Cesar Alexander Antunes-Maradiaga, pictured with his son, was detained by the Homeland Security officer (right) on November 24.Courtesy family
A few weeks before Christmas, six siblings huddled around a phone in their mom’s bedroom to talk with their dad and grandpa, who’d just been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Memphis.
Camila, 16, the oldest girl, seemed tense as she sat next to Saraya, 13. Their grandpa tried to lighten the mood, at one point singing to them, but Camila was unusually quiet. “I could barely speak to him, because I would burst out in tears,” she told me later.
Camila (like Saraya, a pseudonym) is tall and athletic, with long brown hair. She’s the fiery one of the bunch, the protector, always ready with a quip. “I wish I could go to the White House and smack Donald Trump,” she said, a little more like herself.
She’d been sleeping almost all day of late, yet still she was exhausted. Camila worried about everything, everyone: Her mom, who came home sobbing after her dad was detained and was now struggling to pay the rent. Saraya, who has darker skin and was constantly getting harassed by cops. Their 12-year-old brother, who’d been withdrawn ever since ICE officers busted into their house, guns drawn, sans warrant. Their grandpa, 75 years old, who said the detention facility where they took him wasn’t providing the blood pressure and diabetes medications he needs. And, of course, her dad, who always used to cook Camila the most delicious frijoles and pinole, and warm arroz con leche at bedtime to help her sleep—but can no longer do so.
With their breadwinner gone, the family has been eating lots of spaghetti. “We’re out of money, and I’m trying to help my mom, but I can’t because I’m a minor,” Camila told me over the phone. “I’m trying to look for a job.”
“If I could get therapy, something,” she added, “because I’m tired. I’m on my last string.”
The family’s troubles began on November 24. It was a Monday night, and father Cesar Alexander Antunes-Maradiaga had been home getting ready for dinner when he realized they were out of cream, which the recipe called for. The store was a short drive away, and he hopped into their 2013 Honda Civic with his father-in-law and uncle-in-law, who lived with them.
It should have been an easy errand, but one of his headlights was out. On his way home, at the corner of Jackson and Gragg, lights flashed behind him: Tennessee Highway Patrol. The cops, as I witnessed myself, had been everywhere lately. On September 29, the Trump administration launched the Memphis Safe Task Force, consisting of around 1,700 officers from a mix of local, state, and federal agencies—including ICE—supposedly to crack down on crime.
Antunes-Maradiaga is an asylum seeker from Honduras. His father-in-law, also Honduran, is undocumented. Terrified, he FaceTimed his wife, Nicole Amaya, who watched events unfold on her phone’s tiny screen: An officer approached the car, and Antunes-Maradiaga held a piece of paper up to the window, a Know Your Rights flier saying he didn’t have to open the door. Unimpressed, the officer smashed the car window and pulled him out, putting a gun to his head.
The officer demanded identification, but Antunes-Maradiaga didn’t have a driver’s license, so Amaya provided his passport number and Alien Registration Number to the troopers via FaceTime. By the time she got to the scene in person, she told me, more than two dozen officers from different agencies were there. Antunes-Maradiaga and her dad, Jorge Fidel Mejia, were in the back of one of their vehicles. Heart racing, Amaya approached an officer from Homeland Security Investigations, a division of ICE. “Y’all told me y’all wasn’t gonna detain nobody!” she yelled, citing an officer’s assurances during the FaceTime call.
“Maybe the trooper told you that,” she recalls the ICE agent saying. “I didn’t.”
Since the task force launched, local critics have called it an “occupation,” and accused the Trump administration of using the city’s crime problem as a Trojan horse, an excuse to boost its deportation count. In its first six weeks alone, the task force conducted nearly 30,000 traffic stops—and nearly 70,000 by mid-January. The federal officers ask drivers and passengers for proof of citizenship, leading to hundreds of arrests of noncriminal immigrants. “Show me his criminal record—you ain’t got it! So what are you taking him for?” Amaya says she yelled at the agent from the roadside, shivering because she’d forgotten a coat in her rush. “My dad can’t go back to his country,” she told me later. A Honduran gang “killed my brother in pieces with a machete when he was 17.”
“We might let your daddy go because you said he’s been here for 25 years,” the agent said, in her recollection.
“Y’all don’t let nobody go; let’s get real,” she responded, before the officers took her husband and father away.
The agents handed her a piece of paper explaining the headlight issue, in case another cop pulled her over. “Good luck getting home,” they said.
When Amaya got back to the family’s small, one-story house, she walked down the hall to her bedroom, then collapsed on the floor and began to cry. Camila consoled her, listening as Amaya tried to explain what had happened. “I’m the one who understands her more than the rest,” the daughter told me.
Suddenly, they heard a boom. “Oh my god, what was that?” Amaya said.
Then came stomping in the hallway, and the bedroom door flung open. The officers were holding guns and screaming. Some had vests labeled ICE or HSI, she says, and one was labeled US marshals, though that officer said he was from the Drug Enforcement Administration. The officers hauled her 12-year-old son, who’d also come in to sit with her, out of the room before pulling his hair and slamming him to the floor, the family told me. They accused Amaya of “aiding and abetting,” implying she was hiding other undocumented immigrants. “What am I aiding and abetting? My own children?” she yelled. Amaya and her children are US citizens.
Camila felt helpless, she told me later: “I just panicked because what am I gonna do with 20 men?” She cursed out the agents and demanded, to no avail, that they let her mom and brother go.
“He doesn’t give no reason,” for stopping me, said Saraya, who is in eighth grade. “He was like, ‘Where’s your mama? I wanna see your mama,” Amaya chimed in.
The family said the officers didn’t have a warrant, an allegation that seems credible given recent developments. Namely, a bombshell report by the Associated Press revealed that ICE told its officers that they may forcibly enter homes without a judicial warrant—which, according to a whistleblower, is contrary to their own training manual, to say nothing of longstanding legal precedent. The US Marshals Service, which handles press inquiries for the task force, ignored my questions about the raid and declined to weigh in on the warrant issue, but confirmed that Autunes-Maradiaga and his father-in-law were detained by ICE during a traffic stop.
The officers searched the house. Not finding anyone else undocumented, they left the same way they came in: through the front door, which they’d damaged upon entry—it would no longer lock and had a huge hole at its base. “I was like, whose gonna fix my door? They just walked off, and they were laughing,” Amaya recalls.
She and the kids inspected the additional damage: a punch mark on a bedroom door the officers had been unable to open, and someone had ripped the wifi router right out of the wall. “I just sat down and cried, because I couldn’t do anything,” Camila told me.
Camila is an 11th grader at Kingsbury High, located in a neighborhood with many immigrant families. Her favorite academic subject is history; for fun she enjoys volleyball and soccer. She hadn’t been able to play lately, though, due to injuries and stress—a month before her dad was arrested, she was hurt while fleeing a terrifying situation.
According to a press release from the Marshals Service, the Memphis Safe Task Force responded to a shooting at around 1:30 a.m. on October 22 at a house in the Nutbush neighborhood, not far from Camila’s school. After officers arrived, they found a corpse with a gunshot wound in the head, and later they found another that was partially dismembered. The 36-year-old suspect, Arsenio Davis, was accused of killing his mother and teenage nephew.
The press release didn’t name Camila, but earlier that same night, she, her cousin, and some friends were hanging out near the house when Davis came out. They didn’t know him, and there appeared to be something very wrong with him; according to Camila, he started yelling at her, demanding she come inside and pay him. Instead, she ran.
Afterward, she filed a police report alleging Davis had pursued her; she had to leap multiple fences to escape, leaving her cut up—scars on her stomach, arms, and legs, a busted knee, and nerve damage in one leg. “I almost got murdered,” she told me. The Memphis Police Department did not respond to my questions about the incident, but the family says an officer found her hiding in an abandoned house nearby, her pants ripped from traversing the fences. “The system still has failed to call to get her any kind of victim [support],” he mother told me.
“I’m just sick of being paranoid. I need a counselor or something to talk to.”
The trauma kept compounding. In mid-December, Camila says officers went to Kingsbury High and arrested her boyfriend, whose parents brought him to the United States from Honduras at age 2.
The Tennessee Highway Patrol, meanwhile, kept stopping Saraya around the neighborhood; one trooper shined a light in her face. “He doesn’t give no reason,” for stopping me, said Saraya, who is in eighth grade. “He was like, ‘Where’s your mama? I wanna see your mama,” Amaya chimed in.
And then there was the silver car with tinted windows that kept driving past the house multiple times a day—almost every day. Sometimes it would stop out front. They figured it was undercover law enforcement. “I’m not scared of them,” said Saraya, strong-willed like her sister. “They ain’t got no reason taking hardworking people that build their house and help their community,” Camila added. “Why can’t they just take the bad people?”
“That’s what they were supposed to be doing,” Amaya replied. “That was the statement”—the task force’s stated reason for being in Memphis.
“I don’t know how to feel, actually,” Camila said. “Today there was National Guard at the Walmart—they kept on staring me and my two sisters up and down. I told them they’re not supposed to be here. I said, ‘When are they leaving?’ They said, ‘We’re never leaving.’”
In December, Amaya attempted to file a report with the Memphis Police Department claiming the Tennessee Highway Patrol was harassing her family, but an officer told her she’d have to file a complaint with the THP. “I’m scared to call them because they’re already stalking me. I feel like I’m trapped,” she said.
“I’m just sick of being paranoid. I need a counselor or something to talk to,” Camila told me. Amaya had looked into getting trauma therapy for her daughter, but “every single [provider] didn’t take her insurance.”
The MPD and Highway Patrol ignored my requests for comment, and the US Marshals would not directly address the family’s allegations. I received a statement saying the task force “does not tolerate excessive force or harassment,” and that “all enforcement actions are expected to be conducted lawfully and professionally. Allegations of misconduct are taken seriously and should be directed to the appropriate oversight channels for review.”
In the days after the raid at Amaya’s house, Maria Oceja, who co-leads the neighborhood group Vecindarios 901, which documents ICE arrests, drove over to comfort her. She recalled Amaya as shaky and distressed, speaking quickly and peering outside frequently, on the lookout for law enforcement. “She’s very traumatized, very overwhelmed, and just trying to process everything,” Oceja said. And Camila seemed “in shock.” Of the thousands of cases Oceja’s group has witnessed since the task force launched, this one stands out, though there was a similar incident back in October, when officers followed an immigrant family home from a laundromat and then broke into their home.
“They should see how my mom gets on her knees, starts crying; she don’t know what to do.”
While Camila slept around the clock after her dad’s arrest, Amaya has struggled to get more than two hours of shuteye at a stretch—anxiety keeps her awake. How will she pay rent? Her husband worked in concrete and her dad would chip in money from odd construction jobs. She worries that the men might never return from ICE custody. Antunes-Maradiaga had an asylum case, Amaya says—he fled MS-13 gang members 12 years ago—but it was dismissed in 2023 without a final decision. Her father, Fidel Mejia, is undocumented. Both are being held at Winn Correctional Center in Louisiana, where they have reported that they lack mattresses and the guards call them wetbacks. Officials at the facility haven’t allowed him his medications, Fidel Mejia said, although they did at one point shoot him up with a tranquilizer, against his will, when he couldn’t sleep. Also: The tap water is yellow.
Amaya hasn’t been able to get a job because she’s needs to stay home for her kids, especially her 1-year-old. She’s had bad experiences with day cares, which are also expensive. Without a paycheck, she can’t even fix the front door. Cold air blows in through the hole at its base, which the family tried to stuff with towels. They eventually put a couch against it. The last time I spoke with her, their heat and electricity were shut off, and she was facing eviction during a winter storm.
Then, just this week, with the door still unrepaired, someone broke in and ransacked the house. Amaya sent some video footage. I could hear her cry as she walked through the hallway and into her bedroom, now strewn with the family’s possessions—drawers removed from a dresser, clothes everywhere. Their immigration papers were stolen. “I can’t anymore,” she texted me. “I don’t know what to do, and it’s freezing.”
We have “nothing,” Camila had told me earlier. “It’s like this whole world went to shit.”
“I just hope one day these [law enforcement] people understand other people’s pains,” she’d added. “They should see how my mom gets on her knees, starts crying; she don’t know what to do. One day they’re gonna understand” that immigrants “got kids, they got family.”
In the meantime, “I hope they all go to hell and burn.”
