Note: Street Roots’ interview with Jorge Luis Reinaldo was conducted in Spanish, with assistance from an interpreter. Quotes are translated as directly as possible while maintaining appropriate context.
The room fills with cheers as the news comes in.
Whether they’ve been granted protection in the U.S. or finding out they’ll soon be deported, everyone held in a Tacoma immigration facility is ready to celebrate. One more person is no longer stuck in the limbo of a crowded warehouse.
“Because it’s not easy to be locked up here,” Jorge Luis Reinaldo, a 22-year-old Venezuelan asylum-seeker, told Street Roots. “Even for the strongest.”
Amid President Trump’s hardline immigration push, U.S. immigration agents detained Reinaldo Feb. 20 in Portland, where he lived and worked. Now, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, is holding him while he awaits his asylum hearing in September. The community he built through his church, and as a day laborer, is demanding his release, fearing he may be deported to Venezuela, or sent to a prison in El Salvador, like other young Venezuelans under Trump’s reign.
Early this year, Reinaldo’s phone was broken, and he couldn’t receive messages. When he got it fixed on Feb. 19, he found several voicemails from ICE agents saying they had been trying to reach him since Feb. 2. He was to report to its Portland headquarters immediately to fill out paperwork. But when he showed up, the only paperwork for him to sign was to transfer him to Tacoma.
He sat isolated in a room inside the ICE field office in Portland. He only speaks Spanish, but he said agents mostly spoke to him in English with some help from an interpreter.
Equity Corps of Oregon immigration lawyers advised Reinaldo in advance, telling him not to sign anything without a lawyer present. The Portland Immigrant Rights Coalition sent a lawyer from its rapid response team within a couple of minutes. Despite their efforts, they were unsuccessful in averting his detainment. ICE agents simply said Reinaldo was subject to a “custody redetermination,” and was “on a list from D.C.,” according to Karla Castañeda, executive director at Voz Workers’ Rights Education Project, where Reinaldo has found work for the past year.
Three months later, Reinaldo is still there.
“Just for the simple fact of being Venezuelan, we have been attacked,” Reinaldo said in an interview on a tablet shared between 10 others who sleep in the same cubicle. “I think that we should separate the bad from the good. (Trump) wants all of us to pay for it.”
As he waits for his asylum hearing, Reinaldo’s community is taking action, demanding ICE release him and the roughly 1,500 people in custody at the privately-run Northwest ICE Processing Center, or NWIPC. Advocates are planning a caravan from Portland to Tacoma on May 31 as a show of support for those confined inside.
Castañeda said the community has come together in recent months, working in solidarity in the face of Trump’s immigration policies. Recently, Voz and the National Day Laborer Organizing Network organized a letter-writing campaign to elected officials and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, seeking to pressure the federal agency to grant Reinaldo’s bond request.
“Just for the simple fact of being Venezuelan, we have been attacked.”
— Jorge Luis Reinaldo
Reinaldo’s detainment set him back in the life he worked to build in the U.S. He lost his apartment and his consistent source of income through the various temporary employers who hired him. He doesn’t receive benefits, and he didn’t have a work permit, so he worked temporary jobs he found through Voz.
Growing up, Reinaldo said life in Venezuela was hard, but living conditions were better than they are there now.
Being isolated from oil markets, its main source of income, wreaked havoc on Venezuela’s economy in the mid-2010s. Due to economic collapse beginning in 2013, Venezuela, a petrostate, endured what Human Rights Watch called a “profound humanitarian crisis,” during which Venezuelans had little access to food, medicine and electricity.
In 2015, when he was 12 years old, he said there was no food to eat. By 2016, his mother decided to leave the country along with his sisters and cousins.
“In 2016 and 2017, Venezuela was in chaos,” Reinaldo said. “I mean, there was nothing to be found in the supermarkets. There was a lot of hunger in Venezuela.”
Venezuela faced a constitutional crisis after the U.S. led an international push to remove Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro from power in favor of his challenger, Juan Guaidó. Trump, then in his first presidential term, placed sanctions on Venezuela’s state-owned oil company in 2019, including secondary sanctions, meaning any other country doing business with the state oil company would also face sanctions. (President Joe Biden removed sanctions during his term, then reinstated them six months later. Trump issued an executive order in March imposing 25% tariffs on countries importing Venezuelan oil.)
At his mother’s urging, Reinaldo moved to Bogotá, Colombia, to study in 2020, just after he turned 18. But he was unable to enroll due to a lack of documentation, despite his best efforts.
“In Venezuela, there was no future,” Reinaldo said.
By then, Venezuela’s GDP had plummeted, leaving people with the choice of staying in poverty or fleeing the country in search of better living conditions. The United Nations Refugee Agency estimates that some 7.9 million people are refugees or migrants from Venezuela, and over 7 million people — one in four Venezuelans — remain in need of humanitarian assistance.
Reinaldo and a friend lived in Bogotá for a year. In 2022, they decided to take their first trip to the U.S. They saved money and eventually sold everything they owned to afford the journey.
“That journey — the truth is, it was very, very, very hard,” Reinaldo said.
Their three-day trek from Colombia to Panama through the Darién Gap was harrowing. But Reinaldo is tenacious, a character trait he is proud of.
“I had to make the journey twice through the jungle,” Reinaldo said. “In the jungle, I saw dead people. I even saw a baby die. I mean, I saw a child die, and I kept going.”
At the United Nations office in Panama, Reinaldo and his friend learned the U.S. border was closed. Still, they continued through Costa Rica to Nicaragua, where they encountered crowds of people traveling away from the U.S. border.
The legality of Trump’s 2018 Migrant Protection Protocols program — commonly known as “Remain in Mexico” — went back and forth in the courts, causing uncertainty and chaos at the border. Asylum seekers faced violence from cartels and Mexican border officials while they waited, according to the organization Human Rights First. The organization interviewed nearly 2,700 asylum seekers initially enrolled in the program between January and August of 2022 and found that 41% had faced attacks, including kidnapping, rape, torture and other violent assaults while waiting in Mexico.
Remain in Mexico stayed in place under the Biden administration after Texas brought a lawsuit against the administration in 2021 for ending the program. Many who were awaiting immigration hearings, hoping to enter the U.S., were turned away.
Reinaldo and his friend kept going.
“We had already sold everything,” Reinaldo said. “We no longer had anything behind us. We had to move forward. You understand? So, we kept going.”
They reached Guatemala, but by then, his friend couldn’t go any further. They returned to Panama with nothing, where they stayed briefly with a stranger before they were deported to Venezuela — three years after Reinaldo first left.
“It was very disappointing to arrive with nothing,” Reinaldo said. “Do you understand?”
In 2023, Reinaldo tried again, with his uncle. They successfully crossed the border that December.
Bond
In advance of an April 1 hearing where Reinaldo hoped to be released on bond, his community raised money through GoFundMe to pay the bond if it was granted. However, the judge denied the bond, part of a long pattern of denials for those held at the NWIPC. Reinaldo’s attorney is appealing, but the process typically takes months, so winning an appeal prior to his September hearing is unlikely.
The practice of denying bond is not new, particularly in the NWIPC, even before the Trump administration’s recent efforts to increase detainments and deportations. From October 2022 to July 2023, those held at the NWIPC had the lowest chance of an immigration judge granting a bond motion, at just 3% of all cases, according to the most recent Trac Immigration report published in July 2023. That’s compared with the average of 31% of cases nationwide.
The rate is slightly higher so far in 2025: Immigration judges granted bond in 29 cases, or 10% of its total 288 requests, and 78 cases were withdrawn — meaning the person held wanted to delay their hearing, often to gather more evidence.
The Northwest Immigrant Rights Project filed a class action lawsuit in the U.S. District Court Western District of Washington in Seattle on March 20. The lawsuit argued that since 2022, immigration judges overseeing NWIPC consistently used a unique, draconian policy that prolongs detention by inhibiting appeals to bond denials.
“For at least the past two years, all but one of the (immigration judges) at the Tacoma Immigration Court have adopted a practice of denying all requests for release on bond by noncitizens in removal proceedings who entered the United States without inspection, including as to those who have lived here for decades,” the lawsuit argued.
Aaron Korthuis, a lawyer with Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, which filed the lawsuit, said the Immigration & Nationality Act, or INA, is clear: people who the government alleges initially entered without inspection and have since lived in the U.S., are entitled to a bond hearing under U.S. law. Instead, the Tacoma Immigration Court has held that people like Ramon Rodriguez Vazquez — the plaintiff, who has lived in the U.S. since 2009 — are treated like recent arrivals who are subject to mandatory detention, according to Korthuis. He has not been charged with a crime.
Separately, the lawsuit asserts that the Board of Immigration Appeals is denying due process to people in detention because it takes many months to resolve the custody appeals of noncitizens.
“The Fifth Amendment guarantees timely considerations of someone’s appeal where their liberty interests are at stake,” Korthuis said.
On April 24, U.S. District Judge Tiffany M. Cartwright granted a preliminary injunction in the case, requiring the Tacoma immigration court to give Rodriguez a hearing within 14 days, saying the court may no longer deny his bond on the basis of U.S. mandatory detention laws.
While lawyers for the plaintiff soon plan to request an injunction for the entire class of people with similar circumstances, the preliminary injunction is currently limited to Rodriguez.
“Unfortunately, the Tacoma (immigration judges) have not shifted their practice in response to it,” Korthuis said. “We intend to soon seek relief on behalf of the entire class to ensure that people cannot be continued to be denied bond based on the (immigration judge’s) misreading of the INA.”
Korthuis added class relief is necessary so that immigration judges do not continue ignoring that the INA does not provide for mandatory detention for people like Rodriguez.
“Denying them bond on that basis subjects them to incarceration in a facility separated from their loved ones and communities, even when people have lived here for years,” Korthuis said.
The denied bond hearings are not the only ongoing legal cases that could impact Reinaldo and others held under similar circumstances.
On March 14, Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act to remove Venezuelan nationals who the government says are members of a Trump-designated transnational terrorist organization, Tren de Aragua. The U.S. Supreme Court temporarily blocked the administration’s efforts to deport Venezuelan nationals May 16 until a lower court resolves the case, backing the defendant’s claims the act may violate their due process.
Days later, in a May 19 decision on a separate case, the Supreme Court approved an emergency application filed by the Trump administration. The application sought to pause an order by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California that temporarily postponed the administration’s removal of protective status for nearly 350,000 Venezuelan immigrants under the Temporary Protected Status program. The Supreme Court’s approval of the application allowed the Trump administration to remove the status, for now, at least until the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals makes a decision on the appeal.
Both cases have direct implications for Reinaldo and others held in ICE facilities. Since Trump took office, ICE has deported immigrants without due process — some to prisons in El Salvador, where they endure harsh conditions. In addition to fears of returning to Venezuela, the possibility of being deported to El Savador’s prisons is not lost on Reinaldo.
“It scares me too,” Reinaldo said. “Although I don’t have a tattoo, nor have I committed a crime.”
Reinaldo remains afraid of what might happen if he is sent back to Venezuela. He already faced harassment from police and gangs in his neighborhood when he was younger.
Friends have told him when a person is deported to Venezuela, the police take them directly to their house. He said he fears more police harassment, as police there are corrupt and abuse their power. Gangs and police regularly clashed in the streets when he lived there.
In the neighborhood he is from in Venezuela, it is understood that people should not be outside past 7 p.m. In 2022, he once left his house to visit his grandmother in the afternoon, and walked home around 10 p.m.
He said police stopped him, saying he was someone else, took his money, held a gun to his leg and threatened to shoot him, before demanding he buy them a cola to purchase his freedom. He didn’t have any money, because the police had taken it, but the police became more upset when he said so, threatening him further.
“I decided to leave the country because there were a lot of problems,” Reinaldo said.
He left for Colombia again, where he saved money to get to Ecuador, then the U.S., with his uncle. They made it across the border in December 2023.
Reinaldo said he came to Portland because it was close to the Canadian border, but he quickly built community through his church and his work, and stayed.
Reinaldo first walked into the Voz Worker Center, a Northeast Portland community space and job opportunity organization supporting day laborers, on Feb. 10, 2024.
Voz serves roughly 1,000 workers annually, with some 300 currently active workers, according to Castañeda, its executive director. It’s part of a coalition of organizations nationwide working to prevent exploitation of day laborers and provide resources to the immigrant community.
Workers at Voz participate in a daily lottery to be added to a list of workers for the day. After the list is created, people go to various jobs, from landscaping to demolition, construction or moving jobs. Some employers offer workers long-term opportunities when they find a good fit, while other workers fill important gaps through temporary roles. Many are asylum seekers, often waiting for a work permit. Once the permit comes through, Voz can help place people with agencies for long-term work.
Reinaldo was such a great worker that when employers hired him they never wanted to let go, Castañeda said. He’s worked as a bricklayer, a painter, a cook, an electrician’s assistant and a landscaper, to name a few. Reinaldo attributes his work ethic to his father — formerly in a high-ranking position in the Venezuelan military — saying what his father taught him helped him get a lot of work.
“I’ve worked in everything because of that, of always saying, ‘Well, even if I don’t know how to do it, I’m going to do it — I’m going to try,” Reinaldo said.
Through Voz, Reinaldo participated in a leadership and education program, and got a certificate in irrigation through an accredited workforce development program Voz created in partnership with Portland Community College. He said he’s always been curious, wanting to learn about all kinds of things.
“What I’ve wanted most is to study to be an electrician although I haven’t been able to,” Reinaldo said. “My thought is, as soon as I finish arranging all of this, my documents, well, if they give me the opportunity, then I’d like to continue studying.”
Voz and PCC are working to renew the program, according to Castañeda. Receiving college credit and gaining a certificate helps to improve overall working conditions, as workers can demand dignified wages from those who hire them. It also fosters a sense of pride.
“We had folks that didn’t graduate elementary,” Castañeda said. “For them, higher education just seemed so impossible.”
Asked what the community support means to him, Reinaldo said he has always had a hard time accepting help. Still, he added, as strong as someone thinks they are, everyone has their moments.
“I am a person who, to be honest, has never liked receiving help, since I was a child,” he said. “However, all this help that I have had, especially at this moment, well, the truth is that it does make me feel good. It makes me feel like I have a family, even though I don’t have a family nearby. It’s nice, no matter how strong I want to be.”
ICE spokesperson David Yost did not respond to Street Roots’ multiple requests for comment.
Voz, International Migrants Alliance, Migrante Portland and La Resistencia have organized a caravan from Portland to Tacoma to the NWIPC, with support from the National Day Laborer Network and Somos Más Comités del Barrio.
Meet May 31 at 9:30 a.m. at the Voz Worker Center. Depart at 10 a.m.
Details at portlandvoz.org
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This article appears in May 28, 2025.