The dizzying speed of Trump’s deportation machine: Fresno man lands in Mexico 16 days after arrest

In summary

Luis Arreguin, a father of four, lived for 49 years in the United States. It took just 16 days for ICE to send him to Mexico after detaining him in Fresno.

MEXICALI, Mexico — As the smell of manure from California’s Imperial Valley wafted across the border into this sprawling Mexican industrial city, Luis Arreguin glanced up at a burnt-orange cathedral in the downtown square. 

It was the first time he’d seen it since he left Mexico as a child, decades ago. 

Arreguin, 54, had called a small community near Fresno home since he was 5. 

But on Oct. 1, federal immigration agents pulled him over on his way to work. He was among the first of about 130 people who advocates say were taken into custody during the opening days of the Trump administration’s latest immigration enforcement surge in the San Joaquin Valley. 

“My whole life got destroyed,” said Arreguin, who is married and has four children. 

The skilled laborer’s rapid removal to Mexico shows how fast Trump’s deportation machinery is moving, almost dizzying in its efficiency. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement removed more than 356,000 people in the first nine and a half months of the 2026 fiscal year, which began Oct. 1, 2025, according to agency data. That surpasses the roughly 320,000 removals it carried out in all of fiscal year 2025.

The expanded enforcement that caught Arreguin later spread to the rest of California, and became known as “Operation Safe California.” 

Arreguin spent just 15 days in federal custody before agents put him on a jam-packed deportation flight to Tapachula in southern Chiapas, near Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala. From there, he took buses back up to the country’s northern border where his daughter rented him a motel room in Mexicali.  

“I had a five-bedroom house (in Fresno.) I don’t have nothing now,” he said.

Once a launchpad for people headed north, Mexicali is now an island for outcasts, as close as the deported may ever be again to their families and car payments and mortgages in the United States. 

Located just across the border from the solar farms and alfalfa fields in Imperial County, Mexicali is known for exquisite Chinese food and being the state capital of Baja California. But many residents here also struggle with poverty and crime.

People shower with hoses in the public park. One day last week, criminals left a narcomanta at a public kindergarten warning Baja California officials not to cooperate with “Los Rusos,” a faction of the Sinaloa cartel. 

Arreguin doesn’t know what he’s going to do. Mexico is a country he doesn’t know. He understands Spanish, if it’s spoken slowly enough, but he doesn’t speak it. 

“Poquito,” he says, apologizing to people passing him on the sidewalk in front of the church. “I don’t mean to disrespect the people.” 

Last week, his wife visited from Fresno, a seven-and-a-half-hour drive away. In 31 years of marriage, he said, they had never spent a night apart until his arrest. 

“She said, ‘I’m gonna cry the whole way down.’ I said, “Well, I’m gonna cry too,” you know. We try not to think about it. We’re just trying to make the best of the days we have with each other,” Arreguin said, his voice cracking. 

‘I’ve been watching you’

Arreguin still doesn’t know why he was targeted. The ICE agent who stopped him on his way to work near Fresno told him, “I’ve been watching you.” 

But Arreguin is not sure he believes he was under surveillance. That same morning, agents swept the small farmworker town where the family lived, emptying the streets. 

“My whole community works in the fields. They did a sweep on my little town, and my wife called me and said, “It’s empty, babe. It’s empty,” he said. 

He said he’s had no recent interactions with law enforcement. A public records search returned no recent criminal history. 

“I’m a father. You kidnapped me in the morning and took me from my kids,” he said. 

After his arrest, he was held at an ICE office in Fresno and then transferred to Bakersfield. He said he was taken back and forth while his blood pressure climbed until he eventually ended up spending about seven hours in an emergency room in Bakersfield. 

“They asked me, ‘Are you afraid to go back to your country?’ And I said yes, and I figured that was going to hold everything and at least give me a chance in court,” he said. 

After several days, agents transferred him to Camp East Montana on the outskirts of El Paso.  

“I didn’t know where I was going,” he said.  

The facility has been a focal point for lawsuits from civil rights organizations and detainees, who have complained about harsh conditions, including not getting enough to eat and insufficient medical care. In September 2025, ICE’s own internal watchdogs found dozens of violations, the Washington Post reported. 

Arreguin spent five days there before he says his phone communication was cut off and he was put on the plane to southern Mexico. 

“At least I am safe here, and I’m not behind the walls of a detention center where I could die,” he said.

Crowded deportation flight

Arreguin said his flight carried roughly 300 fellow deportados, all shackled and chained at the wrists and ankles. He counted 22 women and one minor. 

“They shackled a 14-year-old kid,” he said. 

Arreguin described agents restricting people’s access to the bathroom and water during their 36 hours of travel. 

Meanwhile, officers taunted him: “Oh, look, it’s the famous Mr. Arreguin,” they said, holding up their phones with news stories about his arrest and social media videos his daughter made to draw attention to his case. 

Just before they deplaned, he said, agents hurried down the aisles, removing shackles. He interpreted it as an effort to keep Mexican officials from seeing how they had been transported. 

“A lot of people are afraid to even say anything about how they were treated,” he said.

ICE did not respond to CalMatters questions about the flight or the conditions Arreguin described. 

Others on the flight who spoke to CalMatters on condition of anonymity corroborated the details Luis gave. ICE has a long-standing operational policy that mandates passengers in custody are shackled with handcuffs, waist chains and ankle restraints during flights, including during layovers and refueling stops. 

One detail the former Central Valley resident said he’ll never forget: “Everybody on that plane had their work clothes on. Every single one of them.” 

Changing Mexico deportation strategy

Since this spring, the administration has largely stopped sending Mexican nationals back across the land border. Instead, it’s flying them deeper into Mexico, where officials believe deportees dropped near the Guatemala border are less likely to try to cross back into the United States. 

In Tapachula, Mexican officials fed Arreguin and gave him a debit card loaded with 2,500 pesos, about the equivalent of $130. “They didn’t have to give me that,” he said. It got him as far north as Mexico City. His adult daughter paid for the rest of the trip to Mexicali, where, as a teenager, Luis was able to cross the border freely with his Fresno church group. 

The border city is receiving fewer deportees now than it has in the past decade. In 2024, U.S. authorities returned more than 43,000 Mexicans through Baja California crossings at Tijuana and Mexicali, about one in five of all repatriations nationwide, according to Mexico’s Interior Ministry. 

In the first seven months of 2026, just 1,567 people came through the Mexicali crossing, less than 2% of the national total. The numbers fell as the Trump administration shifted to flying Mexican deportees farther south to Tapachula and Villahermosa, which together took 48,000 people over the same time period, nearly half of all returns.

Those figures don’t include people who were removed to Tapachula and then made their own way north again, like Arreguin. 

“You know you can’t just take people away from their family,” he said. 

What now?

“Don’t cry,” Luis tells his oldest daughter, holding his phone outstretched in front of him to FaceTime her in front of the Cathedral of Mexicali in Baja California. 

In Fresno, Luis’ wife is packing up their house to move. The family doesn’t have the money to stay without Luis paying rent as the family’s main breadwinner. His two youngest children, 6 and 10, will have to change schools. 

“I’m tired of crying,” he says. “It takes a lot out of me when I’m speaking about what I had to go through and what I’m going through and how I was treated,” he said. 

But, he’s working on finding a lawyer to help fight his deportation and return to his family. 

“I have to fight,” he said. 

Until then, his daughter is paying for his motel and food. She is maxing out her credit cards. She is looking for a place in Mexicali big enough for the whole family to visit him for Thanksgiving. 

For decades, Arreguin worked to give his children a better life in the United States. Now his daughter Elaina is trying to make him comfortable in Mexico. 

You’ve supported me for years, she told him. “Now I can do that for you.” 

CalMatters photojournalist Larry Valenzuela contributed to this report.