Cecilia stood outside a federal immigration field office in Centennial, chewing her lip and weighing the few choices left to her. Behind her, piled in a car, was what remained of her family’s life in the United States.
It was early May, and a few feet away, her three sons took turns sticking their shoes into old prairie dog holes in the dirt, the youngest’s Crocs breaking through cobwebs. As the boys looked from the ground to their mother, she explained that if she returned to the office the next day, immigration agents had promised to detain the family and arrange their return to Venezuela.
The Centennial office building was similar to one into which her husband and the boys’ father had disappeared late last year. But unlike Ronald, who’d been arrested at what he thought was a routine appointment, Cecilia arrived that day hoping that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement would take them away.
She and her three children — ages 12, 9 and 6 — had walked for three months to get to the United States in 2024, crossing notorious expanses of jungle and mountains for the prospect of a stable future and a reunion with Ronald, who’d come earlier that year. But like other families split by the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, they now found themselves struggling to make ends meet in a single-parent household, with no regular paycheck and few options.
The loss of a primary source of income, coupled with the federal government’s efforts to keep many immigrants indefinitely detained, has spurred families like Cecilia’s — and detainees like her husband — to stop fighting and leave the country. They’ve given up on asylum cases or other legal defenses in favor of a swift release from detention and from financial collapse.
An unprecedented number have asked to leave while in detention, while tens of thousands more have, like Cecilia, . Many more have simply left on their own, immigration advocates say.
Cecilia, who had been seeking asylum in the U.S., said outside the Centennial office that her family would be flown first to Arizona and kept in a detention center before they left. She believed the government would expedite their exit, she said in Spanish, because she was seven months pregnant. Earlier, she said she’d heard that families could sleep in hotels.
Two nonprofit workers and a volunteer had come with the family to the field office. They weren’t accustomed to walking immigrants without proper legal status into ICE custody. They were skeptical of the stories Cecilia had heard — and as she spoke, they exchanged glances and shifted their feet.
“A detention center is not a hotel,” V Reeves, of Housekeys Action Network Denver, told her in Spanish.
Cecilia crossed her arms.
After her husband was arrested, she’d learned she was pregnant. In the six months since then, the family lost its apartment and Cecilia lost her own job after her pregnancy began to show. They tumbled into poverty and near-homelessness, and she wanted to leave for her kids.
“They’re hungry because I can’t work,” she said that morning, before they’d left the house. They were all struggling to sleep. She’d briefly continued sending the boys to school, where they could at least get reliable meals. But then she’d pulled them out, fearful they could be arrested.
To protect her privacy and that of her children in her small Venezuelan town, The Denver Post is identifying Cecilia by her middle name. The Post confirmed Cecilia’s identity with two immigration advocates helping the family and by identifying her later in an ICE detainee database.
Using internal ICE records obtained by the , The Post also confirmed Ronald’s initial arrest and release in spring 2024, as well as his second arrest at the Centennial office in November, two days before Thanksgiving. Those details matched both Cecilia’s description and the advocates’ records about the family. The Post was unable to speak with Ronald and is identifying him by his first name.
ICE spokespeople did not respond to questions sent earlier this month about Cecilia’s status, and they referred additional questions to another agency. On Thursday, in an unsigned statement, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security wrote that it “continues to support lawful and orderly departures and to work with interagency and international partners to mitigate documentation challenges where possible.”
On the morning that she turned herself in, Cecilia had $6 in her bag. If she decided to stay, she would need $800 to pay for another month in the single room the family shared in a south Denver home. She had an air mattress that was twin-sized and fraying. The boys took the floor.
So she made a choice. They would return to the Centennial office the next day and hope for a swift return home.
Losing a breadwinner’s support
Two other single-parent immigrant families had initially set out to surrender to ICE that first morning.
Diana Marquez Ruiz and her two children lived with Cecilia, in another room down the hall. Before they’d left, Ruiz had cried softly as she and Cecilia signed waivers to allow the advocates working with them to request congressional inquiries should the women vanish into ICE’s detention system.
But on the way to the field office, a sobbing Ruiz turned back with her two children, grief-stricken and unwilling to leave their dog behind in the U.S.
Ruiz’s husband was removed from the Aurora detention center on the same day as Ronald, and she’d befriended Cecilia afterward. Across the nation, men have made up the overwhelming majority of those arrested in immigration detentions. Of roughly 4,800 people initially detained in a Colorado ICE facility last year, nearly 9 in every 10 were adult men, according to ICE data analyzed by The Post. Eighty-six percent of those arrested by ICE in the state during President Donald Trump’s first year back in office were also men.
Of those detained, 477 men were married, according to the ICE data. For Ronald and nearly 2,000 more people, the data provides no information about their marital status.
“We are now seeing the breadwinner be the person that is getting detained often,” said Andrea Loya, the executive director of Casa De Paz, which works with detainee families in Aurora. “Thatap the person going to work, the person who was driving the car.”
Within six months of a family member’s arrest, families without legal status lost 70% of their income on average, according to a study of immigration enforcement in the United States between 2006 and 2009. More recent studies found that the children of deported parents “faced serious challenges due to deportation of a parent, including economic hardship, housing instability, food insecurity, and separation from parents,” according to a from a division of the American Psychological Association.
During her first visit to the ICE office this month, security guards told Cecilia to submit a self-deportation application through the CBP Home App, through a program in which immigrants are offered incentives — including a cash payout — if they agree to leave. But she had already tried that, unsuccessfully, and showed up at the office unannounced out of desperation.
“The CBP Home app gives aliens the option to leave now, and self-deport, so they may still have the opportunity to return legally in the future and live the American dream,” . “If they don’t, we will find them, we will deport them, and they will never return.”
In a December legal filing, an executive with federal contractor Salus Worldwide Solutions wrote that more than 100,000 people were in the “pipeline” for one incentive program, and that the company had supported 34,738 assisted voluntary departures — like the one Cecilia was seeking.
“When we’re working with folks who are detained, the financial strain and emotional strain on the family and community is making it less likely that people will fight their case when they have a legal right to do so,” said Cindy Schlosser, a social worker who oversees the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network’s social service project. “… Itap not just the detention, but the detention without hope of reasonable release that puts families and their loved ones who’re detained in these impossible situations to decide, ‘Should I be deported or not?’ ”
On that morning in early May, a third mother who identified herself by a pseudonym had been dropped off at the Centennial office with her son, her infant child and their luggage, seeking to self-deport.
But ICE rejected her and her family because the baby was a U.S. citizen.
‘No best choice’
If Cecilia had doubts about surrendering to ICE, the other mother’s rejection wiped them away.
She was adamant that she did not want her next child to be born here. It would only make it harder to leave.
The next day, the family left behind a breakfast of mini donuts and Coke. They piled their suitcases, a trash bag and their backpacks — patterned with stars and characters from “Lilo and Stitch” and “Paw Patrol” — back into the car and returned to the field office. The day before, Cecilia had packed her Mickey Mouse wallet and tucked away the orange folder that contained the family’s immigration paperwork.
She closed the door to the bedroom behind her.
“Ready,” she told the boys.
She’d arrived in the U.S. a month before Trump was elected president a second time, joining tens of thousands of Venezuelans who traveled to Denver or passed through the city in the final years of the Biden administration. Under Trump, her husband felt the brunt of the arrest-and-deport crackdown that had made the United States far less hospitable for families without permanent legal status.
The family had left Venezuela for a stable future they had not found.
After her own hardship and her husband’s experiences in detention, she said she would not miss the United States. Their long journey two years ago, she said, had been “for nothing.” She missed her mother.
“I want to leave,” Cecilia said. “The nervousness is leaving me.”
The advocates working with the family were less tranquil. They were not convinced that the family would be able to leave quickly, let alone that they would receive the — totaling $10,400 for her and the boys — who voluntarily leave the country.
Gracie Willis, an attorney with the National Immigration Project who didn’t work with Cecilia’s family, said her organization had spoken with hundreds of attorneys, activists and others who work with the immigrant community during regional meetings in April about ICE’s deportation efforts. Two of them said they knew people who actually received the money they had been offered to self-deport. She had heard of some families staying in hotels, as Cecilia hoped.
“There is no best choice,” said Jenn Piper, the Denver program director for the American Friends Service Committee, which worked with the family. “Even though I’m very nervous about what can happen with (Cecilia), am I going to say her best choice is being homeless and pregnant with her three kids in the United States?”
Still, the advocates made plans: One of them, Miriam, who asked to be identified only by her first name because she is an immigrant and feared retaliation from the federal government, asked Cecilia to sign several privacy waivers.
Cecilia stuck a piece of paper with Miriam’s phone number in her pocket, and they agreed that if Miriam didn’t hear from Cecilia soon, Miriam would alert members of Colorado’s congressional delegation.
Going back home
With luggage in tow, Cecilia and her sons walked back through the Centennial field office doors on May 5.
Inside, three people sat with them to arrange their transportation, said Miriam, who accompanied the family inside. They were searched, Cecilia produced her $6, and the boys were handed fidget spinners and promised food. Cecilia was shown a video on sexual harassment.
The family was given shoes without laces and new clothes — except for the 6-year-old, who had grown too skinny to fit the pants he was offered.
Cecilia’s eyes were teary as she said goodbye to Miriam, but she remained calm. She became anxious only when her phone was taken.
For the next week, Miriam and other advocates didn’t hear directly from the family.
During that time, a man called Cecilia’s mother and told her the family was safe. Cecilia briefly appeared in a public ICE detainee database before vanishing from it. ICE did not respond to emails from The Post about the family’s status during that period, and the American Friends Service Committee prepared to launch a public campaign.
Then, on the morning of May 13, Miriam’s phone rang. Cecilia was in Caracas, the Venezuelan capital. She was safe and nearly home.
In a phone interview with The Post nearly a week later, Cecilia said she was back in the small town she had left years ago. Children were playing in the background. After turning herself in, she said she’d stayed in a hotel in Denver for three days, and she was seen by a doctor. There were government personnel watching them, but they weren’t armed, she said, and the family was treated well. They ate.
They next flew to Arizona, where she was given a phone to complete her self-deportation and receive the money she’d been promised. When she finally returned home, she slept.
She was not with her husband, and she declined to discuss their relationship. She spoke sparingly about the last few years and about what it was like to be home: “It’s good. I’m calm.” Her boys were well. She had no regrets.
“I went to this country,” Cecilia said of her time in America. “It didn’t work out.”
When the family flew to Venezuela, a doctor accompanied them, she said. Hers was the only family on board. The rest of the plane was occupied by roughly 180 shackled Venezuelan men, all being deported.
