As immigration enforcement intensifies, Tucson families are separated

In early February, several black SUVs with tinted windows pulled onto Mari’s property. She says there were numerous agents, heavily armed, with their weapons drawn.

“The machine guns were always drawn on us,” she said. “At no time they put their arms down, even though they knew we were no threat. And I declared and I showed them his documents and said, ‘He is legally here. What are you doing?’ And they did not care.”

We have changed Mari’s name because she is afraid of retribution for telling her story.

Mari’s husband has lived in the U.S. for about 30 years. As a teenager with his family, he fled death threats from organized criminal groups in Mexico.

He started an immigration case in 2022, pursuing protection under the international human rights treaty, the Convention Against Torture, which is akin to asylum. The government issued him a work permit, and he was attending regular immigration check-ins while awaiting his scheduled “reasonable fear interview.”

“So that day they came and they took him from our house, which will be recorded in my head forever, because they just came here with machine guns and everything like if we were criminals and tore our family apart, and that was horrific, and that will be in my mind forever,” she said. “They have destroyed us mentally, emotionally, and physically because my husband is our sole support, and with him gone, we are in critical with losing our home.”

Not only is her husband the breadwinner for their family, running a successful landscaping business, but he also takes care of his wife and his son’s physical health. Their adult son who lives with them has developmental disabilities and experiences seizures. And Mari eats through a feeding bag after multiple surgeries on her intestines and stomach due to cancer. She can’t access the bags without his help lifting them.

“I depend on my husband 100%, and I have been so ill and so weak, and I've been losing weight since my husband was taken and it's just getting worse my primary says I need to get my husband back with me, because he's the one that takes care of me and cares for me and makes sure that I keep going, because without him, I cannot keep going,” she said.

Mari talks to her husband on the phone, for the few minutes he's allowed to call her from immigration detention.

Danyelle Khmara

Mari’s lawyer Siovhan Ayala says arresting him while he was complying with everything the government was asking for is inhumane.

“They're detaining a lot of people. It used to be, before Trump was in office, that people were being arrested based on their criminal records, but in the detention center, I've seen recently people being arrested who were just on their way to take the garbage out or walking along the street and no criminal activity going on, and then they were arrested,” she said.

John Sandweg, an acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the Obama administration, says the Trump administration plans to arrest everybody they encounter with a nexus to immigration enforcement.

“Regardless of whether or not they meet some priority — meaning, whether they just crossed that border or they’ve lived here 20 years, have U.S. citizen kids and have no nexus to the criminal justice system,” he said. “Everybody's being treated, pretty much across the board, as a priority.”

ICE is not giving the public much information about their operations or arrests and did not respond to requests for an interview for this story.

Maria Carrasco with Derechos Humanos, a human rights group based in Tucson, says what they’re seeing is when people are detained by ICE, their families often don’t know where they’ve been taken.

“They take them to different places, and we cannot find them. And it is really worrying, you know, for the family,” she said. “You just worry about your loved ones and you cannot find them anywhere.”

She says many people being detained do not have a criminal record and many live here and pay taxes and have jobs and families.

According to the nonprofit Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, undocumented immigrants paid nearly $97 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022, of which more than $700 million came from Arizona.

Carrasco says there have also been numerous cases of ICE showing up at businesses, saying they are doing an I-9 audit, a check that employers are complying with federal laws regarding the employment eligibility of their workforce.

Luis Campos, an attorney volunteering with Derechos Humanos and other immigrant rights organizations, represents such a business, a carnicería on the south side. In March, witnesses say more than a dozen masked agents arrived in numerous unmarked vehicles.

“It was a tremendous show of force,” he said. “I think they were armed. I think at some point some of them had face coverings and it seemed extraordinarily militaristic, given what the purpose was.”

Campos says the agents were there for an I-9 audit and to deliver a search warrant for related documents. They left without arresting anyone and took no further legal action.

AZPM reached out to ICE to confirm the details of the incident, but again they did not return our messages.

“When you bring that many agents it's because there might be targeted arrests, particularly individuals that might have criminal records and there's probably need to secure the perimeter and ensure the safety of individual officers you need to have many officers present,” he said. “This was not that.”

Sandweg, the former acting ICE Director, says worksite immigration enforcement is another place where there’s been an uptick, which is likely to continue and expand, as well as border officials collaborating with local and federal agencies not typically involved in border enforcement.

“All of these are just truly unprecedented efforts, overall, in terms of interior immigration enforcement,” he said. “I really think are also largely designed to create a climate of fear within the immigrant communities in order to encourage a self-deportation. And I don't think the administration is shy about admitting that.”

Mari is still coping with her husband's detention.

She has reached out to Senator Mark Kelly’s office for help. They did not respond to requests for an interview regarding this story.

Mari and her husband’s friends and family helped start a GoFundMe to help her get by while he’s detained. But she has also begun selling their belongings. During a yard sale, she sold some of her husband’s grilling and cooking equipment.

“I was hoping — I was like, I hope everything else sells but not this, and that was the first thing that I sold,” she said. “So at that point, I got emotional. But it's hard to get rid of anything because, like I said, my husband is just, every little thing that he would buy is with a lot of love. And so everything here at the yard sale means a lot, because he buys everything thinking about me, to please me, to make me happy.”

Mari visits her husband in detention twice a week, but she still doesn’t know when he’ll be released.

Samantha Callicutt is a University of Arizona journalism student and a student-employee at AZPM.