Living with Fear

A young immigrant is swept up in a raid—and tries to navigate the U.S. courts

At 7 a.m. on Feb. 2, Mauricio was heading out the door of his Owings Mills apartment on his way to work when six immigration officers approached him asking where he lived and who lived with him.

He lived in the apartment right there with his older brother Antonio, he told them.

The officers searched Mauricio and asked for identification. He told them he didn’t have an I.D., but they found a paper in his wallet noting a missed court date. Because of this, they arrested him and put him in one of their two vans. While he waited, Mauricio saw the officers return to his apartment where he assumed they knocked several times on the door, possibly looking for his brother, to no avail. The officers took Mauricio into detention where he spent the next 25 days in jail. He didn’t know whether he’d be sent immediately back to his home in Guatemala, held for years and then sent back, or be released.

Mauricio, 19, was one of the early arrests in this year’s national uptick in immigration enforcement.

Read the rest of the article online at The Baltimore Sun.

This is a part of a multi-story and multimedia issue that can be found at www.citypaper.com/seekingrefuge