At 7 years old, JeanCarlos Fiallos Manzanares crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally, hiding in the trunk of a taxi with his older sister. For more than a decade, he lived in the shadows in the United States. Salvation came, or appeared to, in his 20s, when President Barack Obama offered young immigrants like him protection from deportation.
But last year, agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement pulled him over near his mother’s house in Miami. Since then, he has been detained at the Otero County Processing Center in New Mexico, some 1,944 miles away from his wife, who is a U.S. citizen, and their two young sons.
The second Trump administration has eroded the hard-won protections of the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, often called DACA, with some of those immigrants now being detained and deported. The administration wants to deport Fiallos Manzanares, 31, to his native Honduras.
Trump slashed access to healthcare benefits and prohibited deferred action holders from obtaining or using commercial driver’s licenses. The Board of Immigration Appeals, controlled by the Department of Justice, ruled that having deferred action alone isn’t enough for a judge to halt a person’s deportation. And U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that approves applications for deferred action, began slow-walking renewals and work authorizations, immigrant advocates say: A process that previously took 15 days has stretched to six months or more, leaving recipients out of compliance and forcing people to lose their jobs.
“It’s death by a thousand cuts,” said Janet Napolitano, the former secretary of Homeland Security under Obama who, in 2012, created the deferred action program that provided work permits for undocumented immigrants who came to the country as children and shielded them from deportation.
A Homeland Security spokesperson told The Marshall Project in an email that “DACA does not confer any form of legal status in this country. Any illegal alien who is a DACA recipient may be subject to arrest and deportation for a number of reasons, including if they’ve committed a crime.”
As deputy director of advocacy for United We Dream, which seeks policies protecting immigrants brought here as children, Juliana Macedo do Nascimento began hearing stories about deferred action recipients getting detained during traffic stops last year. “That made us very concerned,” she said.
As the detentions accelerated, United We Dream began tracking them.
Around the same time, the Trump administration decided that detained immigrants should stay in jail while their cases proceed.
The number of people protected by the deferred action program has dropped since Trump took office, according to federal data. More than 533,000 people held deferred action at the end of the Biden administration; a year later, the number had dropped to about 495,000.
While some of the decline can be attributed to recipients moving to more permanent status, “in most cases, we think the decline is tied to the processing delays,” said Jennie Murray, chief executive of the National Immigration Forum, a nonprofit coalition of business, law enforcement and religious leaders advocating immigration reform.
Hundreds of people who had been granted deferred action by the government have been detained since Trump took office, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Many of them have criminal records, which could disqualify them from protection. But at least 85 people without a criminal conviction or pending criminal charge have been deported, according to the department.
Immigrants brought to the United States in childhood were once the poster children of the immigration reform debate — the one group that most Americans, regardless of political affiliation, could agree deserved protection.
Even amid the current political polarization, numerous polls continue to show that Americans broadly support protecting immigrants who came here as children, Murray said.
When Fiallos Manzanares was pulled over last year, he was driving with an expired license. He had faced criminal charges in the past, but they had all been dropped or dismissed, and he hadn’t lost his deferred action protections.
“I’ve been here 25 years, and nothing ever happened like this,” he said. “I’ve always been protected by DACA since I got it in 2012.”
He told the ICE agents that his DACA was valid and his renewal application was pending. They told him he would no longer qualify for the program if he was detained — then they detained him.
In a video call with The Marshall Project using a detention center tablet in mid-June, he wore a trim beard and navy blue scrubs. Detained immigrant men milled about the long dormitory in the background.
“If they are going to terminate my DACA, they have to have a reason, like if I had a conviction or a felony,” he said. “They have rules.”
But those rules, which once seemed clear, have been changing under Trump.
During his first term, Trump tried to revoke the deferred action program but was blocked by the Supreme Court. Now, the administration is chipping away at protections one at a time instead of ending the program outright, Napolitano said.
“They can kill off DACA without saying they’re killing off DACA,” she said.
Detaining recipients ignores the purpose of deferring action, said Michael Kagan, a law professor and director of the University of Nevada’s Immigration Clinic.
“Your head can spin trying to understand what this means,” Kagan said. “Deferred action means ‘I’m not going to arrest you or detain you.’ Now it seems to be, ‘I’m not going to arrest you, unless I do arrest you.’”
Deferred action recognizes that, historically, the executive branch hasn’t had the resources to enforce immigration law universally and that some immigrants deserve humanitarian consideration, Napolitano said.
Trump has taken a different view.
Andrew Arthur, resident fellow in law and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for tighter immigration restrictions, said the Trump administration’s curtailing of protections is an effort to return to the letter of the law. President Joe Biden used enforcement discretion too liberally, he argued, allowing millions of immigrants into the country who had no lawful status.
“We’re boomeranging back from a Biden administration that used prosecutorial discretion and deferred action for every law it didn’t want to enforce,” he said. “It’s a return to regular order.”
Resources for enforcement are less of an issue now that the Trump administration’s immigration program is flush with $240 billion in funding through fiscal year 2029 — more immigration enforcement money than Homeland Security has ever had before.
Kagan said curtailing the deferred action program is “self-destructive for our economy, community and families. It says, ‘Let’s take some people who are doing really well and let’s destroy their lives. It doesn’t seem like productive policy.”
Lawmakers haven’t overhauled the nation’s immigration laws since 1996, when they voted to strengthen immigration enforcement mechanisms in such a way that all but eliminated the executive branch’s discretion, said Doris Meissner, who was head of the Immigration and Naturalization Service at the time.
They soon regretted it.
As the Clinton administration began to implement the changes, “we started to get pushback from members of Congress when deportation actions were issued to people in their district,” said Meissner, now director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan immigration research organization.
“No matter how carefully you write a statute, you are never going to be able to cover every possible extenuating circumstance,” she said.
Though deferred action dates back at least to President Richard Nixon, Meissner issued a memo in 2000 enumerating 13 factors that immigration agents should consider before deporting someone. They included past military service, family ties and length of residence in the U.S. More than a decade later, Obama’s deferred action program became the first that immigrants could proactively apply for.
The use of deferred action “has gone through ups and downs,” Meissner said, “but it has endured.”
Fiallos Manzanares grew up in Miami. He started a handyman business and married.
Two months after he was detained last year, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services — which, like ICE, falls under the umbrella of Homeland Security — approved Fiallos Manzanares’ application to renew his deferred action status.
He could finally get back to his life, he thought.
“I have nothing in Honduras,” he told The Marshall Project. “I don’t even have a home. My life is here. I have my two babies waiting for me.”
But ICE didn’t release Fiallos Manzanares from immigration detention. When, weeks later, he remained jailed with no end in sight, he filed a petition for habeas corpus, asking a federal judge to order his release.
Instead, an immigration judge ordered him deported to Honduras, and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services rescinded the deferred action protections it had approved for him months earlier, reasoning it had acted by mistake.
In an email, a Homeland Security spokesperson told The Marshall Project that Fiallos Manzanares “will remain in ICE custody pending removal proceedings” and highlighted his criminal history, which “includes resisting arrest, disorderly conduct, trespassing, aggravated assault and domestic violence.” Court records show that the charges against Fiallos Manzanares, stemming from arrests between 2017 and 2020, were dropped or dismissed.
For more than a year, he has been fighting for the reinstatement of his deferred action and is waiting for a federal judge to decide whether he will be released.
His spouse, Marie Castro Fiallos, told the federal court her husband’s incarceration has been devastating for their children.
“Since the day my husband was detained, our lives have been turned upside down,” she said. “Our children ask for him constantly. Every day, they ask when their father will come home.”