Border Report: The ‘Domino Effect’ of an ICE Arrest

Misael Curiel-Castañeda is not usually at home on weekdays, but on Wednesday, he took bereavement leave after his grandmother died.

His wife of more than 12 years, Trisha Sleek-Castañeda, had kissed him goodbye and left for work around 7:30 a.m., she said. Soon after, the couple’s lives turned into a nightmare as Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials detained Curiel-Castañeda outside their home in City Heights, breaking the window of his car to arrest him when he asked to wait for his wife and his lawyer. 

Sleek-Castañeda, who is a U.S. citizen, said she has barely eaten or slept since. 

“He’s just my everything. We’re a good team,” Sleek-Castañeda said. “I’ve lost my person.” 

She’s trying to stay strong for her husband, daughters and grandchildren, but in her lowest moments, she feels an emptiness that she said she would not wish on her worst enemy. 

The couple’s story is one example of the particular ways in which mixed status families — families whose members have various statuses from U.S. citizen to undocumented — are affected by the Trump administration’s efforts to detain and deport as many people as possible. Despite popular belief, being married to a U.S. citizen isn’t enough to protect someone from ICE. 

When asked about Curiel-Castañeda’s arrest, ICE responded via email through an unnamed spokesperson that he’d been detained during an “at-large enforcement operation.” The spokesperson said Border Patrol had arrested him in the early 2000s, alleging involvement in a smuggling operation, and returned him to Mexico.

His immigration court documents, which his wife showed me, indicate that the government had accused him in an immigration proceeding of transporting undocumented people as part of a smuggling network, which Sleek-Castañeda said was a false accusation. At the time, he was in the United States on a tourist visa. Curiel-Castañeda agreed to leave voluntarily because he didn’t want to spend more time in detention, and the matter was dropped. He was never charged in a criminal setting.

In addition to the emotional support, friendship and partnership that she is missing, she is also worried about her health. She has a heart condition, and without her husband working, she said she will lose her health insurance. She has a letter from her doctor explaining how crucial her husband’s presence is for her health.

“I’ve been in and out of the hospital,” Sleek-Castañeda said. “I’ve been passing out, and my husband’s there to take care of me.”

Known best to family and friends as “Mudo” because of his quiet and reserved nature and as “Paw Paw” to his grandchildren, Curiel-Castañeda took out the trash that Wednesday morning while he was home, Sleek-Castañeda said. She said she saw him in their Ring camera. Then he got in his car to move it across the street.

Soon after, she received a phone call from him to tell her that ICE officials were at his car door. 

“I said, ‘Do not open the door. Wait until I get there,’” Sleek-Castañeda recalled. 

She left work and tried to get in touch with the couple’s immigration attorney.

The ICE officials did not wait. They broke his car window and forced him out of the car. Her younger daughter, whom Curiel-Castañeda has raised as his own, filmed the encounter as he obediently stood by his car while officials surrounded and cuffed him.  

The daughter asked if the officials had a warrant. One said yes, but the officials did not produce it to show either her or Curiel-Castañeda. 

Sleek-Castañeda said they didn’t even ask for his name, so she’s not sure how they would’ve known they had the person they were looking for even if they did have a warrant.

She went to the Edward J. Schwartz Federal Building in downtown San Diego, where ICE has offices on the second floor and holding cells in the basement, and asked an ICE supervisor for the warrant. He did not give it to her.

She told the supervisor that her husband had a legal right to a phone call and asked that he be allowed to call her. An officer brought her Curiel-Castañeda’s keys and wallet, but she noticed that his phone and Meta glasses were missing from the returned belongings. She left to take his car to fix the window.

Her husband eventually called from the detention phone system used by ICE, and when she pushed 1 to accept the call, it disconnected. She went back to the federal building and insisted on a call, finally talking with her husband late that afternoon. 

Since then, she has been trying to figure out how to pay the $12,000 an attorney is charging her to try to get her husband out of custody. She was supposed to leave later this month to go spend time with her older daughter who is nine months pregnant, she said, but now everything is on pause until she can sort out her husband’s case. With her own job ending later this year because the company sold, she also has to figure out how she’s going to survive.

“I don’t think that people take into consideration when we’re taking people’s loved ones, it’s like a domino effect,” Sleek-Castañeda said. “There’s so many things that happen when they’re not here, you know, especially when my husband financially takes care of us. I mean, there’s no way I can afford to live in San Diego.”

She’s also worried about the toll this experience will take on her husband.

“As traumatic as it is for me and how I’m feeling, I can’t imagine how my husband must be feeling right now and the anxiety that he must have, being locked up like that, and you don’t even have a speeding ticket or parking ticket. You’re locked up just because you have brown skin,” she said. “That’s the only thing that my husband is guilty of is having brown skin. That’s it.” 

“If he would have been a white man moving his car and parking in front of his house, do you think that they would have busted out his window? No,” she added.

She said the family had prioritized the needs of the children rather than paying the money to adjust her husband’s status — which is complicated because of the old immigration case.

Sleek-Castañeda said she met her husband when she came to San Diego from Illinois to visit her mother for Thanksgiving. Her mother told her there was a man she wanted her to meet. 

They went to Curiel-Castañeda’s aunt’s house for dinner, and Sleek-Castañeda remembers seeing him standing in a doorway. 

Who’s that? she asked her mother. That’s the one I’ve been telling you about, her mother responded. 

She knew even then that the two would end up married, she said. 

She said her husband has always been the kind of person who helps those in need, recalling when he bought new sneakers for a man living on the street near their home who didn’t have proper shoes. 

She said her husband would take her car to wash it and fill it with gas every weekend and that he always made sure she felt beautiful — and loved. 

“He’s always, always made sure that we were taken care of,” Sleek-Castañeda said. “So that’s who ICE has detained is that kind of human being — not a criminal, not a drug dealer, not a rapist, not a murderer. He is just a good human being. And they can’t see it because they can’t see past his skin.”

Next to their kitchen table, there’s a bin filled with Cheetos and Doritos, snacks her husband had stored in his car because she doesn’t like having junk food in the house. 

While she spoke with me on Friday, her husband tried to call twice. Each time, she pushed 1 when she was supposed to, and each time, the phone disconnected.

Outside, broken glass from his car window still littered the street.

Thank you for reading. I’m open for tips, suggestions and feedback on Instagram @katemorrisseyjournalist and on X/Twitter and Bluesky @bgirledukate.

In Other News

Green card appointments: ICE began arresting people at their green card appointments in San Diego last week, I reported for Daylight San Diego. I also put together a timeline based on documentation kept by volunteers at the federal building about the way ICE arrests in official spaces have evolved since they began in May.

SENTRI expansion: A second set of SENTRI lanes will open this Wednesday, Alexandra Mendoza reported for The San Diego-Union Tribune.

Habeas petitions: Immigration attorneys are filing more habeas petitions in federal court to get clients released from ICE custody, Sofía Mejías-Pascoe reported for inewsource and Gustavo Solis reported for KPBS.

Military at the border: The Marines deployed along the border in San Diego have quietly returned to Camp Pendleton, according to Salvador Rivera of The Border Report.

Race in San Diego: The Museum of Us opened a new exhibit on race in the region, and Lisa Deaderick of The San Diego Union-Tribune interviewed one of the researchers.

Hunger strike: A man at Otay Mesa Detention Center has been on hunger strike for weeks to ask the government to give him information about his application for a visa as a victim of human trafficking, I reported for Daylight San Diego.

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