Copyright The Oregonian
Napoleon Andres Magaña and his stepfather, Arturo Garcia Cabrera, were detained last month by immigration authorities who broke into their Gresham apartment and then into a bedroom with rifles drawn looking for a different person. For Garcia Cabrera, that was just the beginning of an ordeal that stranded him on the other side of the country. The federal government transferred Garcia Cabrera four different times to four different states before releasing him in Mississippi, where he had no cellphone and no family. It took him almost a week to get a ride and travel home. “It was awful and complicated for him to be able to return here,” his stepdaughter, Maricruz Andres, said in Spanish. Andres Magaña and Garcia Cabrera wrongfully entered U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody Oct. 15 after armed agents broke open a door in their Gresham apartment without a warrant after agents surrounded their building for more than an hour, shouting a man’s name they didn’t recognize. Both men have no criminal record. Andres and her 3-month-old baby had taken refuge with the men in her room and recorded the incident. A senior official with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security later confirmed the agents weren’t looking for either Andres Magaña or Garcia Cabrera, and that the man they were looking for had escaped and remained at-large. Immigration authorities didn’t immediately respond to a request seeking comment for this story. “They didn’t have the right to enter the way they did,” Andres Magaña said in Spanish. “That is why we have laws, but they themselves broke the laws.” Both men were taken to the ICE facility in South Portland and transferred to long-term detention in Tacoma, Washington, where Andres Magaña remained until his release Oct. 30. Being in immigration detention was agonizing, he said, and he was surprised when he was told he was getting out. “You don’t know what’s going to happen there,” he said. “You’re without information.” Garcia Cabrera was forced even farther from home. After being moved to Tacoma, the federal government transferred Garcia Cabrera to Arizona, then Louisiana and finally Mississippi. It’s common for immigration authorities to transfer people to other detention centers, but it wasn’t immediately known how many people are released and left stranded away from home. His stepdaughter said she believes ICE had a motive for the moves. “Now we are seeing a lot of people who are being detained unjustly, they don’t have a record, they don’t have any problems with the law,” she said. “So what they are doing, is moving them to different places so they can give up and so they can become frustrated and sign their deportation.” Garcia Cabrera was released Friday morning, and communication was scarce because he didn’t have a phone, making arrangements to travel back to Oregon from Mississippi difficult. He arrived in the early hours on Thursday. Andres Magaña said immigration authorities kept his cellphone and a gold chain his mother bought him. Relatives were able to pick him up last week, and his mom made him a guisado with pork and green chili to welcome him. “It was many days of anguish, and worry,” his sister, Andres, said in Spanish. “We didn’t know what was going to happen. The only thing we wanted was for them to be released here. They had not committed any crime for them to be taken.”
