‘They lied to us from the beginning’: Deported Louisiana family says ICE lured them with ruse

by Bobbi-Jean Misick, Verite, Louisiana Illuminator
March 14, 2025

Stephanie Ali did not think she and her family were being deported to Honduras in late January, until they reached their gate inside a Houston airport.

Earlier that day, she, her mother Claudia Hernandez and younger brother Jason met with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents near their home in Metairie, where they were told they were going to Houston for a hearing in immigration court, Stephanie said.

But instead of escorting them out of the airport when they deplaned in Houston, agents walked them to another gate, according to Stephanie. The flight display said “McAllen” – a Texas city close to the Mexican border.

“I was so scared,” Stephanie said in a phone interview with Verite News from her aunt’s home in San Pedro Sula, a city in northwestern Honduras. “Even just to think of it right now, I start to cry because it’s so horrible.”

She said ICE agents in Louisiana had assured her family that they were not under arrest and weren’t being deported.

But by the following day, they were back in Honduras — the country where Stephanie was born, but barely remembered. By the time the ICE agents returned her there in January, the family had been living in the United States since she was 10, 14 years earlier.

Jason, who was three when the family came to the United States, couldn’t remember Honduras at all.

Soon after they flew into the country, the Alis’ travel visas expired. The family, however, remained.

For years they sought a legal way to stay in the U.S, applying for asylum on the basis that they’d been targeted by gangs. The claim was denied.

“New Orleans was home for us, and they literally just took it away from us like they didn’t care about us,” Stephanie said.

Days before the family’s abrupt removal from the country, Donald Trump was inaugurated for his second term as U.S. president. As a candidate, Trump promised to take an extremely hard line on immigration — enhanced border security, vastly expanded use of immigration detention and mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.

On his first day in office, Trump signed a series of executive actions related to immigration, including one that expanded the “expedited removal” process, making it easier to quickly deport undocumented immigrants. After Trump’s election, immigrant activists in the New Orleans metro area warned communities to brace for increased encounters with ICE.

The Ali family had been on ICE’s radar, facing removal, for some time. They had a pending application for a temporary reprieve from deportation when, in mid-January, a case manager working for an ICE contractor asked them for a meeting at a nearby office, promising “good news.”

For months the family had been monitored through one of ICE’s “alternatives to detention” programs, which use various technologies to track immigrants who are not detained and pose little or no security threat. The case manager said the family didn’t need to be under surveillance anymore.

When they arrived ICE agents were waiting for them. Less than 36 hours later, they were in Honduras.

While deceptive, such “ruses,” as they are referred to in internal agency memos and operational manuals are neither illegal nor new. But some immigrants’ rights advocates said they are concerned that agents will increase their use of ruses under Trump, creating chaos in immigrant communities.

“There’s a huge human cost,” said Jeremy Jong, an attorney at immigrant support organization Al Otro Lado. “Let’s say a single parent gets tricked and detained and they don’t have any time to make sure people are responsible for their kids. What happens to their kids?”

ICE did not respond to multiple requests from Verite News for interviews, answers to questions about methods used to arrest immigrants and about the events surrounding the Ali family’s deportation.

Attorneys for the family, at Mayeaux and Associates in Baton Rouge, declined an interview request but confirmed Stephanie’s timeline of the events leading up to the Jan. 29 deportation.

‘Y’all lied to us’ 

Members of the Ali family had been facing removal since 2018, when they were denied an asylum claim that would have allowed them to remain in the country legally. They were then placed under a removal order.

In 2023 the family applied for a temporary stay on deportation. But that application was still in process when, in October of last year, they were placed in the surveillance program, which required them to be tracked through a GPS monitoring app on their phones and to meet periodically in person with a case manager.

Hernandez, Stephanie’s mother, said she was nervous when they were first placed under supervision. The immigrants she knew in the program had only recently arrived in the U.S.

The Ali family had been in the country for more than a decade, moving here to escape gang violence, according to filings in the family’s immigration case, which were reviewed by Verite News.

Those filings also show that in Honduras, Julio, who worked as an accountant, had become a target for extortion simply because gang members assumed he had money.

“My husband and I decided to flee for this reason, because we did not want to be killed by the gangs,” Hernandez said in a sworn statement from 2023.

The Alis arrived in the United States in 2011. Here, Claudia said, she finally felt safe.

“You could be free to do your things, be yourself and you don’t have to hide anything,” she said, speaking Spanish while Stephanie translated.

The family made a life in the New Orleans area, settling in Metairie. Julio worked in construction until his death in 2022. Hernandez said she worked as a cleaner on construction sites when the family first arrived, but switched to cleaning houses because the schedule allowed her to be home when her kids returned from school.

The children grew accustomed to American life. Jason said he only realized his family was undocumented as an adolescent.

Stephanie, now 24, had received a life-saving open heart surgery at Children’s Hospital in New Orleans when she was 11 and later attended Grace King High School in Metairie.

The family asked for the stay of removal on the basis of Stephanie’s still-delicate heart condition.

Their request was still pending in mid-January, when Stephanie and Claudia were contacted by the surveillance case manager with “good news.”

The meeting was to be held at an office in St. Rose — about a 20-minute drive from the family’s Metairie house — used by the federal contractor that manages the surveillance program. When the family arrived, they were ushered into a room with ICE agents, Stephanie said. She said one agent – a woman – said the family needed to attend a court hearing in Houston that day for an immigration judge to decide whether they would remain in the U.S. or not.

“I started to worry,” Stephanie said. “I was like, ‘This is not what we’re here for. Y’all lied to us.’”

Stephanie said the agent assured her and her family that they were not being deported and that they were not under arrest. Still, according to Stephanie, the agents did not let them leave the office and told them they could not call their immigration attorney until they got to the Houston court.

Although New Orleans has its own immigration court, agents told the Alis that they would get a hearing faster in Houston, where there are three immigration courts, Stephanie said.

The agents took away their electronics, their jewelry and even their hair ties, Stephanie said. Before agents took her phone and turned it off, she managed to send some messages in Spanish to a friend in New Orleans, Melisa Escobar.

“I don’t know if we will return or if we will get deported,” Stephanie wrote on WhatsApp.

She wrote: “Give a kiss to Lili,” referring to Escobar’s three year old daughter. Then Stephanie stopped writing.

Agents had the family mark a couple of documents with their fingerprints, barely allowing a chance to read them, Stephanie said.

Stephanie said agents told her they would provide her with medication for her heart condition once they arrived in court in Houston, then placed the family into a van on its way to Louis Armstrong International Airport.

Three agents accompanied them on a flight from New Orleans to Houston, telling the family not to worry because “everything would be OK,” Stephanie said, adding that the agents told her they had already booked her family a flight back to New Orleans after the hearing was over. But once they arrived in Houston, she said, the agents escorted them to another gate in the airport terminal to wait for a connecting flight to McAllen.

“Are we not coming back to New Orleans?” Stephanie said she asked the agents. “What’s going on?” But they were no longer talking to her.

After arriving in McAllen, Stephanie said the family was taken to a hotel for the night. There, she said, an ICE agent visited their room and confirmed that they were being sent back to Honduras.

“They lied to us from the beginning,” Stephanie said. “What they did was wrong.”

She said the agent provided her with a 60-day supply of her medication. When she asked what would happen once it ran out, the agent indicated she’d be on her own, Stephanie said.

“I was devastated,” Stephanie said. “It’s heartbreaking for a country that you see as home treating you this way.”

The next day Stephanie, her mother and brother were put on a plane to San Pedro Sula, where, she said, they were finally given back their belongings and called their attorney in Louisiana.

According to Stephanie, the family’s attorneys said there was nothing the family could do to change their situation, now that they were in Honduras. They would likely be banned from entering the U.S. for years as a penalty.

Stephanie called Escobar to tell her what had happened. And then, in a message, she assured her friend that she’d be OK, even if she didn’t quite believe it herself.

“No te preocupes mi mely.” Don’t worry, my Mely, she said. “Todo estará bien.” Everything will be fine.

‘They’re leaning into the tricks’

Although Stephanie and her family felt blindsided by ICE’s tactics, the deceptive methods that they say ICE agents used to deport them are not only legal, but also have also been encouraged for years.

A 2005 Department of Homeland Security memo provided guidance on the use of ruses in immigration, reminding agents at one point that if their ruses involve “adopt[ing] the guise of a different agency,” a supervisor should inform that agency of the deception. A 2010 fugitive operations handbook for ICE’s enforcement and removal operations department details how ruses are “designed to control the time and location of a law enforcement encounter.”

The agency’s use of ruses reportedly increased under the first Trump administration. And in the early months of Trump’s second term, Jong, from Al Otro Lado, said he and other immigrants rights advocates have noticed an increase in incidents of agents using deception to arrest, detain and deport immigrants.

“It’s everywhere,” Jong said. “We’ve been hearing from people across the country that they’re using tricks to get people to come in and get arrested.”

Last month, the Gulf States Newsroom reported on a separate case of an unnamed migrant under ICE supervision in Louisiana who received a text message saying they were being placed on a reduced level of surveillance, only to be arrested at an in-person meeting. And in Florida, a Venezuelan man under supervision was arrested at a routine check-in, according to a report from NBC News.

Jong said he and fellow immigrants’ rights advocates have seen a range of ruses used on their clients. Immigrants’ rights advocates have argued that ruses  — especially in order to enter a subject’s home to conduct a warrantless search — can violate Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.

“They almost never have a warrant,” Jong said. “ICE really relies on people giving themselves up and that’s why they’re leaning into the tricks.”

‘It’s just so humiliating’

Stephanie said she “never imagined” her family would be deported. She said she feels cut off from the community she’s known since she was a child. Her friends, her doctors and her father’s grave are back in the U.S.

As bad as it is for her, she said feels worse for those who have not yet been ensnared by the federal immigration system but soon may be.

“People think that [they] are criminals, because they arrest them. They handcuffed their hands and their feet and everything,” Stephanie said.  “To my Latino people, looking at them like that, it’s just so humiliating.”

Enrollment in one of ICE’s supervision programs does not shield anyone from deportation.

Jong said he fears that Trump’s second term will bring increased data sharing between government agencies, which could allow ICE to target undocumented immigrants under surveillance who are applying for legal ways to stay in the U.S.

“Whenever there’s a Trump administration, there’s always this idea of, ‘If you apply for something, we can use that information against you,’” Jong said.

The new Trump administration, meanwhile, appears undeterred in making good on the president’s pledge to carry out “the most sweeping border and immigration crackdown in American history.”

According to an NBC News report last week, the feds are gearing up for an operation targeting undocumented families with minor children, like the Alis. Stephanie said she worries for others who may meet the same fate as her family.

“It’s just something that I wish nobody could go through,” she said.

This article first appeared on Verite News New Orleans and is republished here under a Creative Commons license. PARSELY = { autotrack: false, onload: function() { PARSELY.beacon.trackPageView({ url: “https://veritenews.org/2025/03/13/deported-family-ice-deception-immigration/”, urlref: window.location.href }); } }

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