He hadn’t moved anything in the house. Their bed was still unmade — it had been like that for days, he said, since the last night they slept in it. Her shoes, tossed near the front door. On the small dining table were further scattered bits of her presence: the leaves of her morning mate, a stack of her unopened letters. In the kitchen, their dishes still sat untouched in the sink. He said he couldn’t bring himself to wash the ones they had used to eat breakfast before they left the house that last morning.
“We didn’t know this was the last time she was going to come back,” he told El Tecolote.
For the past weeks, Roberto has been sleeping on a friend’s couch, too distraught to spend the night alone in his house.
This July, Roberto’s wife Sandra was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during a routine check-in appointment at the agency’s San Francisco field office. Since then, she has been held in a detention center, waiting for updates on her pending asylum case.
For years, ICE has allowed many immigrants with pending cases, like Sandra, to remain in their communities and work while they go through immigration proceedings. As an alternative to detention, those individuals must comply with several ICE supervision guidelines, including attending regular check-in appointments at ICE’s field offices.
But since the Trump administration raised ICE’s daily arrest quotas in late May, arrests at routine check-ins have surged, sparking protests in San Francisco and beyond. Immigration advocates warn that the trend, coupled with harsh detention conditions, could pressure some asylum seekers to abandon viable claims.
Legal aid groups say dozens have been detained in recent weeks, with an estimated five to 15 arrests daily at ICE’s San Francisco office, though shifting policies make the agency’s actions hard to predict.
Roberto said that the day Sandra was detained, ICE agents told him she could wait for updates on her case from inside a detention center, just as she had while living with him. Yet her process has already been ongoing for years. Sandra is still waiting for her first court date, according to ICE and immigration court records. With the backlog mounting, there is no telling when her case might move forward.
“For them, it’s very normal. But the result is a home destroyed,” Roberto said. “I’m really depressed. I haven’t eaten in days. I’m not hungry, I don’t want to eat anything.”
“She’s my family,” he added. “She’s my home.”
Roberto met Sandra on Facebook in 2017, when they were still living on different continents. He was in San Francisco, working as a social worker and awaiting a decision on his own immigration case, when her profile popped up under the platform’s “People you might know” tab. Curious, he sent her a friendship request, and they began chatting, quickly discovering they had a world of commonalities.
She lived in the same small town that his parents had grown up in and that he had visited in his childhood. Her house was just three blocks away from his grandmother’s. She had spent 10 years living in the South American country where Roberto had been born and raised. Though they’d unknowingly walked the same streets, they had never crossed paths.
They dated online for a few months, but after a while, the relationship fizzled out. Still, they stayed in touch: liking each other’s pictures and celebrating each other’s birthdays. In 2021, Roberto asked a friend traveling to Sandra’s town to buy and bring her candies. Their relationship rekindled.
A year later, Sandra embarked on a months-long journey to meet him. She took several planes, crossed Central America on foot with some relatives, and got lost for 10 days in the Darien Gap, a dangerous stretch of rainforest between Colombia and Panama known as a major route for migrants. “She almost died,” Roberto said.
When she eventually made it out of the jungle, she reunited with the relatives she had previously been walking with. Together, they made their way to the U.S.-Mexico border, where she turned herself in to border officials.
After two months in detention, she was released to her uncle’s house in another U.S. state, and Roberto flew to see her for the first time.
“It was a magical moment,” he said. “I had been waiting for a long time to meet her.”
Over the next three years, the couple started building a life together in San Francisco as they waited for updates on their immigration cases. Sandra started taking English classes at City College. They traveled across the U.S., visiting landmarks and meeting each other’s families. They slowly covered their fridge with magnets of the places they visited: New York City, Las Vegas, and Arizona. They put up souvenirs that their new friends had brought them from their trips around the world. Early this year, they celebrated their wedding.
“We’re not just married,” Roberto said. “We go to the gym together, we’re together throughout the day and through the night. And we don’t get bored of each other.”
Sandra, he said, is someone “everyone loves.” She buys clothes to donate to homeless shelters. She cooks for her friends and Roberto’s coworkers, and always returns from her trips with gifts for them. She calls her parents regularly and is very close to his family.
This summer, Roberto said, “many things started happening at once.” After almost a decade of waiting, Roberto secured legal status. In late June, they took a trip so Sandra could reunite with her two brothers. Soon after, he received a promotion at work. The couple was elated.
They were already planning their next trip to Washington D.C., and once Sandra obtained legal status, to visit the rest of the world, starting with Denmark and the Dominican Republic.
“We were looking to start a family,” he said.
But the morning after they learned of Roberto’s promotion, their lives took a turn when Sandra was arrested by ICE.
Roberto can’t stop lamenting that day. That morning, as they waited for her appointment, she was “more affectionate than normal,” taking a selfie with Roberto and giving him small kisses.
She asked him to give her a hug, he said, and he told her she was being dramatic.
As 9:00 a.m. approached, Roberto told Sandra he had to leave for work. She didn’t want to be left alone and asked him to call in sick. But he was scheduled to start in 30 minutes, and decided to go in for the first part of the work day.
“My love,” he said he told her, “I’ll come back.”
But by the time he was clocking in, his phone rang. The call, he said, came from an unidentified number. When he picked up, he heard Sandra’s voice. She had been arrested, she told him, and would soon be moved to a detention center. Roberto rushed out of work and began calling legal aid groups. It was already too late.
“It’s like she could feel like something was going to happen,” Roberto said. “And I was so stupid… I think that if I had been with her, maybe they wouldn’t have taken her. I don’t know.”
ICE transferred Sandra to a detention center where she remains, according to the agency’s detainee locator. And Roberto was left outside, facing new beginnings, but separated from the person he most wanted to share them with.
“How can I stay focused?” he said. “I’ve gone to church a lot to beg God. I’ve gone to the beach because that’s where you feel the presence. And I’ve cried. I’ve cried so much. I won’t be at peace until we’re together again.”
Now, Roberto and Sandra call every day. He sends her money so she can rent a tablet from the facility and pay for video calls with him and her lawyer. Roberto says agents at the facility tell Sandra that her case will take time to be resolved, making her feel hopeless.
“She doesn’t want to be there for a long time,” Roberto said.
Despite urging Sandra not to sign any documents, Roberto said lawyers and nonprofits haven’t given them much hope either.
Some told him Sandra might be deported to her home country. Others said that she might be able to get out of detention, but that it will take time. Some said it might be easier for her to decide to leave on her own, and for Roberto to bring her back, a path that could take years. One supposed attorney claimed he could get Sandra out in a year for $25,000 up front — an offer many nonprofits warn immigrants to be wary of. Roberto walked out. Sandra’s attorney, meanwhile, continues to fight for her pending asylum application, which allows her to remain in the U.S.
ICE has also made it harder for many detained immigrants to be released, said Alex Mensing of the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice (CCIJ). A new July policy made millions ineligible for bond hearings, and release decisions now often rely on ICE’s discretion, making outcomes “arbitrary and very political.” The current landscape could further complicate Roberto and Sandra’s desire to reunite.
“All I want is to have her with me,” Roberto said. “That’s all I want. I want my wife to be with me again, but it doesn’t seem like it will be possible.”
Roberto has considered visiting the detention center so he can see Sandra in person, but lawyers and family have warned him not to, fearing that, without citizenship, he might be at risk of detention as well.
Inside his house, he says, it’s impossible not to remember her. On a cabinet near the kitchen table are three framed photographs: the two of them bundled up in Lake Tahoe, Roberto kissing Sandra’s cheek at the edge of the Grand Canyon, and a portrait of Sandra’s parents, smiling. Her favorite snacks are still stocked in the drawers. Her makeup is still in the bathroom. Her gym bag sits by the door.
Roberto says he can’t bring himself to touch anything Sandra left behind.
“She’s my best friend,” he said. “And I don’t know when I’m going to be with her again. I don’t know why they’re doing this.”
Editor’s note: The couple’s names and countries of origin have been changed or withheld at their request, due to fear of retaliation. Key details were verified via ICE and immigration court records, documentation reviewed during a home visit and confirmation from legal advocates.