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“We were in waiting mode,” a Honduran immigrant based in St. Louis told me as she described her time being held in a county jail in Missouri. In June 2025, the woman — who asked to be identified by pseudonym “Mary” to avoid targeting — was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at a gas station in St. Louis. “Dinner was the same every day, and waiting was the worst part because nobody tells you that you have to wait for such a long time,” she said.

Mary and her husband Jose (also identified here by a pseudonym) are both from Honduras. Their family is mixed-status: They have two children, one born in Honduras, the other born in the United States. During the first months of Donald Trump’s second administration, immigration sweeps in their working-class neighborhood of St. Louis created a flurry of panic and upended their lives. Just two weeks before Mary was arrested, Jose was picked up by ICE.

For a short time, they were both held in the same county jail in Phelps County, an hour and a half away from St. Louis, in central Missouri.

“I was taken to the same jail where he was in, but they didn’t allow me to see him,” Mary recalls. “It was very sad not knowing anything about him because he only had me.”

Three days later, Jose was transferred out of the jail. For six weeks, Mary did not hear from her husband. Nobody in their family could find him. He had disappeared into Trump’s deportation machine. There was more waiting.

Police in Many “Sanctuary Cities” Have Repeatedly Collaborated With ICE

Mary later located her husband with the help of Abide in Love, an organization doing jail support for immigrants in the Phelps County jail. Jose was being detained in Monroe County jail in Illinois, just across the border from St. Louis. This was a surprise, as Illinois is supposed to be a sanctuary state where county jails are banned from holding immigrants. As it turns out, there is a loophole that allows jails to hold immigrants with criminal violations in federal custody.

According to an indictment, Jose was being held on criminal charges of felony reentry, what is officially known as U.S. Code 1326, the “crime” of being caught twice crossing the border. The penalty is typically a two-year prison sentence, then deportation. The original law goes back to the anti-immigrant “nativist” movement of the 1920s. After 9/11, the newly formed Department of Homeland Security stepped up prosecutions of felony reentry. Immigration, once treated as civil law, became criminalized.

More recently, in September 2025, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the “Stop Illegal Entry Act” to increase the penalties for felony reentry to a mandatory minimum of five years of imprisonment. It has not come before the Senate, but Donald Trump has indicated he is willing to sign the bill.

The criminalization of immigration is often overlooked by immigration activists. In the........

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