be recused from “all matters that could directly or indirectly benefit GEO Group, including through the award, writing, and execution of federal contracts.”
Questions about Homan intensified earlier this fall when national media outlets reported that he was caught on tape in September 2024 accepting a bag filled with $50,000 in cash from undercover FBI agents posing as businessmen, allegedly to help them obtain contracts related to immigration enforcement if Trump was elected president. The Washington Post, New York Times, and other news media organizations reported that the Trump administration later shut down the bribery probe that was launched when Joe Biden was president.
Homan has since denied taking $50,000, calling the allegation a “hit piece.”
The Trump White House pushed back, too.
“This blatantly political investigation, which found no evidence of illegal activity, is yet another example of how the Biden Department of Justice was using its resources to target President Trump’s allies rather than investigate real criminals and the millions of illegal aliens who flooded our country,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in a statement in response to the reports. “Tom Homan has not been involved with any contract award decisions. He is a career law enforcement officer and lifelong public servant who is doing a phenomenal job on behalf of President Trump and the country.’’
Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) says the government should release of any video and audio evidence to clear up the matter.
“We want those released to the public,” Representative Raskin told CNN. “If there’s no crime and they really think that the whole thing should be quashed, then they should not be afraid of showing that to the public.”
The Institute for Public Service Reporting reached out to ICE, the White House, and GEO Group for comment but has yet to receive a response.
Living in limbo
It has been five months since Miguel was released from detention on a $2,500 bond. The order of release by U.S. Immigration Judge Jamee Comans cited a “full consideration of the evidence presented,’’ which included documents showing he was protected by deferred action.
Since then, Miguel’s days have been filled with uncertainty.
“What is going to happen with me? What is going to happen in the future?” he asked, concerned that neither he nor his lawyer have received any updates regarding his case. “I am confused.”
Miguel and his mother are the financial providers for the family of nine. They work opposite schedules at local manufacturing companies. If he is removed from the country, the family would lose half its financial support.
Attorney Austin describes Miguel as an “incredibly selfless” person.
“Everything that he does is for his mom and his siblings,” she said.
But she realizes she is fighting against time to keep him in the country. Miguel’s deferred action expires next June, when he will lose his protection from deportation.
His next immigration check-in has been set for December.
As he waits, Miguel says he cherishes every moment he has with his family, “sharing conversations, meals, and laughter.” But he is aware that things can change at any given moment. He says family separations are painful and crippling.
“It’s as if they clip off one of your wings,” he said.
Erika Konig is an intern for the Institute for Public Service Reporting. A senior journalism student at the University of Memphis, she is a first-generation college student and a naturalized citizen from Mexico. She graduated summa cum laude from Southwest Tennessee Community College before enrolling last spring in the U of M.
Editor’s note: Miguel is not the real name of this story’s central character, who asked to not be identified for fear of repercussions against his family. As a general practice the Institute for Public Service Reporting does not use pseudonyms but is doing so here because of the sensitive nature of this story, which shines light on the plight of many immigrants.