A Utah family says they’re being hunted, one-by-one, by the same ICE agent. First their son, then their father. Now the mother is in hiding, carrying only a suitcase, convinced she’s next. In interviews from detention and an undisclosed park in Salt Lake City, they describe racial profiling, psychological abuse, and a relentless campaign that feels more like vendetta than enforcement.
By Nick Valencia | August 25, 2025
SALT LAKE CITY — Brandon speaks English with the ease of someone who has lived in the United States for most of his life. Because he has. For 20 years, this country has been his home. Yet today, he is locked inside the Nevada Southern Detention Center—his life dismantled not by a violent crime or gang ties, but by an expired DACA permit and a non-violent DUI.
When I reached him by phone, Brandon’s voice was steady but weighted. He described how corrections officers mocked detainees with slurs like “wetbacks” and “beaners,” handing out cold burritos with smirks. Agents laughed when others were taken away, he said, sometimes taunting that they might never return.
“It’s a psychological game,” Brandon told me.
Before being taken into custody, Brandon says he, “kept America running” by working in an auto shop on the semis. He would fix up the broken big rigs that move the country’s goods. That life ended one morning when a blue Dodge cut him off near his home on his way to work.
Lights flashed, and eight ICE agents surrounded him. Ultimately, it was a female ICE agent who took him into custody. He remembers her vividly—her condescending demeanor, her words during their trip to processing telling him he was one of her favorite “captures,” her small talk.
Brandon wishes he didn’t remember her so well. Two weeks later, the same agent captured his father.
A Mother on the Run
When we arrived in Utah to meet Brandon’s mother, her first worry was that we might be ICE agents ourselves.
Over the phone from the airport baggage claim, we assured her we had traveled to tell her side of the story. For that reason, we did not reach out to ICE for comment, avoiding any risk of drawing more attention to the family’s case.
We agreed to meet in an undisclosed park in Salt Lake City.
Under the Utah summer sun, she sat on a park bench, visibly exhausted, as she recounted the day ICE came for her son, and—just two weeks later—for her husband.
“They had high-caliber weapons pointed at him, like the military,” she said about Brandon’s apprehension.
The same agent who detained her son later led the raid against her husband. They even allegedly pointed their weapons at her 17-year-old son, a U.S. citizen, before threatening to come back and take her next.
She is convinced they will keep their word.
“100%—for the color of our skin, for our language, and for our place of origin,” she responded when asked whether she believes ICE is racially profiling Latinos.
When I asked if she feels safe here now, her answer was chilling.
“Now I feel like I’m hunted just as much here as in Mexico,” she said before adding, “God doesn’t destroy. God builds. God repairs families. God isn’t like them.”
Today, she remains in hiding—pressing on with what she can carry in a single suitcase, effectively a nomad, waiting with faith that her family will one day be whole again.
The Broader Moment
Brandon believes the tactics used by ICE today are inhumane.
“Under another president, they’d be going after violent criminals, not people like me,” he said from detention. “[ICE agents] feel empowered by this administration.”
For him, the stakes are existential. He is detained among men convicted of violent crimes, while his own record—one DUI—pales in comparison.
His father, once described by the family as “cheery,” has lost hope. Not only was he detained two weeks after Brandon, he too is now in the same Nevada detention facility.
Yet the two have never been allowed to see each other.
“Who knows if we ever will,” Brandon said.
