Immigration and Customs Enforcement released scores of older and medically compromised detainees in the spring as the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the United States. Now, just as coronavirus cases are again increasing in many parts of the country, ICE appears to be targeting immigrants freed months earlier for rearrest.
Julio Colcas, a 55-year-old Green Card holder with a range of medical and mental illnesses, is one of them. Colcas walked out of the Essex County Correctional Facility in Newark in April feeling sick, possibly with COVID-19, but thrilled to be out. He took two buses, a train, and a taxi to South Plainfield, NJ, where his family lives, and bought an $18 Peruvian dinner that was “good as hell.”
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Colcas immigrated from Peru 40 years ago, when he was 15, and his release from jail after three years in prison and ICE custody meant he could fight his deportation order while living and working freely. Colcas found a job. He went to the beach. He had long conversations with his 22-year-old son, whom he had not seen in several years. And he bonded with his 3-year-old grandson, who was born while he was locked up.
Colcas also did exactly as was required under ICE’s supervised release: He wore an ankle bracelet so ICE could track his movements, and he met with ICE officers at their office in Newark each month to “check in.” It was just two days after his last check-in in early October, he said, when an ICE agent called him: Your ankle monitor needs to be replaced; come back into the office.
When Colcas got to the office, he waited for two hours and was then taken into a room with three officers. “And that’s when I knew something was weird,” Colcas said. “Why do they need three people to change my ankle bracelet?”
Officers replaced his ankle monitor with handcuffs and returned him to the county jail in Essex, where had previously spent almost two years. Essex has a contract with ICE to house immigrants in deportation proceedings while their cases are being adjudicated.
“I’ve been here 40 years -- I’m not trying to go anywhere,” Colcas said. “If I leave here I leave here in a body bag. I’m not going back….My whole life is here, ya know? All I know is here.”
Colcas lived in the United States legally as a Green Card holder, but under President Trump, permanent residents like Colcas are targeted for deportation if they have criminal records. ICE cited his unspecified “lengthy criminal history.” This includes a 1985 conviction for possession of a pistol. And according to court records, Colcas has two drug convictions, in 1987 and 2011. The latter one was for selling $40 in cocaine, Colcas said. After that conviction, he violated his probation, and was sent to prison in 2017 for less than a year. He was transferred to ICE custody from prison.
Colcas suffers from seizures, and mental illness -- major depressive disorder and generalized anxiety disorder, according to medical records. A psychologist who evaluated Colcas in jail last year said he presents a “serious suicide risk” if he’s deported, and is “not capable of defending himself independently in immigration court.” During his six months out of jail, Colcas received weekly telephonic therapy, which he said was helping him. He does not get therapy in jail.
For five days Gothamist/WNYC sought to confirm details of Colcas’s story with ICE. A spokesperson neither confirmed nor denied that agents used a ruse about a busted ankle bracelet to trick Colcas into being rearrested. The spokesman also did not reply to a question about whether ICE is actively seeking to return released detainees to jail just as coronavirus numbers in New Jersey pick up again. Initially, the agency responded to a question about Colcas’s arrest with a curt and cryptic reply: “2 Peruvians were recently put on charter flights and removed to Peru.”
That information scared Colcas’s daughter, who gave birth to his granddaughter just two days after the arrest. But it wasn’t true. Colcas remains at the jail as his challenge to a final order of deportation, issued last year by an immigration judge, winds its way through federal court.
Colcas is so entrenched in American society that he actually received a COVID stimulus check -- $1,200 worth of irony, given the same government’s attempt to deport him.
“I was thinking of Christmas coming, Thanksgiving, I was about to buy my granddaughter a crib,” Colcas said. “I had things planned.”
Julio Colcas with his family at a baby shower for his granddaughter in August.
As of last week, Colcas’s daughter, Brandi Jones, hadn’t told her son where his grandfather went. “Now he’s always asking about his grand-pop and it’s like, I have no explanation,” she said. “And it really hurts me because [ICE agents] don’t know what they’re doing to these families, to these people, they’re just tearing them apart with no explanation, no reason as to why.”
Colcas said his mental illness is at the root of his alcohol addiction and legal problems. He said he has four DUIs on his record, but has been sober for several years and did not drink during his six months of freedom. “I realized that alcohol destroyed my life,” he said.
In April, a federal court ordered ICE to release detained immigrants at a high risk of complications from Covid-19, and by the middle of the month ICE had released 245 detainees on orders of supervision from the three county jails in New Jersey that house immigrants from New York and New Jersey. Colcas was sick at the time of his release, and he believes it was COVID-19, since he has since tested positive for the coronavirus antibodies.
"I was happy as hell when they came and called me — I couldn't believe it,” Colcas said after he was released. “When I left everyone was clapping...By me leaving, it gives them hope it could happen to them, too."
It is unclear how many of those who were released have been re-arrested. Colcas said he met another man who was also detained after being released, and an advocacy group, First Friends of New York and New Jersey, received reports from attorneys about others.
Nationally, seven ICE detainees have died after contracting COVID. At Essex County Correctional Facility, eight detainees have tested positive while in custody, according to county data, and all have since been released.
Matt Katz reports on air at WNYC about immigration, refugees, hate, and national security. You can follow him on Twitter at @mattkatz00.
