‘It’s a miracle’: A California father reunites with his family after weeks in ICE detention
The tears flowed as the sun rose Wednesday in Pomona.
It was a family reunited, joyous in a moment of freedom, but focused on an uncertain future.
Jose Luis Zavala arrived at dawn to the tight embraces of his family at their Pomona home, a day after being released from federal immigration detention. It was nearly two months that masked agents detained him at his gardening job in La Mirada — making him one among thousands arrested across Southern California and the nation as part of the federal government’s mammoth immigration dragnet since early June.
“I’m still in shock,” said Zavala in Spanish, his three daughters, son, their grandmother, and wife surrounding him. They greeted him with hugs, wiping away tears outside their home in their small, close-knit working class neighborhood, after a long bus ride from across the country.
“I can’t believe I’m with my family again.”
There were days when neither he, nor members of his family, thought this day would come — at least on U.S. soil.
That pervasive uncertainty — and the impact on Zavala and his family — are reflective of many in Southern California, who have often found the head of a household, the breadwinner, a beloved father, mother, aunt, uncle, on the verge of deportation, inside a detention cell far away from home.
Zavala’s elusive path to freedom has been a journey that runs through an increasingly complex federal immigration system, where attorneys, families and detainees face a pipeline of evolving interpretation of rules and expanded federal authority, claimed by a new presidential administration.
Many have gone into the shadows out of fear of being detained, but Zavala’s family has shared a glimpse into their lives, of the impact – from the day when he was rounded up to his homecoming on Wednesday.
The day
June 18 is now seared into Zavala’s and his family’s memory.
That was the day when during a lunch break, agents converged. Moments later, cell phone video shows him being ushered into an SUV by masked armed officers. He was taken to a federal holding facility in downtown L.A., where his wife and daughter desperately tried to get vital medication to the patriarch of their family.
Eventually, Zavala’s wife, Maria Murillo, was able to get in, with the help of Pasadena Mayor Gordo, who had been there demanding information on arrests that took place earlier in the day in his city. She at least got a few moments with him, and was able to give him his medication.
Days later, he was transported to a detention center in El Paso, Texas, where he’d been ever since.
On Wednesday, before Zavala arrived home riding in the family’s pick up truck, his 14-year-old daughter, Arabel, held back tears as she and younger sister Isella held “welcome home” signs for their father.
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Arabel reflected back to the morning before Zavala was taken from the La Mirada site.
It was 5 a.m., he’d come in to give her a hug for the day. The still sleepy teenager didn’t hug back, she said.
He went to work. She went to school, telling her mom that morning to not worry about the possibility that her husband could be apprehended.
“I told my mom in the car, I know (the raids) are happening, but I don’t think you have to worry,” she said. “They are not around the area yet. But I didn’t know they were in the area. I didn’t know it was going to happen later on that day.”
When she and her younger sister found out, they cried and the family scrambled to figure out what to do, or if they would even see him again on U.S. soil.
“He hugged me,” Arabel said, remember the morning of that day. “I didn’t hug him back because I was still sleeping. I just broke down, because the first thing that came to my mind was that I didn’t hug him back.”
Bigger Picture
Zavala’s path to Wednesday mirrors many in the area.
He is undocumented. He came to the U.S. illegally in 2002 from Guanajuato, the capital city of the central Mexican state of the same name.
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Murillo and her husband met in 2003, became friends and ultimately lovers. But he returned to Mexico and then came back to the U.S. again in 2006.
The two would settle in Pomona, where they would have four children — three daughters and a son.
He would find a job as a forklift driver and eventually find his way into the landscaping and gardening business.
But he had a DUI arrest on his record, back in 2005, a charge that was ultimately dismissed. And there were some traffic infractions. In the current crackdown, authorities seized on those in the reported push to attain the Trump administration’s goal of 3,000 arrests a day.
Homeland Security officials said the DUI, coupled with his illegal entry and re-entries into the U.S., were sufficient to set his arrest in motion. And they pointed to the state of California, “which dangerously created a program in 2021 to dismiss (charges),” said DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin, back in June, in response to questions about Zavala’s arrest.
Immigration officials doubled down.
A memo from Todd M. Lyons, acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, that detention was entirely within ICE’s discretion, but he acknowledged a legal challenge was likely. For that reason, he told ICE attorneys to continue gathering evidence to argue for detention before an immigration judge, including potential danger to the community and flight risk.
But Burga successfully argued to an immigration judge earlier in July that his client was not a danger, nor a flight risk. And, years ago, Burga also argued that because Zavala was not given a “speedy trial” as guaranteed by the Constitution on the DUI charge, he was able to dismiss the case, he said.
“It was a straight dismissal,” he said.
Ultimately, Burga and family maintain that he is not the “worst of the worst” that Trump Administration officials have pledged to detain and deport in an effort to stop what they call an “invasion” of immigrants across the Southern border, particularly during the years of the Biden administration.
Immigration officials have indeed arrested people with serious criminal records, touting on the government’s ICE website the removal of immigrants wanted for serious crimes.
But by Wednesday, Zavala’s attorney, Burga — weeks after arguing his case in immigration court — was still reflecting on the lack of a warrant for his client’s arrest, who, or what agency were the the men from who arrested him, and the lack, early on, of a charging document against Zavala.
Roller coaster
But even with the judge’s ruling, which technically released Zavala on $5,000 bond, the government continued to try to keep him detained, and ultimately deported. Zavala’s eldest daughter, Denise, and her brother, Giovanny, would go to Texas in anticipation of his release.
But after getting so close, they would be turned back after the government reserved the ability to appeal. That meant he would have to spend at least another 30 days in the El Paso facility, potentially months.
“We were thinking we were going to start the school off without our dad,” Arabel said. “That really hit us hard.”
But in immigration court, after such a ruling, government attorneys had 10 days to file an intent to appeal. That filing never came. The family re-petitioned for the bond release, and Zavala was on a bus ride home with his daughter, who went to get him.
The future is still uncertain. But the family was hopeful in prevailing in Zavala’s deportation case, with the goal of obtaining legal status and then a green card.
It’s a process that will take time, perhaps years, Burga said.
But it’s a process that starts this week.
Zavala, more frail from his days in detention, himself was still feeling traumatized from the experience, worried about being detained again.
“We’re heading to Phase II,” Giovanny, 17, said. “We’ve got to start working with the lawyer on the next part, the legal status.”
He said it will be costly for a family of modest means.
“But it’s a price to pay for a better future,” he said.
Zavala said on Wednesday that he had big dreams for his family, in the United States.
He aspires to some day buy a house for them.
For now, Zavala, would have to settle for a home-cooked pork dish with beans on the side, as the family seeks to smooth over the roller-coaster of emotions of the past weeks.
“I was afraid I wasn’t going to have my dad,” 11-year-old Isella said, reflecting on her fear over being bullied at school. “But now it turns out that I’m going to have him.”
Arabel cried so much that first week, she said, “I couldn’t cry any more.”
Eldest daughter Denise noted her father’s rare reluctance to work at the moment, as they returned on the long bus ride home.
“The fact that he told me he doesn’t want to work – to stay on the safe side – was really shocking,” she said, noting her father’s Monday-to-Sunday work schedule. “I’m hoping today he can get a good night’s rest, now that he’s finally home.”
Giovanny remembered the lines of detainees and families wanting to check on their loved ones that he and his sister saw in Texas.
“It’s just sad,” he said of what he saw. “The U.S. is built around immigrants. We all make up the community.”
Ultimately, Maria Murillo said she was ready to move forward.
“I’m just so happy. … We had God on our side. To me, it’s just a miracle,” she said.