High school graduate facing ICE deportation weeks after earning his diploma: ‘I was just living my life'
Emerson Colindres, 19, arrived in the United States with his family as an eight-year-old in 2014 but was detained during a routine check-in at an ICE facility in the Cincinnati suburb of Blue Ash on Wednesday June 4, according to members of the community who have begun campaigning for his release.
The Colindres family had sought asylum in the U.S., requesting protection from extortion by Honduran criminal gangs, only for their case to be rejected, their appeal denied and a final removal order issued in 2023.
Since then, they have participated in ICE's Intensive Supervision Appearance Program (ISAP, a parole-like alternative to incarceration) without ever being overtly ordered to leave the country.
Bryan Williams, the teen's soccer coach at local team Cincy Galaxy, told a local affiliate of ABC News that the three ICE agents who picked Colindres up had clearly been waiting for him.
'They informed us that they were detaining and deporting Emerson only,' he said. 'No explanation was given.'
'Emerson's one of the best kids I've ever met,' Williams continued. 'We don't know what we can do, but we're doing whatever we can.'
Explaining the rationale behind the detention of the recent graduate from Gilbert A Dater High School, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said in a statement: 'Those arrested had executable final orders of removal by an immigration judge and had not complied with that order.
'If you are in the country illegally and a judge has ordered you to be removed, that is precisely what will happen.'
The DHS also noted that ISAP 'exists to ensure compliance with release conditions.'
On Sunday, Colindres's teammates gathered outside the Butler County Jail in Hamilton where he is being held wearing 'Free Emerson' T-shirts and spoke to him by phone for 20 minutes.
'I was just... living life, minding my own business,' Colindres told a local journalist on the same call. 'And now I'm here.'
On the conditions in which he is being kept, he said: 'It's just awful. We only go out once a day – sometimes twice. [It's] not a life someone who didn't do anything should be living.'
Teammate Joshua Williams appealed for his friend's release saying: 'He didn't do anything wrong. And they just took him away.
'I was the last person who saw him, I got to hug him goodbye. I wish I hugged him longer. Because I didn't know that would be the last time I was going to see him.'
Preston Robinson, another teammate, said: 'It's not like he had a say in whether he could or couldn't come.
'I just wanted to be here to show that I support him. Support anybody that's going through this, because it's just not fair.'
Shortly afterwards, at the same protest event, Ada Bell Baquedano-Amador, Colindres's mother, addressed President Donald Trump, whose administration is now enforcing its long-threatened illegal immigration crackdown with increasing aggression.
'Please, Mr Trump – because I'm talking directly to you – have pity on us,' she said in Spanish. 'Have compassion.'
Baquedano-Amador has since told The Cincinnati Enquirer that she too has been given 30 days to self-deport to Honduras in the wake of her son's arrest.
'You can't imagine what I'm feeling,' she said. 'How is my son going to make it over there? He doesn't know anything and the country where we come from is very insecure... It's not just.'
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