The ICE deportation case of wedding photographer Adan Caceres raises new questions about due process, detention conditions, and immigration enforcement.
Adan Caceres is a wedding photographer. With his immigration paperwork in process and married to an American citizen, he thought it would be easy to take a plane to Texas to work at an event. It was a mistake — he ended up being arrested at John Wayne Airport and deported to his native country, El Salvador.
Caceres believed his case was exempt from deportation. He had complied with all legalization procedures and thought it was only a matter of time.
But his immigration case had grown complicated years earlier. In 2018, Caceres was issued a deportation order — something both he and the Department of Homeland Security confirmed. However, Caceres said he never received the order to appear in immigration court, as it was sent to an incorrect address, and he was not notified by the legal counsel he’d retained at the time.
Caceres’ current attorney filed a motion to stay his removal on Oct. 22, four days after he was detained, asking the immigration court to halt any deportation until the motion was decided. Caceres said he was deported days later without meeting a judge or being allowed to appeal.
Caceres said he was never advised of his rights throughout the eight days of his detention, and was misled into signing paperwork he was told was related to his belongings. He later learned it was an agreement barring him from reentering the United States for five to ten years, he said, according to media reports.
Like many Salvadorans, Caceres has a violent past in his country — some relatives have been killed, and his return raises numerous concerns.
After Caceres was detained, his wife set up a GoFundMe in the hopes of raising $7,000 for legal fees to file a motion to appeal his pending deportation. Within days, they had raised $22,000, all donated by their church community, friends and family.
“I was in my head for those three hours just thinking, ‘What’s going to happen? What am I going to do? What is my wife going to do? What happens if they deport me, where am I going to go?’” he recalled. “My whole family is in the States.”
When he was 10 years old, he exited his grandmother’s home in El Salvador early one morning to find the body of his 21-year-old aunt, he said. She had been stoned to death and her tongue cut out, according to Caceres.
By the time Caceres turned 11, he had been sexually assaulted twice, he said. Shortly afterwards, he and his brother began receiving threats from MS-13 members demanding they join the gang, according to Caceres. In 2014, the two boys decided to make their way to the U.S. in hopes of joining their mother, who had left the country when Caceres was 8.
“We literally just walked to the border of the U.S.,” he said. “We told them we are looking for our mom and we are looking for asylum because we are fleeing from our country. And so they took us in.”
After he turned 18, he moved out of the house where he lived with his mother and into a home with friends he had made through his church. It was during that time that he began honing his photography and building his career as a wedding and portrait photographer.
His career was thriving — until it came to an abrupt halt that Saturday morning.
Around six hours after arriving at the ICE field office in Santa Ana, Caceres was allowed to call his wife.
“All I said was, ‘Babe, call a lawyer. I love you. I’m really sorry. Don’t worry about me,’” he said.
More hours passed. At one point, two agents pulled him aside to take a photo of him, according to Caceres. From behind the camera, the two men smiled at him.
“That photo felt like one of those photos you see online of people that went fishing or that went hunting, and they captured a deer or a fish,” he said.
The agents did not explain why the photo was taken.
Later that day, he was driven to the Adelanto ICE Processing Center, located about 85 miles northeast of Los Angeles.
Many of the men tearfully shared their stories, mentioning wives, children, and families they had been separated from. Caceres said some suffered chronic health conditions and were not given their medication on time. Family members would arrive with medicine in hand, he said, but were turned away.
But on Thursday night, Caceres was already on a plane to El Paso. His wife was never notified.
“That’s when I knew I was getting deported for sure, because people in Adelanto told me once you’re sent to Texas, that’s when you’re going to be deported,” Caceres said.
The detainees were all shackled with handcuffs on their wrists and ankles, connected to another chain at their waist for the duration of the flights and layover.
“They treat you like you don’t feel anything,” Caceres said.
After landing in El Paso, the group was kept in a bus without air conditioning for around four hours, with no water or food, Caceres said.
“The people on the buses started moving to shake the bus to show them we needed help, we’re freaking dying in here,” he said.
The detention center, he said, was no improvement. Men were given aluminum blankets to fight the cold and told to use bathrooms that were covered in fecal matter and urine.
After that, they flew to Louisiana to pick up more men, then headed for El Salvador.
Only 6% of ICE Arrests in Los Angeles Involve Violent Offenses
