Talking from El Salvador, José Serrano Maldonado wasn’t sure his English was up to explaining what happened to him.
“The problem is English,” he said, “mine is not good.”
Better than my Spanish, so we talked. We talked about how he got to Maryland in 2005, then built a handyman business. We talked about his wife and kids, the home they bought just south of Baltimore.
And we talked about the Jan. 2 call from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, ordering him to be in the Baltimore office at 9 a.m. the next day.
“I asked him, what [did] I do? What happened? Why? Because I don’t have, you know, any problem,” he said.
“They say, ‘You need [to] come here, because you can come or we come to your house.’ You know, they have my address. So they say, ‘We go to your house, we catch everybody there.’”
His wife. Their two American-born children.
So, he went into Baltimore that Saturday morning. It started a journey that lasted until, hands and feet bound, Serrano Maldonado landed aboard a deportation flight back in El Salvador.
Serrano Maldonado’s trip into the deportation machine grinding through America is not unique. Instructed by President Donald Trump, ICE agents are throwing out people by the hundreds of thousands, including hundreds every month in Maryland alone.
In places like Minneapolis, it has turned violent. Deadly. In Maryland, there have been raids in Annapolis and a shooting in Glen Burnie. Members of Congress say their offices are constantly being asked for help.
Most of those snatched in this purge, like Serrano Maldonado, have committed no crime. Some came across the border without permission, a civil offense, but countless others are here under refugee programs, or are U.S. citizens.
“The papers,” Serrano Maldonado said. “They give me asylum, OK?”
Salvadorans are one of the largest Latin American immigrant groups in Maryland. Serrano Maldonado said he’s among the one-third here under temporary protected status, granted after devastating earthquakes in 2000.
Serrano Maldonado came to Annapolis to live with an uncle and find work after his first marriage broke up in California.
Jobs in construction, painting, roofing and landscaping led to a sideline as a handyman. By word of mouth, it grew into a business. One of his clients was a real estate agent who helped him buy a house in Brooklyn Park three years ago.
When he drove Jan. 3 to the federal building, he was told that his papers were no longer valid. He was taken to the notorious holding cell.
He stayed for five days, crammed in with 45 other men. They got Mylar blankets and 20 small mattresses to share on the floor. Food came in plastic boxes.
“Something stinking,” Serrano Maldonado said. “This is not food. Something, something in the plastic box every day. But not good.”
The cell had a single toilet. There were no showers.
Serrano Maldonado got one chance to use the phone, and he called his wife. He asked her to find a lawyer.
Friends, many of them in Annapolis, raised $5,000 to retain a Baltimore firm, Griffith Immigration Law.
That didn’t stop ICE from flying Serrano Maldonado on Jan. 7 with others in his cell from BWI Thurgood Marshall Airport to the ICE Alexandria Staging Facility in Louisiana.
Louisiana is a deportation hub, and two companies, Avelo and GlobalX, have connected it to Maryland with six-hour charter flights. Avelo ended its contract last week.
Conditions in Louisiana were still crowded, but better. The center is a 400-bed transfer facility, designed to move detainees fast. After several days, Serrano Maldonado said he was handcuffed, shackled and put on a bus to Mississippi.
It was during his four-day stay at the Adams County Detention Center there that he finally talked with his lawyer, Anna Tijerina. She told him in a Jan. 19 video call that a hearing was scheduled Feb. 12 in Baltimore.
A judge, she said, signed an order barring ICE from deporting him.
“She say, ‘Don’t worry, everything is good. We have your case,’ you know, ‘Everything is good. Take care.’”
Serrano Maldonado said he told Tijerina that he would try to relax, but that his face had started pulsing from the stress. He asked her to move fast because ICE was, too.
Four hours later, detention officers told him it was time to go.
They handcuffed and shackled him again, then marched him back to a bus. They told him he was headed to Mexico.
“I don’t know nothing in Mexico,” he said. “And they say, ‘We remove you to the Mexican border.’ Why, I say, why? Man, I don’t know Mexico.
“They say, because there’s more shit for me.”
It’s not clear if the officers were being cruel or didn’t know where he was going. They told Serrano Maldonado they were just following orders.
The bus took him back to Alexandria, Louisiana, where he was put aboard a flight the same day to San Salvador, not Mexico.
Released after he landed, Serrano Maldonado stepped into the airport and called his family.
“Thank God, I have my parents here, man, my father and my mom,” he said.
Kate Amara, a reporter for WBAL-TV 11, was in an immigration court on Jan. 22 when a judge demanded to know why Serrano Maldonado had been removed.
ICE couldn’t explain it, and a spokesperson ignored requests for comment.
Serrano Maldonado’s case isn’t high profile. No member of Congress publicly called for his return until I asked about him.
“In defiance of two clear court orders, Trump’s ICE has wrongfully deported José Serrano Maldonado, a legal Maryland resident, to El Salvador — as this Administration continues to violate individuals’ due process rights at an unprecedented scale,“ U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen said Monday.
He’s an almost anonymous victim of the industrial deportation complex, a cruel machine that spits out people with no compassion or discretion.
Serrano Maldonado said Tijerina, who didn’t respond to requests for comment, has told him to expect a letter from ICE this week giving him a date to return to the U.S. Meanwhile, he’s told his wife to stay inside.
So he’s waiting. Waiting for that letter to arrive, explaining that it was all a mistake.
Waiting to come home.
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