The New Yorker:

When Manuela’s husband texted her that he’d been apprehended on the street, her life in New York instantly capsized.

By Jordan Salama

At eleven minutes to eight o’clock on the morning of January 27th, in Corona, Queens, Manuela, a twenty-three-year-old undocumented immigrant from Ecuador, was about to wake up her daughter when she received a string of panicked WhatsApp messages from her husband, Iván. “Mami, migración got me,” Iván, who is also undocumented, wrote. It was one of seventeen frantic texts, punctuated by typos and sobbing emojis, in the course of three minutes. “My God.” “Noo, my love.” “Pay my phone bill.” “Please. Mami.” “Please. Mami.” “I don’t have.” “Phone signal.” “They were just outside.” “They grabbed me.” “Three of them.” “And they’re taking me away.”

He had stepped out of the house only minutes earlier, and was heading to his job with a roofing contractor, when he walked right into a group of federal agents near Roosevelt Avenue. Iván was clearly terrified. He had never been convicted of a crime, Manuela told me, but he did have a deportation order to his name. He’d missed a scheduled immigration hearing early last year. Manuela said that his hearing date had been changed but they had not been notified; it’s likely that his notice to appear had arrived at an old address.

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