There had to have been a mistake, Martin Padilla recalled telling the immigration agents.
An inspector in the oil and gas industry, he was about to fly to Sacramento for work when agents pulled him aside at Corpus Christi International Airport in Texas last August. Stopped at the security X-ray scanner, he told them he had DACA status, referring to the Obama-era program designed to protect undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as young children. His DACA card, he said, was in his wallet.
It didn’t matter.
Within hours of the Aug. 5 encounter, Mr. Padilla had been detained. Days later, he was deported to his native Mexico, leaving behind his American wife, their three children and the family’s new home.
Mr. Padilla, 35, is among about 500,000 people enrolled in DACA — the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program — which is supposed to shield them from deportation and allow them to work legally. And he is one of the dozens of DACA recipients who have been expelled from the country by the Trump administration.
The swift effort to deport Mr. Padilla underscores the tenuous state of many immigration protections under President Trump as he seeks to deliver on his pledge to deport millions of people and remake the country’s immigration system.
The federal government has all but ended the resettlement of refugees. The system for weighing asylum claims has been brought to a near standstill. And the Supreme Court will soon decide whether the Trump administration can end Temporary Protected Status for more than a million people from some of the world’s most troubled nations.
Mr. Padilla’s lawyers challenged his deportation, arguing in a federal court filing that his due process rights had been violated. After seven months, Mr. Padilla was allowed to return to the United States.
“My focus is getting back to work and providing for my family,” he said in an interview.
But Mr. Padilla is hardly out of jeopardy. There is an outstanding deportation order that was issued to his family when he was a child. The Department of Homeland Security said that order was a basis for his detention last year, even though DACA was intended to protect him. And the agency also cited two D.W.I.s over the last 14 years, which can be considered by immigration authorities even though neither led to a criminal conviction.
With the Trump administration working to weaken a wide range of protections, DACA recipients are realizing that the program, born of bipartisan support for a generation of young undocumented immigrants, is no longer the reliable shield it seemed to be for most of the last two decades.
Since Mr. Trump took office last year, 650 DACA recipients have been taken into custody by ICE, and nearly 90 percent of the people arrested had previously been charged with or convicted of a U.S. crime, according to D.H.S. Lawyers contesting the Trump administration is relying on minor infractions and decades-old deportation orders to justify detentions and removals of a protected group.
Neither Mr. Padilla or his lawyer received an official explanation for his deportation, they said.
“It seems so arbitrary that they decided to pick him up,” said his lawyer, Danielle Claffey. “The whole purpose of deferred action is to defer someone’s removal, even if they have a removal order.”
In response to an inquiry from The New York Times, D.H.S. said Mr. Padilla was a “criminal,” citing two D.U.I. charges and a deportation order from 2003, when he was 12. Records show that a D.W.I. charge in 2012 was dismissed. A 2023 guilty plea for another D.W.I. was discharged by a judge without a conviction.
