A dad deported. A family fractured.

Misael Garcia Lopez built a life in Eugene.

An ICE arrest sent him back to Mexico.

His family had to decide where to call home.

Most mornings, Misael Garcia Lopez drove his 11-year-old son, Leo, to school in Eugene’s Bethel neighborhood, then hiked up Spencer Butte. He loved taking in the cool air as he climbed to the top, where he could look out over the city he’d called home for 18 years.

He expected the same on Nov. 19, 2025. It was a Wednesday. He told Leo to have a good day and assured him he’d pick him up after school, like always.

Minutes after leaving the Prairie Mountain School parking lot at about 7:30 a.m., he noticed an unmarked blue SUV following his Ford F-150. A second car soon joined behind. When the lights and sirens started, he pulled over near the wetlands of Meadowlark Prairie.

The men who approached Misael’s truck that day were agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, conducting what agency records describe as “targeted immigration enforcement.” Misael, then 48, was a “targeted subject” for lacking legal status in the United States.

By 9 a.m. Misael’s family was worried. 

His wife, Valeria, always called him during her work break. He didn’t answer. 

The three children she shares with Misael — Leo; Jasmine, 22; and Luis, 28 — couldn’t reach him either. 

Jasmine, three months pregnant, drove to the last known location of her dad’s phone. She found his truck there, parked by the meadow, empty.

The last school drop-off

Misael had no criminal record. His legal history was limited to a speeding ticket and a couple of disputes in small claims court.

In the early 2000s, he and his wife had separately crossed into the United States from Mexico without authorization, hoping to secure a better future for their growing family. They picked Eugene’s Bethel-Danebo neighborhood to raise their three children.

Lookout Eugene-Springfield has chosen to identify Misael’s wife and eldest son using the pseudonyms Valeria and Luis due to sensitivities surrounding their immigration status.

According to ICE records and a November statement from ICE Public Affairs Officer Chrissy Cuttita, Misael had no “valid immigration documents” in his possession when he was pulled over. A supervisory detention and deportation officer on scene, whose name was listed as “Campbell” in agency records, issued a warrant for his arrest.

Agents demanded Misael get out of his truck, took his phone and keys, placed him in the back of one of their vehicles, and drove away.

Through the window, he watched his neighborhood disappear behind him.

“I went into shock,” Misael told Lookout in Spanish. “I couldn’t believe I was being arrested by immigration. I mean, I never thought that was going to happen to me … I thought that, since I don’t have a criminal record or anything, maybe it would be eight, 15 days in jail at most, and then I’d see my son again.”

Misael would spend the next two months in a detention cell hundreds of miles from home as his case churned through immigration court. His family’s fight to stay together would end with them on opposite sides of an international border. After nearly two decades of building a life together in Eugene, they would begin the slow, painful work of rebuilding it, apart.

Misael was among at least 15 Lane County residents detained Nov. 19 by ICE.

Between October and December 2025, nearly 1,200 Oregon residents were detained by ICE as arrests surged statewide — part of the Trump administration’s broader immigration enforcement campaign that has upended thousands of families across the United States.

But Misael’s family didn’t know any of that yet. They didn’t even know where he was.

“Nobody let us know that my dad was taken,” Jasmine said.

LIFE INSIDE

Misael called his family from an ICE facility in Portland around noon. That morning, he said, he begged agents to let him call Jasmine so she knew she needed to pick Leo up from school. They refused. Only in Portland did an agent allow a brief call.

“They told me, ‘You have five minutes to talk to your family so they can find you a lawyer, whether you want to fight your case or not,’” he said.

That was when he began to suspect the goodbye at Leo’s school drop-off that morning would be their last.

After a long bus trip up Interstate 5, Misael was checked into the Northwest ICE Processing Center, a privately run 1,575-bed detention facility in Tacoma, Washington. Detainees have submitted more than 3,000 complaints over the center’s conditions.

He was held in a cell subdivided into units with bunk beds. He was issued two gray uniforms, given a medical exam, and received his daily diabetes medication and painkillers for his left shoulder.

In 2024, Misael had torn his rotator cuff in a fall while working for a landscaping company that plants trees for the city of Eugene. He was still recovering from the injury. Pain flared when the ICE agents pinned his hands behind his back during the arrest. Misael explained his injury to the agents in Spanish. One mocked him before moving his cuffs to the front, he said.

The injury wasn’t his first on the job. His hand was caught in the blades at a mill a few years earlier, forcing reconstructive surgery. Misael had worked as a mechanic, a roofer, a dishwasher, and at a grocery store, almost always taking overtime when it was available. 

Inside detention, life flattened into routine: for breakfast, sausage and cereal that tasted like paper; for dinner, rice and beans; cards and basketball to pass the time; conversations with other detainees that stretched into the early hours of the morning, after the lights were turned off.

“We encouraged each other — ‘Come on, keep going. Everything is going to be OK. You’re going to be back with your family’ — things like that,” Misael said. “But, unfortunately, day by day, you begin to realize the reality … that it’s not like that.”

Misael was placed in removal proceedings, a civil process in which an immigration judge would decide whether he could remain in the U.S. or should be deported on grounds he had entered the country without authorization.

“We encouraged each other, ‘Come on, keep going. Everything is going to be OK. You’re going to be back with your family,’ things like that. But, unfortunately, day by day, you begin to realize the reality.“

MISAEL GARCIA LOPEZ

His family connected with two attorneys who believed Misael had a good shot at getting bond, which would let him reunite with his family while his case moved forward. 

His thoughts often drifted to his one-story manufactured home in Eugene, where the chatter of parakeets filled the front room. He’d built an aviary to keep him and his wife company when Jasmine and Luis, his eldest children, moved out. The birds made him feel alive.

Once money came through his commissary account, Misael spoke with his family at least twice a day, cracking jokes to try and keep the conversation light. 

“All he says is, ‘It’s not somewhere anyone wants to be at,’” Jasmine said. But he also reassured them the Tacoma facility was a “mansion” compared to other jails — at least there were curtains for privacy in the bathroom.

A priest visiting from Portland gave Misael a rosary and a cross.

Misael frequently had attended services at St. Mark Catholic Church in Bethel. It’s where Leo received his first communion. Misael and Valeria got married in 2015 a few miles away at St. Mary Catholic Church on Charnelton Street.

In Tacoma, Misael met a 20-year-old from El Salvador who had been detained for eight months and made handmade rosaries from a dough created using the bread served in detention. Misael traded with him for six rosaries, for members of his family he prayed he would see again.

‘I WILL NOT BE SILENCED’

In Misael’s absence, Jasmine and Valeria led the fight against his deportation. They also stepped into his role as the family’s primary providers, taking on the paperwork and mounting expenses that came with his detention.

Valeria met Misael when they were teenagers in their shared hometown of Santa Ana Ahuehuepan, Mexico, a small town north of Mexico City in the state of Hidalgo.

Valeria had followed him across the southwest border to the United States, their eldest son in tow.

Now, Valeria was still reeling from her husband’s arrest, just minutes from their home. That day, the Ring camera outside the family’s front door captured cars cruising past that matched Misael’s description of the one that took him away. She worried immigration authorities would come for her next. 

So she stopped going to work. For weeks, Valeria rarely left the house. Friends, relatives and community volunteers drove her to errands. Jasmine moved back in to be with her.

In response to emailed questions about ICE’s Nov. 19 operations, an unnamed Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said the department “is not going to confirm our vehicles and put an even larger target on our officers’ backs or confirm law enforcement tactics.” 

Citing rising death threats against officers, the spokesperson added: “When our heroic law enforcement officers conduct operations, they clearly identify themselves as law enforcement while wearing masks to protect themselves from being targeted by highly sophisticated gangs like Tren de Aragua and MS-13, criminal rings, murderers, and rapists.”

Jasmine, an American citizen born in Eugene, channeled her earnings as a certified nursing assistant and employee at Ross Dress for Less into the household. She gave interviews to the press. Saugat Malakar, her 23-year-old boyfriend and the father of her unborn baby, worked overnight shifts at McDonald’s.

Jasmine carried her passport everywhere. 

“Just because he was taken and he and my mom might be afraid to say something, doesn’t mean that I will be afraid,” Jasmine said a few days after his arrest. “I feel like, in a way, I have the privilege of being able to speak out and not be afraid. I told my mom, ‘I’m not going to be intimidated. People can say whatever they want to me, but I will not be silenced.’”

Before this, Jasmine’s biggest concern was her upcoming OB-GYN appointment, where she was set to learn the sex of her baby. (Misael thought the family’s first grandchild was a boy.) When Jasmine first told him about the unexpected baby, he didn’t say much. Then he pulled her into a big hug.

“I can’t get myself too stressed about this whole thing, because I also have to look after the health of the baby,” she said. “It’s really hard to try and not stress out and just cry.”

The possibility of her dad’s deportation made it feel impossible.

“My mom doesn’t want to stay here if my dad’s not here,” Jasmine said. “Wherever he goes, she wants to be with him. And that would also cause my little brother to have to go with them, and that’s just not fair.” 

Her voice cracked. “It would just break us apart.”

‘HE IS NOT A THREAT’

The next chapter of her dad’s story unfolded in legal filings and high-stakes hearings in a Tacoma courtroom. 

Misael was caught illegally crossing the border in Calexico, California, in 2007. He was issued a voluntary removal order. Instead of staying in Mexico as ordered, he crossed again shortly after and reunited with his family in Oregon, where he remained undocumented for 18 years. A DHS spokesperson said in July that “Garcia-Lopez illegally entered the country at an unknown date and time.”

“This alien knew the consequence of violating U.S. immigration law as he experienced the consequence of being found by authorities to be in the United States illegally when he voluntarily deported in 2007,” the ICE spokesperson Cuttita said in November.

Courtney Carter, one of Misael’s two immigration attorneys, argued that his case didn’t apply to statutes for mandatory detention. She pointed to his lack of criminal history and nearly two decades of residence in the United States.

Ahead of his Jan. 6 bond hearing, Jasmine and Valeria set out to paint a fuller picture of Misael’s life and character for the judge. They scrambled to contact people to write letters of support and submitted more than a dozen. Some vouched for his work ethic, others his warmth and acts of service to those he loved.

“I respectfully ask that you consider the profound impact my uncle has on our family and our community,” wrote his Utah-based niece, Liliana Simiskey. “He is not a threat — he is a source of comfort, safety, and strength to everyone around him.”

Dora Herrera Bravo of Cottage Grove, the mother of his son’s friend, has known Misael for more than 15 years. She wrote that without being asked, Misael offered to remove her bathtub and toilet after she bought her first home. 

“He is not a threat — he is a source of comfort, safety, and strength to everyone around him.”

Liliana Simiskey

Ashley and Abigail Griego, the daughters of Misael’s former boss at Grocery Outlet, said that he helped paint their house. 

Anahi Lomeli Aceves of west Eugene wrote that Misael drove her son, his great-nephew, to soccer practices when she could not.

And Isaac Diaz of Springfield — the best friend of Misael’s eldest son, Luis — wrote that Misael was a father figure in the absence of his own. Diaz said Misael agreed to let him hang out with Luis only after meeting Diaz’s mom. They went on to spend “countless hours” at each other’s houses.

“To see a father who loves his kids and does everything to be involved in their lives, possibly being ripped away from his family is hard to understand,” Diaz wrote. “His children do not deserve to be without a father.”

A ‘perfect storm of misfortune’

Misael spent Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s behind bars in Tacoma. His 49th birthday, too. Time “dragged on” in detention, he said. 

Carter, his attorney, appeared with him at Tacoma Immigration Court for a Jan. 6 master calendar hearing — usually a short procedural meeting.

Misael’s other attorney, Hilary Smith, was slated to handle his bond hearing later that day, when Judge John Odell would review the case’s evidence.

But the judge became frustrated when Carter was not immediately prepared to argue bond issues, Smith said. He began directly questioning Misael, who wasn’t provided a translator.

The judge had evidence of only one of Misael’s crossings, in 2007. But through questions about his immigration history, Odell elicited details about Misael’s earlier crossings, before his documented voluntary removal in Calexico.

The questions pulled Misael back to his being a new father in Mexico in his early 20s: He worked in an oil refinery and in construction. His eldest son, Luis, was born premature and needed costly care. A daughter died shortly after birth and needed a funeral he couldn’t afford. 

Between 2000 and 2007, he crossed the border multiple times with the help of coyotes — migrant smugglers hired by cartels — chasing the opportunity he heard other migrants found in the U.S. The dangerous journeys became too taxing, and he settled permanently in Oregon.

As some of these details emerged in Misael’s hearing, Smith was noticing a pattern.

Tacoma judges — who, like all immigration judges, sit under the executive branch — were increasingly interpreting migrants’ past border crossings as evidence that they posed a flight risk, or were unlikely to appear for future court proceedings.

Historically, Misael’s early crossings wouldn’t have been taken as seriously in determining if someone was a flight risk, Smith said. Immigration judges used to be more sympathetic to circumstances that temporarily pull migrants back to their countries of origin. 

But now, Smith found herself fielding questions in bond hearings she “typically wouldn’t have had to.” 

She noticed the shift in cases involving habeas petitions — legal challenges arguing a person’s detention was unlawful, often seeking a prompt bond hearing, as in Misael’s case.

“The bond hearing was conducted in a more, for lack of a better word, invasive, aggressive manner to maybe find reasons to deny it,” she said. 

Misael’s bond was rejected, in what Smith described as a “perfect storm of misfortune.” 

Tacoma immigration judges are among the toughest in the country on bond, according to a March lawsuit filed by the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project. Last year had the lowest rate on record of immigration judges granting noncitizens bond in the United States; the rate during the first four months of 2026 was even lower. 

The Trump administration has pressured immigration judges to stop granting bond to immigrants who crossed the border illegally and to ramp up deportations, according to an April 2026 New York Times investigation. 

During President Donald Trump’s first term, judges were given a more muted version of the same directive. Even so, one described their work to the Seattle Times in 2018 as “doing death-penalty cases in a traffic court setting.” 

Misael’s bond hearing unfolded against that backdrop.

In the months since, attorneys with Smith’s Seattle law firm began filing additional habeas petitions challenging the constitutionality of how bond hearings were conducted. Some have succeeded, resulting in detainees’ release, Smith said.

“During Misael’s hearings, no one had really explored that option yet, because it’s pretty novel,” she said. “Unfortunately, with the timing of everything, he got caught up in the worst of it.”

no way home

The denial extinguished what hope the family had for Misael’s temporary release. His lawyers said there was little else they could do. Months had passed since Misael was taken from Eugene, yet the immense weight Jasmine and her mom felt in November was back. 

“We really all thought that they would let him go,” Jasmine said. 

In Tacoma, Misael saw fellow detainees with criminal records and multiple prior crossings go home after their families posted bond. Yet he was still there.

He could have pursued asylum or cancellation of removal, but losing his case would mean appealing from behind bars, indefinitely separated from his family.

“Sometimes the number one goal shifts to just being let out of detention,” Smith said. “I kind of think that’s what happened in this case, based on the advice that he also received from his other lawyer, who was more familiar with the chances of success on his particular application.”

Carter, the other attorney, did not respond to repeated requests to comment for this story.

So Misael chose “voluntary departure,” an agreement for him to return to Mexico instead of waiting in detention for proceedings that could result in a removal order, which would have barred him from reentering the U.S. for 10 years.

Nationally, the number of detained migrants abandoning their immigration cases by taking a voluntary departure has spiked under the Trump administration. An inability to seek release on bond is in part driving the surge, a Washington Post analysis found in May. 

A future petition from Jasmine could eventually let Misael apply for a waiver to reenter. That potentially costly process could be as long as a couple of months to a couple of years, Smith said. But courts for detained immigrants don’t pause for that. His deportation was imminent.

Misael’s request for voluntary departure was granted Jan. 12. 

Three days later, he and other migrants were flown in shackles to an Arizona facility, where federal agents separated them by nationality. After awaiting processing overnight, Misael was bused to the border town of Nogales, Mexico. 

“All of us were excited at the same time because we were going to get out and finally be free, no longer in a prison where we didn’t belong,” Misael said later, about the mood on the bus. “But at the same time we were sad, because we were trying to process what was happening to us.”

Also aboard was Ignacio, a man Misael had befriended in Tacoma, who lived just blocks away from his family’s west Eugene home. 

Arrested on the same day and denied bond on the same day, the pair grew to rely on each other, clinging to fleeting hope they might return to their families. Their children also knew each other. Jasmine had been texting with Ignacio’s daughter, Apple, in the days since their fathers disappeared from ICE’s detainee locator database, once they crossed to Mexico.

Jasmine didn’t yet know that federal agents had released her dad in Mexico with only 96 cents, no documents, and a phone he couldn’t unlock because he forgot the passcode. He said it felt like an eraser wiped his memory from the day of his arrest.

Misael needed to get more than 1,300 miles south, to Mexico City, where his family planned to meet him. Ignacio, who was heading further south to Oaxaca, gave Misael 5,000 pesos — about $300 — to buy a meal, a pair of shoes and a plane ticket.

‘vive feliz mexico’

Misael’s deportation pulled him from one family and pushed him back into another. 

His older brother Angel picked him up from the Mexico City airport in an old Ford truck, upholstery peeling from the roof next to a cutout of the Virgin Mary. They began the two-hour drive north to their hometown of Santa Ana. 

They passed Tula de Allende, a nearby manufacturing and oil city of about 100,000 people. One of its largest employers, Mexico’s state-owned oil company Pemex, runs a refinery there for gas and diesel. Flames atop its skeletal towers and tangled pipes flicker on the horizon 24 hours a day.

Dense buildings gave way to dry grass dotted by shrubs, hardy trees and power lines. The asphalt turned to a dirt road flanked by cinderblock homes with tin roofs, laundry on clotheslines drying in the heat.

Though 18 years had passed since Angel had seen his brother, Misael’s quiet demeanor and wit were unchanged, he said. “Very much a joker, very much laid back.”

But Angel sensed something deeper within his brother had changed. The “blows life deals you” had shaped him, he thought.

“He no longer thinks like he did [when] he was 15,” Angel said. “He is already a full-grown man, with the responsibilities that come with that.”

Misael’s view from his brother’s truck felt a world away from the Willamette Valley’s sloping green hills and overcast winter skies. Even though it “rains half the year,” Misael found Eugene beautiful. The tranquility of the city reminded him of his own hometown. 

They soon sped by a white concrete wall painted with blue block letters reading “Santa Ana Ahuehuepan.”

The flat town of about 3,600 is where the Garcia family and Misael’s in-laws have lived for decades. Most locals work in agriculture, run tienditas (small shops often attached to shopkeepers’ homes), and work in neighboring cities like Tula.

It had grown denser since Misael left. The Tula river, where he swam after school with Angel and his friends, was now mucky with runoff from Mexico City sewers.

“It’s not the little town it used to be anymore,” Angel told his brother. 

At the end of a sloped gravel driveway sat the one-story home of Remedios López Guerrero, Misael’s 72-year-old mother — a gathering place for three generations of family.

A tin roof over the entryway shadowed its bright green facade. A curtain embroidered with sunflowers suspended from the front doorframe fluttered in the breeze. Shrubs grew against the sun-bleached brick walls that enclosed the surrounding yard. Old tires, buckets, water jugs and tarps sat next to pots of climbing flowers perched atop wood pallets and metal beams.

“Where did you bring me?” Misael joked to his brother. “This isn’t my house.”

The last time he saw the place, it was much smaller. His family had added more rooms over the years. It was a reminder of all that Misael missed since he left. The sun lines that creased his mother’s face and the streaks of silver running through her ponytail were another. 

Remedios cooked chicken for her son’s arrival. Misael and his family gathered around the dining table on the kitchen side of the large front room, across from couches and armchairs arranged in a U-shape. The apricot walls tinted the room orange.

They celebrated the reunion with shots of tequila and bottles of Dos Equis beer. His nieces, Alison, 8, and Araceli, 4, made him a colorful marker sign in Spanish that translates to “Welcome home, Uncle Misael. We love you very much.” 

Under the names, they wrote: “Live happily Mexico.” 

But that night, Misael struggled to sleep. 

He rose early the next morning, before a rooster in the yard awoke the rest of his family, to help his mother haul buckets of ground corn for her tortilla business. She made tortillas from a hut in the yard every day to sell, mixing masa dough by hand and pressing it into rounds.

Misael knew his return strained the family’s already tight finances. He used to send about $100 home to Mexico every month to help cover his mother’s expenses. Now, with Valeria not working in Eugene, there was little extra to send.

Misael needed work and a car. And there was endless paperwork to tell the Mexican government what he was still struggling to grasp: He was home. 

Misael and Remedios haul corn before dawn.

goodbye, again

Back in Eugene, Jasmine and Valeria rummaged through Misael’s closet. They filled boxes with clothes and keepsakes — his cowboy boots, a hat he wore to his wedding — to ship to him.

Calls over WhatsApp offered them glimpses of Misael’s new life in Mexico: his stomach upset by the food; his sleep improved from frequent walks since a car wasn’t always available. By late January, he was starting to seem more at ease there, Jasmine said. 

Meanwhile, his family in Oregon was forming a plan for the months ahead. 

Valeria, who was living in near-constant fear of an ICE confrontation in Eugene, would move to Mexico that summer.

She planned to join Misael and her family in Santa Ana, and she would take Leo with her, once he finished the school year and after Jasmine gave birth. 

Years before, Valeria’s family had used her remittances to build a modest house next to her mom’s tiendita. The house, still unfinished, would be a future home for her, Misael and Leo.

Jasmine and Luis urged their mom to leave their younger brother in Eugene, but she refused. Leo didn’t want to be apart from her. 

Whatever Valeria decided, she would be leaving a child behind.

Jasmine outlined the plan in the family’s living room one January afternoon in Eugene. Leo listened quietly, perched on his kitchen stool, as cartoons played in the background. He became uncharacteristically subdued.

He was excited to see his dad, he said, but it would be — he paused — “different.”

“I’m going to miss all the people I met here, especially my brother,” Leo said. “I’m not sure. I’m probably going to be really sad, because my brother and sister, I spend most of the time with them than anybody.”

Leo would enter seventh grade that fall. He would likely enroll at a K-12 school on the outskirts of Santa Ana, Jasmine said. She joked that his Spanish — the family’s first language — would soon surpass her own.

“I spent my whole life here,” her brother said. “I’ve only ever gone a week to Mexico.”

Jasmine was planning a weeklong visit to see Misael in Santa Ana in February, at five months pregnant, before she was too far along to fly. She had just learned she was carrying a boy, as her dad expected. “He was like, ‘I told you so.’”

Jasmine took a pay advance from her new job as a caregiver to people with disabilities to buy a round-trip flight to Mexico City. Jasmine had been to Santa Ana two times before, where she stayed at the unfinished house and met both her parents’ families. This trip, she hoped, would be just about spending time with her dad.

“I don’t know when I’ll be able to see my dad again after this, so yeah, I just want to say goodbye,” she said. “I didn’t get to do that. He just wasn’t here one day.” 

‘not like this’

In early February, two days before her 23rd birthday, Jasmine left Eugene at dusk to drive to the Portland airport. 

When she got off her flight in Mexico City the next morning, she saw Misael standing in a crowded arrivals area. It was the first time she’d seen her dad in more than two months.

They hugged for a long time, both wiping away tears. 

Misael then took her heaviest suitcase and her hand, and they left the airport in lockstep, then drove through the desert to Santa Ana like Misael had weeks before.

That night, with his daughter in the room next to him, Misael slept better than he had in months.

The next day, Feb. 6, was Jasmine’s birthday. 

Her mom’s family gathered to celebrate at the unfinished house where her dad and mom planned to move. Jasmine’s grandma was preparing a barbacoa meal for the occasion, fresh sheep meat slow-cooked in an earthen pit until it fell off the bone. 

After the feast, they lit candles on a cake. Watching her family sing, Jasmine realized this might be one of her last birthdays with her dad. 

“Everyone was looking at me like, ‘Why are you crying?’” she said. “My dad knew why.”

Later that night, Jasmine sat at the table in Remedios’ home, poring over old photos of her dad she had never seen before to piece together bits of family history.

One photograph showed Misael with his late grandfather Manuel, who raised him after his biological father left. Decades ago, Manuel gave the family a little adobe house (since demolished) that became Misael’s childhood home. They slept on petates, woven mats, and plugged holes in the tile roof that leaked when it rained. After storms, Misael fished frogs from a rainwater pond that formed in a nearby field.

By the next afternoon, the conversation around the table had drifted from stories of Misael’s childhood to the chapter his family was still struggling to make sense of.

Misael told them about life in Tacoma, the room growing quiet as he gently laid the rosaries made by his friend on the table.

When his mother — usually a woman of few words — was asked to react to her son’s detention, she broke down, her voice aching as it tightened against tears. 

“He is not a criminal,” Remedios said. “He has never stolen, never killed, and never harmed anyone. My son is a good man, ladies and gentlemen. He grew up with good values from me because I taught him to respect others and to earn [their respect in return].”

Outside, dogs in the yard barked, and Misael’s nieces laughed as they played with a kitten. Around the table, the only sound was her voice. Misael wiped his eyes as his mother spoke, his head bowed.

Remedios thanked God for being able to reunite with her son. But she, too, worried about how her family would get by without his financial support.

“There won’t be anyone to help me the way he did,” she said.

“What happened to my son has been something very hard for me,” Remedios continued. “It has been very hard. Just imagine me, as a mother, and now his own family too — the family he had to leave behind. He won’t be able to go back to them anymore, and I don’t know how that’s going to work.”

She said Misael planned to come back to Mexico someday, but “not like this.”

Misael’s family in Mexico sits for a portrait.

‘The hardest part is the goodbye’

In the days that followed, preparations for Leo and Valeria’s arrival in Mexico filled much of Misael and Jasmine’s time. Between errands, they tried to make the most of their brief reunion.

One afternoon, after stopping at a tile store to get a quote for flooring in Misael’s unfinished home, they drove to the Tula ruins, an archaeological site preserving the remnants of the ancient Toltec Empire. 

The site was just 15 minutes north of Misael and Angel’s hometown, but they had never been there growing up. Despite that, Angel said being at the site sent him back to those early days, when he and his brother jumped in the river as teenagers. 

Jasmine and Misael wandered through the small museum near the entrance, lingering at nearly every exhibit before strolling down an old cobblestone path lined with towering cacti. They bought matching bracelets at a booth selling trinkets and climbed the massive tiered pyramid rising from the horizon like a jagged tooth, Misael carefully guiding Jasmine up the uneven stone steps. 

At the top, the shade cast by 15-foot basalt warriors offered relief from the scorching afternoon sun. Beyond them, the cloudless sky stretched toward distant mountains, interrupted only by plumes of flame from the Tula refinery. 

For a few moments, the breeze was the only reminder that anything was moving at all.

But by the following morning, it was back to paperwork. 

Misael, Angel and Jasmine drove past yellowed fields to a notary’s office on the side of a busy road to process documents needed for Leo’s dual citizenship, a step that would ease his eventual move to Mexico. Misael had made hurried calls and a late-night drive the previous evening to scrounge money for the forms. 

When they arrived, they met Misael’s cousin, Marisol Jimenez Villeda, who helped him navigate a bureaucracy he barely understood at his appointment.

“He knows maybe more about the United States than about Mexico,” she said. 

When Misael crossed into the United States, he hoped to earn enough money to build a house back home for his family. A home now stood, nearly finished, waiting for him. But he had never imagined returning to it without his wife and children. He also wished he could have done more to fix up his mom’s home.

“I wasn’t able to accomplish or finish what I had hoped for,” Misael said at a cafe below the notary’s office as trucks thundered past. 

Even so, Misael said he had no regrets. 

“I have nothing to hide and nothing to be ashamed of,” he said. “I went there to fight for a better future for my children and my mother. And, in a way, you could say I achieved that.”

What he hadn’t been able to achieve, he said, was a life without separation from his family. But that separation hadn’t begun with his detention. It began the day he left Mexico in his 20s.

“From the day I emigrated to the United States, for me, there has been no such thing as a perfect moment,” Misael said. “From the moment I emigrated to the United States, my family was split apart. Over time, I came to accept being separated from my family in two places. But I never thought I’d be [depending] on my parents [for money], like when I left.”

He continued: “Now, in this situation that I am living, I’m understanding the pain that I left for my parents when I left.”

“Of all of us who migrated to this country, many—some of us—have behaved badly. But others came here for the right reasons: to provide for our families and take care of the people we love. That was my case.“

MISAEL GARCIA LOPEZ

In fewer than 24 hours, Jasmine would fly back to Oregon. She didn’t know when she would see her dad again. She sat to his left at the roadside cafe, clasping his hand, the other resting on her pregnant belly.

“It’s this thing that we know it’s coming,” she said. “We just don’t want to talk about it.” 

The morning of Feb. 11, they couldn’t avoid the goodbye any longer. Jasmine and Misael rode in the back of Angel’s truck to the airport.

They exchanged few words. Jasmine drifted to sleep, her head resting on her dad’s shoulder.

The calm of the drive gave way to a loud chaotic airport filled with construction and bustling travelers. Misael and Jasmine stopped and embraced at an escalator that would take her to a security checkpoint. Passengers impatiently pushed past Jasmine as her eyes flooded with tears.

Misael whispered final words of comfort in her ear. Then she left. 

He watched her ascend the escalator, wiping his eyes. Jasmine didn’t stop crying until the plane was in the air. 

“I was able to be with her, even if it was only for a few days, and then she had to leave again,” Misael said months later. “That’s the hardest part — having to say goodbye all over again. You find yourself wondering when you’ll be able to hug your loved one again, or even see them in person. That’s what really leaves a mark.”

Jasmine waits in the Guadalajara airport during her trip back to Eugene.

‘making peace’

Life in Eugene moved forward without him.

Valeria returned to work. She stayed up late preparing tamales in her blue kitchen to sell to friends and family, one of her side hustles. Jasmine, nearing her due date, stocked up on baby clothes and diapers. Dozens of friends and family members came together in April for her blue-and-white-themed baby shower.

Jasmine’s water broke in the early hours of May 2. She rushed to PeaceHealth Sacred Heart Medical Center at RiverBend with Saugat and was soon joined by her mom, Leo, friends and her doula. 

That afternoon, Jasmine’s son was born. 

She named the healthy baby boy Emilio Manuel, taking his middle name from Misael’s grandfather.

“It was such a surreal feeling,” Jasmine said a month later, recalling the moment as Emilio fidgeted and gurgled beside her. “He cried, and he opened his eyes as soon as they put him on my chest. Then I rubbed his back a little bit, and he stopped crying.”

Shortly after the birth, Valeria called Misael.

“I could hear my dad crying, which then made me cry,” Jasmine said.

In June, Misael still choked up recalling the video call. He was overjoyed to see his grandson enter the world, but heartbroken he wasn’t there.

“There are mixed emotions, two very different situations,” he said. “At times, I feel happy, and at times, I feel sad because I’m not with my loved ones. With the birth of my grandson, I feel the same way. It’s two feelings at the same time, and it’s hard. It’s hard to deal with all of this.”

Jasmine rarely let Emilio out of her sight in the weeks that followed. For her first shower alone after he was born, she placed his car seat in the bathroom and peeked around the shower curtain every few minutes.

The baby was a happy distraction from a painful transition coming soon, too soon. 

Leo’s dual citizenship was finalized. Boxes filled the family’s little house in Eugene, ready to be shipped to Mexico. Jasmine’s mom and Leo planned to leave in August.

Every day after work, Valeria hurried into her daughter’s room to see Emilio. At night, she soothed him when he cried, so Jasmine could sleep. Soon, she would be gone, and Jasmine’s boyfriend would return to working nights. 

Jasmine worried whether she would have enough support. 

“It’s mostly me and my mom,” she said. 

The family still needed money to ship their belongings, finish the house in Santa Ana and cover expenses on both sides of the border. To help make ends meet, Jasmine’s older brother and sister-in-law sold their home and moved back in.

Meanwhile, Misael was still struggling to find his footing.

His family shipped him his Ford truck from Eugene, which he hoped would help him find work, but it was damaged in the process and needed repairs. His shoulder still hurt. Work, mostly manual labor, was scarce. 

He spent days tending to his father-in-law Jaime’s cornfields. Walking through the fields, inspecting each ear’s corn silk for worms, was one of the few things that helped him clear his head. 

“I would like them to come here, but at the same time, I wish they wouldn’t, because life here isn’t that easy,” Misael said in early June. “Even though things in Mexico have improved a bit and there are a few more job opportunities now, life here is still tough.”

“My son is constantly going back and forth to the bar, my wife gets stressed because there isn’t enough money, my children feel it too,” he continued. “They even had to sell their house and move back in with my wife to help her with the expenses. So, it has been hard. It’s going to be even harder now that my wife comes here with my son.”

In Eugene, loneliness crept into Jasmine’s long stretches at home with Emilio. 

One evening, she was cooking dinner — chicken cutlets and rice — and cracked open a Twisted Tea, her first drink since before her pregnancy. A mariachi tune by Vicente Fernández lilted in the background. 

For a moment, it felt like a normal weekend months earlier, when her dad blasted music and belted out his favorite songs. He never let Jasmine go to parties in high school. But on those nights, once she was old enough, they occasionally shared a couple of Modelos.

The memory stung. 

“I was talking to my therapist a while ago and she told me it’s almost like I’m grieving my dad,” Jasmine said, recalling the memory. “Even though he’s obviously not dead, but it often does feel like that.

“It’s not so much anymore about, I guess, trying to get my dad back,” she continued. “It’s more so just coming to terms of he’s not coming back and figuring out how that’s going to look like, and making peace with it.”

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How we reported this story

Lookout Eugene-Springfield followed Misael and his family for more than six months to report this story. Our work began when Misael was arrested by ICE in November 2025, and it continued through his detention, deportation and the planned relocation of his wife and youngest son to Mexico in August 2026.

Lookout reporter Grace Chinowsky and photojournalist Isaac Wasserman traveled to Misael’s hometown in Mexico in February to better understand his experience and document his deportation. We conducted dozens of interviews with him, family members, attorneys and other community members who knew him, and reviewed a number of court documents.

Bilingual sources and hired professionals, Manuel Bayo Gisbert and Cristopher Rogel Blanquet, provided live translation. Normand Garcia, former editor of El Sol de Yakima (the Spanish-language publication of the Yakima Herald-Republic), translated quotes from Spanish-speaking sources into English and prepared the Spanish translation and editorial adaptation of this article.