Editor’s note: This story has been updated to include a statement from CoreCivic, which runs Eloy Detention Center.
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For two weeks, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been holding a Laveen landscaper who has been in the country since he was 3 years old, although the man’s family admits he does not have legal status. The man, 23-year-old Eric Sebastian Ferrales, is now facing deportation from the only country his family says he’s ever truly known.
On Dec. 9, Ferrales and three others were pulled over by Pinal County Sheriff’s deputies in San Tan Valley, where they were working. (That is the same day and place that another Mexican man, Edwar Gonzalez, was detained, though ICE has since released him and admitted he had legal authority to be in the country.) Ferrales’s mother, who asked that her name not be published to avoid retaliation from immigration authorities, said the men’s car was ostensibly pulled over for a broken taillight.
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However, not long after the men were stopped, an ICE agent joined the scene to determine their citizenship status. Three of the men, including Ferrales, were detained and transported to the ICE field office in Phoenix. Ferrales was later taken to an ICE detention center in Florence and then to Eloy Detention Center, an ICE facility run by the private prison group CoreCivic.
After he was detained, his mother said, Ferrales was briefly able to call her.
“I went crazy. I didn’t know what to say to him,” she told Phoenix New Times. “I just said, ‘I love you,’ and he told me, ‘I love you back.’ And that was it. It’s been a nightmare since he’s been taken. We need him home.”
ICE has not responded to questions about Ferrales’ case.
Ferrales and his mother moved to the U.S. from Guadalajara, Mexico, when he was just 3 years old on a visitor’s visa, which they overstayed. Ferrales spent much of his childhood in New Mexico. His mother, who said she has since obtained the authorization to work in the U.S., married in 2013 and had two other children, both of whom are American citizens. Ferrales’ family moved to the Valley before he started at Cesar Chavez High School in Laveen, where he graduated in 2020.
After he graduated from high school, Ferrales began working as a landscaper to support his family, including a younger brother who is nonverbal with severe autism. Ferrales is also extremely close and supportive of his younger brother, his mother said, though the brother doesn’t understand the situation Ferrales faces.
“He’s always caring for his siblings and trying to help us with money and emotional support,” his mother said. “It’s really devastating that he’s been taken while making some money to help his family.”
In a bond request letter, Ferrales’ younger sister called him a “responsible, hard-working and selfless man” whom she’s “always looked up to.”
“Without him, I wouldn’t be the woman I am today,” she wrote.
Eloy Detention Center houses more than 15,000 detainees for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Applied for DACA status
Ferrales isn’t documented and was working without a valid work permit. Nor is he protected by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which shields people illegally brought to the U.S. as young children from deportation and allows them to legally work in the country. His mother said Ferrales applied for DACA status in January 2021, when the process was briefly reopened to first-time applicants, but his application is still processing. A lawyer for Ferrales did not respond to requests for comment on his case.
“I know that it was wrong working in this country, and I know it was wrong to be here,” his mother said. “But we only came for a chance to have a better life.”
Ferrales was arrested as part of a joint operation between the Pinal County Sheriff’s Office and ICE, dubbed “Operation Road Guardian.” Karen Oliver, a 66-year-old retired resident of the Queen Creek-San Tan Valley area and a member of the progressive Indivisible group, said she has observed ICE and the sheriff’s office coordinating for arrests on the side of the road, outside Banner Ironwood Medical Center and even at the local library.
Her organization has attempted to monitor these sites to track the influx of activity, as well as the noticeable increase in abandoned work trucks on the side of the road, but has encountered resistance. She’s been cited by the Pinal County Sheriff’s Office for taking videos of ICE activity while driving, which the office confirmed to New Times.
“I am completely exhausted right now. I’m frightened. I told my daughter to stay away from the library with her four kids,” she told New Times. “I don’t want them to be driving over there and run into that. They don’t need to see that garbage.”
Despite the Trump administration’s stated aims of rounding up undocumented immigrations with serious criminal records, Ferrales’ mother says he doesn’t have one and New Times could not locate any criminal cases associated with his name. He now faces deportation to a country he hasn’t seen since before he could read — and, according to his mother, whose language he doesn’t speak.
In the meantime, he is housed in a facility that has become notorious for its conditions.
“It’s just a matter of time before they break him,” his mother said. “They don’t treat them well over there. He just doesn’t know how to handle these things.”
In a statement provided to New Times, CoreCivic public relations manager Brian Todd said that Eloy Detention Center has “a robust grievance process available to all detainees that provides multiple safe and discrete avenues for concerns to be raised, including toll-free telephone numbers.” He added that “to date, Mr. Ferrales has not filed a grievance.”