Vicente Ventura Aguilar, a Mexican man in the U.S. illegally, was arrested by federal immigration agents on a street corner in South Los Angeles, according to eyewitnesses. A day later, while in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Ventura suffered a medical emergency, losing consciousness and falling to the floor with his limbs shaking, according to a man who says he was detained with him.
Since then, Ventura has effectively disappeared.
It’s been more than six weeks.
ICE told Ventura’s family he was not in its custody, and his loved ones and lawyers have been unable to locate or contact him. They have searched hospitals and morgues and recruited help to look for him in Mexico. They have even filed a missing person report with the Los Angeles Police Department.
“The whole family is worried, especially our mother in Mexico,” said Ventura’s brother Felipe. “We’re afraid that he’s dead.”
The Department of Homeland Security said that nobody with Ventura’s name was in its custody on that day.
“There were 73 people from Mexico arrested in the Los Angeles area” on Oct. 7-8, Tricia McLaughlin, chief spokesperson for DHS, said in a statement to MS NOW. “None of them were Ventura Aguilar.”
The family and lawyers said it’s possible Ventura gave authorities a different name when he was arrested, which would explain why he hasn’t turned up in ICE’s system. But they also said ICE and Customs and Border Protection, the agencies that could potentially have had him in their custody, should make a greater effort to find him.
“They should be doing more than a cursory search by his name and date of birth,” said Laura Urias, the family’s attorney. For example, authorities could search for him using his photograph or other biometric data, Urias said.
Ventura’s situation is unusual: Immigrants detained by ICE typically do not go missing for weeks on end.
His disappearance, however, underscores how much harder it has become for friends and family to keep track of those detained in what immigration lawyers and advocates call a disorienting, hostile environment produced by the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign. Specifically, they cite the indiscriminate mass arrests taking place in cities like Los Angeles and Chicago, suddenly overcrowded detention facilities and what they consider obstruction by federal agents of efforts to contact detainees.
“Vicente’s case is an extreme example of something we’re seeing all the time,” said Lindsay Toczylowski, president of Immigrant Defenders Law Center (ImmDef), the nonprofit legal group representing Ventura’s family. “It’s the chaos of what it looks like to have 66,000 people in immigration detention — the largest number in history.”
Dancing, then detained
Vicente Ventura, 44, grew up in a poor family in Chiapas, a state in southern Mexico, according to Felipe. He came to the United States 17 years ago, when he was in his late 20s, and worked a variety of jobs, from picking grapes in California’s Central Valley to working on sanitation crews in L.A.
Ventura often spent time outside a busy strip mall on the corner of Long Beach and East Vernon avenues drinking with a group of friends, according to business owners in the strip mall. This group was well known to the business owners, who considered them harmless and called them by various nicknames — Ventura’s was gallito, or little rooster.
MS NOW reviewed surveillance footage from one of the businesses in the strip mall recorded on the day Ventura was detained. The footage shows him dancing on the sidewalk with a friend at 8:40 a.m. Five minutes later, at 8:45 a.m., masked agents in unmarked vehicles descend on the strip mall and begin making arrests.
The spot where eyewitnesses say Ventura was arrested is not visible in the footage because of the angle of the camera, but two people present at the scene told MS NOW that they saw agents handcuff Ventura and put him in a van.
Nicolas Ramos, another immigrant from Mexico, said he was arrested alongside Ventura and spent the following 24 hours with him in immigration custody. Ramos, who was deported and spoke to MS NOW on the phone from Mexico, said the agents arrested about five people in total, then continued driving around the city and arresting people until they had filled their vehicles.
The detainees were taken to the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building in downtown Los Angeles, where Ramos and Ventura were held in a basement facility known as B-18, which ICE uses to process most of the people it arrests in the Los Angeles area.
The next morning around 6, Ramos, Ventura and others were loaded onto a van and driven to the U.S.-Mexico border for deportation. The group stopped at an immigration checkpoint station near the border and were sitting on a bench inside when, Ramos said, Ventura, who was handcuffed, appeared to lose consciousness and fall forward.
Ventura’s face struck the ground, and he began to bleed from the mouth. “His arms and legs were shaking really bad,” Ramos said. “He looked like he was dying.”
When the other detainees called for help, Ramos said, one agent laughed and asked if Ventura was faking it. Eventually, Ramos said, agents told everyone to leave the room. This was the last time Ramos saw Ventura, who had not rejoined the group by the time they were dropped off across the border in Tijuana.
ICE did not directly respond to questions from MS NOW about whether it had any record of a detainee having a medical episode at that checkpoint on that date.
Incommunicado at B-18
Ventura’s name never showed up in a public online system that ICE maintains to locate detainees in its custody. While it’s possible that this was because Ventura gave authorities a different name, it’s also likely that Ventura was never in the online locator system at all, either under his name or another one.
According to Ramos, the immigrant detained with Ventura, both men spent all their time in detention at B-18, the temporary holding facility at the federal building in downtown L.A., before being transported to Mexico. B-18, like similar facilities in ICE field offices and federal buildings across the country, is designed to hold detainees for short periods while their cases are processed. Typically, detainees don’t turn up in the online locator system until they’ve been sent to a long-term detention center.
Immigration attorneys and advocates in Los Angeles say that, ever since large-scale raids began in the spring, B-18 has frequently become severely overcrowded. As a result, detainees have at times been held there for several days with limited access to phones.
In a lawsuit against the federal government, advocates allege that ICE has “transformed B-18 into a de facto long-term detention facility, and individuals held there have had their contact with the outside world purposely obstructed.”
The plaintiffs allege that, since mass arrests began, authorities at B-18 have repeatedly denied lawyers access to the facility to meet with clients and prospective clients. Until June, ICE had internal rules preventing people from being held in these temporary holding facilities for longer than 12 hours. The agency then increased that limit to three days. An October investigation by The Guardian found that the length of time immigrants spend in these facilities has increased dramatically and often surpasses three days. “Keeping people from being able to speak to attorneys is by design, because they don’t understand their options — they’re easier to manipulate into giving up their constitutional rights to fight to remain in the United States,” said ImmDef’s Toczylowski. “For the record, illegal aliens in detention have access to phones to contact family members and attorneys,” McLaughlin, the DHS spokesperson, told MS NOW. “Additionally, family members, lawyers, and members of the media can easily locate individuals by using ICE’s Online Detainee Locator System.” Ventura’s reported medical emergency raises another way he might have vanished: Immigration lawyers report situations in which detainees temporarily go missing after having been injured during the course of their arrest and requiring hospital treatment. Ventura’s family has searched for him by phone and in person at several hospitals between Los Angeles and San Diego, using his picture and date of birth in addition to his name. Cynthia Santiago, an immigration attorney in the Los Angeles area, says she has represented several clients who were held in hospital rooms under aliases, under 24-hour guard, effectively incommunicado. One of Santiago’s clients was the subject of a successful habeas corpus petition in October after he was detained by Border Patrol agents, then held under an alias at the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center for more than a month with no access to loved ones, and limited and nonconfidential access to counsel. “What they’re doing is they’re creating mini-detention centers in hospitals,” Santiago said. It’s not unusual for law enforcement agencies to control access to people in their custody who are hospitalized, including by using aliases, and hospitals typically defer to law enforcement on these protocols. ICE’s own detention standards say the agency “retains the authority to make administrative decisions affecting the detainee (e.g., visitors, movement, authorizing/limiting services, etc.).” DHS did not respond to follow-up questions about conditions inside B-18 or the treatment of hospitalized detainees. Jennifer Ibañez Whitlock, senior policy counsel with the National Immigration Law Center, said cases like Ventura’s are the product of an agency that has rapidly and dramatically ramped up arrests and detentions. This is consistent, Whitlock said, with acting ICE Director Todd Lyons’ comments in April that he wanted ICE to function “like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.” “People are being moved at a scale and at a pace that’s different from what we’ve seen in the recent past,” said Whitlock. “There are just more opportunities for people to fall off the grid.” On a recent Friday morning, Vicente Ventura’s brother and his lawyer met outside an LAPD precinct station in South Los Angeles, near the place where Ventura was arrested. They were there to file a missing person report. “We’re just at the point where we need help,” said Urias, the attorney representing the family. “We don’t know where else to turn to find him.” The person behind the desk at the precinct struggled to understand the details of the report. “So he was in ICE custody?” she asked. “Have you tried contacting ICE?”
David Noriega is an NBC News correspondent based in Los Angeles. Recommended
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