Allentown man said to have died in ICE custody is alive in Guatemala, family says
Parents of 82, a resident of Allentown, Luis Leon, headed on a Guatemalan hospital on Saturday in the hope of gathering with the man they say they have disappeared without tracing in the American immigration system a month ago – and who, for a while, they thought they died.
The last time anyone in the family saw Leon was on June 20, when he went with his wife to an immigration office in Philadelphia to replace his lost green card.
There, said the family, he was handcuffed by two officers, who made him without explanation. His wife, who speaks little of English, was left behind and held in the building for 10 hours until she was released to his granddaughter, the family says.
Repeated surveys for immigration officials, prisons, hospitals and even a morgue have provided no information. Leon’s name was not in the online database of the ICE prisoners.
Finally, Friday, a parent of Leon’s native chili was informed that he was taken to a detention center in Minnesota and then in Guatemala. The hospital, citing the confidentiality rules, would not verify its presence when contacted by morning call.
It is not known whether Leon found himself in this central American country deliberately or by mistake. A decision of the Supreme Court in June reopened the door to the efforts of the Trump administration to expel immigrants to countries which are not their country of origin.
Leon obtained political asylum in 1987 after surviving torture in the hands of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, according to his granddaughter, Nataly, who asked that his family name would not be used because it feared that the American government will be punishment against her and her relatives.
In Alentown, he lived a quiet life, raising four children and enjoying retirement after years working in a leather manufacturing plant.
Everything collapsed, said Nataly, when he lost the portfolio holding his green card and took the fateful appointment to replace it at the American office of citizenship and immigration services on the 41st street in Philadelphia.
The frustration of not knowing where Léon is turned into sorrow on July 9, when a caller informed Leon’s wife that he was dead, said Nataly.
A family friend shared the information during the meeting of that night of the Council of the County Commissioners of Lehigh, where a certain number of activists had come to encourage the commissioners to stem ice activities at the Comté court.
An ice official said on Friday that the agency was investigating the issue but would not share any other information, even refusing to confirm that Leon was at the Philadelphia office in June.
Nataly, for her part, went from the range of confusion to sorrow with frustrated rage – often in a few hours – while she tried to learn the fate of her grandfather.
Friday, after hearing that he was in Guatemala, she said in tears that she wanted the world to know how he had been treated by the immigration system.
“I can see that my whole family is suffering right now,” she said.
The mystery surrounding Leon’s test goes beyond the ice. Only a few days after her arrest, a woman claiming to be an immigration lawyer has made an unsolicited appeal to Leon’s woman and said that she could help to remove Leon, but did not say where he was or how she learned the case.
It was this woman who called to tell his wife that Leon died. A week after the communications of the alleged lawyer stopped, the family finally learned that Leon had been in detention in Minnesota, then transferred to a hospital in the city of Guatemala.
Nataly said she intended to go to Guatemala on Saturday to see her grandfather, whose state is unknown. He suffers from diabetes, heart disease and high blood pressure, among other conditions, she said.
Nataly said that the man she calls Abuelo – Spanish for grandfather – is a well appreciated figure in the Alentown district. He gardens, goes to fishing with a close friend and, because he is qualified as tools, works like a man to be tinker for neighbors who need minor repairs.
The Trump administration’s aggressive expulsion program was initially supposed to be led by undocumented residents who have committed crimes. However, transactional files access Clearinghouse, which collects data on the federal immigration application, indicates that the vast majority of people in the detention of ice in July 13 – 40,643 out of 56,816, or 71.5% – have no criminal convictions.
Many of those who were condemned were intended for minor offenses, including traffic offenses, the organization said.
Leon, according to his family, never had as much as a parking ticket – an assertion confirmed by the judicial archives.
The writer Anthony Salamone contributed to this report.
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