A longtime employee at one of Donald Trump’s golf clubs was wrongfully deported to Mexico — and now, U.S. immigration officials are racing to undo their own mistake.
“Alejandro Juarez stepped off a plane in Texas and stood on a bridge over the Rio Grande, staring at the same border that he had crossed illegally from Mexico 22 years earlier,” reported Luis Ferré-Sadurní and Hamed Aleaziz of The New York Times. “As U.S. immigration officials unshackled restraints bound to his arms and legs, Mr. Juarez, 39, pleaded with them. He told them he was never given a chance to contest his deportation in front of an immigration judge after being detained in New York City five days before.”
It turns out Juarez should have never been on that deportation flight at all. According to the report, the Department of Homeland Security mistakenly placed him on a plane to Mexico instead of sending him to a detention facility in Arizona, where he was supposed to await his immigration hearing — a hearing that, by law, he was entitled to.
“Their actions probably violated federal immigration laws, which entitle most immigrants facing deportation to a hearing before a judge — a hearing Mr. Juarez never had,” the Times noted.
“ICE officials raced to decipher his whereabouts, exchanging bewildered emails and contacting detention facilities to pinpoint his location, according to internal ICE documents obtained by The New York Times. It is unclear how many other immigrants like Mr. Juarez have been erroneously removed, in part because ICE has not in the past tracked such cases.”
Juarez “had worked for more than a decade at a Trump Organization golf club in New York,” the report added, and suddenly found himself expelled from the country he had spent more than half his life in.
The case is more than just a bureaucratic blunder — it’s a reminder of how fast lives can be upended by errors buried inside a massive system. Juarez’s deportation highlights the lack of safeguards in place to prevent these kinds of mistakes, especially when agencies like ICE move people across states and borders at lightning speed with little oversight.
And this isn’t the first time something like this has happened. A similar case involved Salvadoran migrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was deported from his family in Maryland to the infamous CECOT megaprison in El Salvador — despite a court order explicitly barring his removal. After months of back-and-forth, the Trump administration finally repatriated him, only to hit him with flimsy gang charges and start looking for other countries, including several in Africa, that might take him in.
For Juarez, the hope now is simple: that DHS can move just as fast to bring him back as ICE did to send him away.
