The first year of President Trump's second administration saw a remarkable 2,450% increase in the detention of non-citizen migrants with no criminal history.
Just as striking are the long and productive ties many of them have to U.S. communities and families — and the reality that a growing number face deportation back to countries they haven't seen in several decades, usually since they were children.
That migrant community crisis is especially heavy in South Florida — and especially for families like Olga Perez's.
These days, Olga's children and supporters gather often at the nonprofit Guatemalan-Maya Center in Lake Worth Beach to pray for her release.
READ MORE: Immigration court delays keep respected Lake Worth Beach mom detained, children in limbo
In November, two days before Thanksgiving, Florida Highway Patrol officers took Olga from her family's landscaping service truck and handcuffed her in front of her children. She was put in federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, custody.
Olga was then sent to the ICE detention center in Eloy, Arizona, where she's been awaiting a hearing on whether she'll be deported.
"Why?" Olga's 21-year-old daughter Eliza Perez asked WLRN during one gathering at the Guatemala-Maya Center this month.
"Why would they take a hard-working mother that pays taxes, that helps the community?"
Like her three younger siblings, Eliza is a U.S.-born citizen. Their mother came to the U.S. 30 years ago as a teenager escaping anti-Indigenous violence in Guatemala's highlands. Their father, an undocumented Guatemalan like Olga, was detained in September and is in migrant lock-up in Georgia.
"I missed Thanksgiving with both parents," Eliza said, fighting back tears.
"I missed Christmas. I missed New Year's. I missed my 21st birthday. Y'know ... how much more do I have to miss?"
Eliza's mother Olga has no criminal history, but she does have a tax-paying business. She's a revered translator of Spanish and Maya Mam — she has helped local agencies like the Palm Beach County Sheriff's office in the past — and a Lake Worth Beach community leader. She's raised her kids, they say, to be good students and citizens.
She is, by all accounts, not the criminal migrant profile President Trump insists his sweeping deportation crusade is targeting.
But her case is common now: data show more than half the migrants deported in the past year under Trump had no criminal convictions.
"If an immigration judge decides to deport someone like Olga," said Guatemalan-Maya Center assistant executive director Mariana Blanco, "I think it's clear we're not going after only these criminals the Trump administration has been talking about.
"We're increasingly going after people who contribute — and have contributed for decades."
READ MORE: Taken by ICE moments after securing a path to legal migrant status: a Honduran's story
Said Olga's 18-year-old daughter Jessica Perez: "It just makes the United States look bad. In reality they're just picking up mothers, fathers, even kids, more than dangerous people."
Last week, several Florida sheriffs — including Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd, chair of the State Immigration Enforcement Council — criticized that trend and sent a letter to the Trump administration urging it to reconsider its current migrant arrest and deportation agenda.
Eliza, the oldest Perez sibling, has put her college computer science studies on hold to keep the family's landscaping business going.
But to her, she said, the biggest injustice is that their mother Olga faces deportation to a country, Guatemala, she hasn't seen in 30 years — and which had a 270% increase in murders last year, mostly gang-related.
The State Department, in fact, recently put Olga's home province, Huehuetenango, on its "Do Not Travel" list.
"If my mother's deported to Guatemala we're worried they'll think she's rich because she's lived in the U.S. for such a long time. What if people try to rob her or kidnap her for ransom?"
"My mom has talked about the reality that she would have no place to live" in Guatemala, Eliza said.
"But at the same time she said maybe people are going to think that she's rich. They could probably try and rob her or kidnap her because she lived in the United States for such a long time. They might think, 'Oh, her four U.S. citizen children can pay her ransom,' you know."
Last week, for the fifth time, an immigration judge in Arizona postponed Olga's deportation hearing.
If she is in fact eventually sent back, one thing Guatemalan deportees like her were thought to have in their favor now was Guatemala's more progressive president, Bernardo Arévalo.
Historically, migrants deported to Central America have gotten little if any re-integration assistance with burdens like housing and employment. In fact, they're often regarded with suspicion because of their time in the U.S.
Arévalo wants to change that — if, that is, he can.
"His is a very well-intentioned program — I mean, at least it generates a more welcoming environment," said Eduardo Gamarra is a political science professor and Latin America expert at Florida International University.
Gamarra recently visited Guatemala to see if the Arévalo government's "more welcoming" deportee re-integration program is in fact working. His verdict: "It does generate some hope for those returning. But because the programs are so underfunded, it's going to be nothing more than hope."
A big reason, Gamarra found, is that Guatemala no longer gets funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID — which the Trump administration shut down last year.
Gamarra worries that may only perpetuate the illegal immigration cycle.
"All of that is a big issue," he said, "across Central America."
And across Latin America generally.
An undocumented Mexican migrant named Armando came to Florida in 2003 when he was seven years old. Even though he hasn't set foot in Mexico since then, he was deported back there in October.
Armando, who asked WLRN not to use his last name because he hopes to apply for a U.S. visa this year, also had no felony record. He was a tax-paying worker in Florida's construction sector — which depends on undocumented migrants.
"It doesn't make any sense," said Armando, "because how does it maintain the economy when you take all the workers out?"
Alligator Alcatraz
Armando, who like Olga Perez had been living in Palm Beach County, spoke to WLRN from Mexico City, where he's living now and trying to find work — and friends.
He said he was on his way to a construction job last July when a Florida Highway Patrol officer pulled him over for having over-tinted car windows. He was taken to U.S. Border Customs and Border Protection custody in Riviera Beach.
Armando was then sent to the controversial Everglades migrant detention center known as Alligator Alcatraz — which Trump administration and Florida officials hd expressly said they intended for criminal migrants.
"In Alligator Alcatraz, there's a lot of racism, a lot of hatred," Armando said.
"We were treated like animals, like we killed somebody. I was called a rapist, I was called a wetback. It's hard, because you know you're not that person, you know?"
After getting COVID inside Alligator Alcatraz, Armando was sent to detention centers in Puerto Rico and Louisiana, until he ended up in Tacoma, Washington.
Realizing he'd likely never be released under Trump administration policy, he agreed to self-deport.
"The new administration guidelines for migrants in detention have made it almost impossible for them to apply for immigration relief," said Armando's attorney, Andres Amon, in Lake Worth Beach, explaining Armando's decision.
"I'm heartbroken, because I'm starting at the bottom again."
Armando said immigration officials told him he'd get a $1,000 stipend under the Homeland Security Department's Project Homecoming (which this year has upped the payment to $2,600).
But, he said, "It's just lies. There's a lot of people that self-deported because, you know, they were gonna get the money. None of us that were in [Tacoma] got any money."
Homeland Security told WLRN not all self-deportees are eligible for the stipend. But it could not comment on Armando's case because he is not disclosing his full name.
After agreeing to self-deport, Armando was flown to the U.S. southern border in October and bussed into Mexico. Officials there gave him $100 in pesos, and he was on his own.
He tried re-connecting with relatives in his home state of Guanajuato, but he was soon threatened by members of the local Santa Rosa de Lima drug cartel.
"You just hear shots at night, and you can't be outside after 9, because the bad people will come and be like, 'Hey, if you don't pay, we're gonna kill you,'" Armando recalled.
"And it's just that easy for them. I'm used to another world of, y'know — security."
So Armando made his way to the home of a family friend in Mexico City. Now, at the age of 30 and single, he's fighting loneliness and depression as an outsider.
"People here don't see me as being fully Mexican," he said. "I stick out.
"And their Spanish is not the Spanish I know — like all the names of the of the streets, I still can't figure them out. You're just stuck in your house, and you can't really do anything.
"I'm heartbroken because I'm starting from the bottom again."
READ MORE: As more migrants self-deport, many say a surge in racism is a key factor
Unfortunately, said Amon, seemingly cruel situations like Armando's, involving childhood migrants forced back to their countries after several decades, are the rule and the exception because "discretion is now non-existent.
"Immigration judges say they feel like their hands are tied."
Because Armando was brought to the U.S. as a boy in 2003, he now regrets not signing up years ago for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, that would have given him legal status.
He didn't, he said, because his migrant worker family couldn't afford the $600 fee when his mother became ill.
He said immigration officials in Tacoma also told him he could apply for a return visa to the U.S. this year. But now: "I've been talking with some of the people that were with me in the Tacoma detention center," Armando said.
"One, he said he was told he can't come back legally for five years, even though he self-deported and he didn't have anything criminal in the system."
That five-year ban, Armando has since learned, is punishment for even self-deporting migrants who had been in the U.S. for, well, for as long as Armando had been.
"The only solution" for cases like Armando's and Olga Perez's, Amon said, "is immigration reform. Congress has to update our immigration laws to give people in these circumstances relief," such as paths to legal status instead of tickets to Alligator Alcatraz — as many Florida sheriffs are now recommending.
Until then, Armando knows the other heartbreaking reality is that his chances of legally returning any time soon to the U.S. — that is, to his de facto real country — are slim.
Copyright 2026 WLRN
