Arrested, transferred, lost, dismissed: One Chicago resident's journey through ICE detention
U.S. immigration authorities have moved one young man so often over the last month that even the Department of Homeland Security has had trouble keeping track of him.
19-year-old Chicago resident and Ecuadorian immigrant Jhonnatan Apolinario Daquilema Tenesaca has been in three Kentucky jails in less than a month. He isn’t behind bars because of any hard criminal offense - instead he’s won this veritable tour of bluegrass state lockups courtesy of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security.
Detained in Chicago’s immigration court on June 12, online inmate information listed Daquilema Tenesaca as arrested in central Kentucky’s Grayson County Detention Center as of June 13. He was booked into the Bourbon County Regional Jail, over 130 miles northeast in Paris, Kentucky, a day later. Bourbon County listed the young man as released on June 25 - but the same day, he appeared booked into Hopkins County Jail in the southwestern Kentucky town of Madisonville.
At time of writing, Hopkins County is where he remains.
The rate at which Daquilema Tenesaca has been moved is so rapid that when his immigration case came up for a hearing in Chicago on June 23, even DHS didn’t know where he was. The department’s counsel told immigration judge Jody Barilla - incorrectly - that he was still in Grayson County.
“She filed information today that was inaccurate. I mean, do they know?” Daquilema Tenesaca’s attorney Gabriel Videla indignantly told Barilla during the hearing on June 23, as he and his colleague Gabriel Zunino attempted to prevent DHS from moving the case to the jurisdiction of Cleveland.
They were unsuccessful. Barilla approved the transfer, pointing out Daquilema Tenesaca was definitely not in Illinois anymore, and opining Cleveland was still the proper venue based on DHS’ best “good faith” representations.
Transferring cases like this is far from unique. Daquilema Tenesaca is only one of scores of immigrants moved from Illinois to Kentucky and elsewhere as federal immigration authorities work to fulfill the Trump Administration’s promises for mass immigrant arrests and deportations. And as DHS prosecutes immigrant removal cases in court, shuffling people around is a key move in its legal playbook.
Videla said in a phone interview that he had never seen anything quite like DHS’ newfound fervor for moving immigration respondents in over four decades of legal practice.
“This thing about moving people so often, that’s a new development… it’s unprecedented,” he said.
Andrew Rankin, an immigration attorney based in Memphis, echoed Videla’s sentiment - he said he’d seen “at least 40” similar cases in his own recent experience.
There are multiple reasons DHS looks to move cases and venue shop, according to Rankin and Stephanie Spiro, Associate Director of Protection-Based Relief for the nonprofit National Immigrant Justice Center. Spiro emphasized that it goes hand in hand with the recent surge of ICE arrests and detentions.
Moving people means you need to find places to hold them while their cases proceed. According to data compiled by researchers at Syracuse University, there were over 56,000 immigration detainees as of this past June 15, almost 72% of whom had no criminal record. It’s the largest number of people detained by ICE that the researchers have yet recorded; a figure only approached in August 2019 under the first Trump administration.
The physical reality of being placed in a detention facility, Spiro said, makes it that much harder for immigrants to prevail in their removal or asylum hearings.
“It’s harder to collect evidence, it’s harder for you to access your counsel,” she said.
To whit, Zunino said he and Videla had spoken with Daquilema Tenesaca only a few times since he was sent to Kentucky. Zunino added the 19 year old’s family in Chicago, who could not be reached for comment on the case, have only had “limited contact” with him.
Exhaustion is also a factor, Spiro said, as the reportedly overcrowded and grueling conditions detainees face sometimes pressures them into accepting deportation rather than fighting or appealing their case.
“When they’re in detention, even if they have good claims to get out of deportation… a good claim to asylum, being in detention is such a stressful, dehumanizing situation that people will often just elect to just leave the country,” Spiro said.
“This is what DHS is banking on, that a lot of people will just not try to fight their claims,” she added.
Being locked up also makes it that much easier for the feds to carry out “expedited removal” procedures, which allow individuals to be deported without the usual immigration court hearing process. Congress first approved expedited removal in 1996; between 2004 and 2019 it was applied to undocumented noncitizens who had been arrested within two weeks of entering the country and within 100 miles of a U.S. border. The first Trump administration nixed expedited removal’s geographic restraints and expanded its eligibility window to two years; though the Biden administration reversed those changes in 2022, Trump revoked the reversals by executive order this past January.
It isn’t clear if Daquilema Tenesaca is subject to expedited removal, as his immigration case first appeared on the court docket in December 2023 shortly after his 18th birthday. Videla said he wasn’t sure why his client was singled out for detention in the first place.
“I wish I knew what criteria they had in mind… but that information has not been forthcoming,” he said. “Some people they detain, some they don’t, and I don’t understand why.”
Besides detention in and of itself, there are more procedural reasons DHS may look to move cases to other venues.
In Illinois specifically, the state’s 2021 Way Forward Act prohibits local jails from housing immigration detainees. ICE doesn’t even list its processing center in Broadview, Illinois - the same processing center to which four Democratic Illinois congresspeople were denied entry on June 18 - on its detention facility webpage.
This logistically constrains federal immigration authorities, who instead opt to move people to out-of-state locations. Once an immigration detainee is out of the state, DHS can move in court to have their case follow them - as it did with Daquilema Tenesaca. Kentucky is an attractive detention target for more than just its proximity to Illinois - ICE has inked 15 immigration enforcement agreements with Kentucky police agencies and jails since the start of this year. This includes the Grayson County Sheriff’s Office and Grayson County Detention Center to which Daquilema Tenesaca was first moved.
A weekly arrest report published in the Grayson County News on June 21 lists Daquilema Tenesaca as just one of nearly 60 ICE detainees booked into the county jail that week.
Immigration cases in Kentucky fall under the jurisdiction of either the Memphis or Cleveland immigration courts, which is also a boon to deportation-minded federal agencies. Judges in both courts, according to more Syracuse University researcher data, have historically denied immigrants’ asylum claims more frequently than have Chicago judges.
Memphis judges collectively denied just over 75% of immigrants’ asylum cases between 2019 and 2024. Judges in Cleveland denied about 76% of asylum cases in the same timeframe. Chicago immigration judges, by contrast, only denied about 39% of asylum cases between 2019 and 2024.
“Illinois bleeds Smurf blue, always has,” Rankin said. “It would be in the government’s interest to find friendlier venues.”
Rankin drew a parallel between Daquilema Tenesaca’s case and that of Columbia University student activist Mahmoud Khalil. ICE agents took Khalil from his home in New York City in March in connection to his on-campus Palestine solidarity organizing, and he was quickly moved to an ICE detention facility in Louisiana. He remained there until his release on June 20, with the Justice Department unsuccessfully trying to have his case sent to Louisiana. A Manhattan federal judge instead sent the case to New Jersey.
“They’re picking the venue that’s better for them,” Rankin said.
Another part of what makes a venue “better” for either immigrants or government prosecutors is determined by what U.S. appellate court has jurisdiction over it. Immigration judges’ decisions are appealable to the national Board of Immigration Appeals, but that agency’s decisions are themselves subject to the jurisprudence of whichever appellate court covers the venue in which an immigration judge concluded initial proceedings.
There are 11 U.S. appellate court “circuits,” not counting a separate appellate court specific to Washington D.C., and all issue their own independent decisions. This sometimes leads to “circuit splits” when different appellate courts issue different rulings on the same issue. Chicago is the seat for the Seventh Circuit, while both Cleveland and Memphis fall under the jurisdiction of the Sixth Circuit.
On immigration, Rankin said, the Sixth Circuit is decidedly more conservative than the Seventh.
“It would be good for the government to move them out of the Seventh and into the Sixth,” Rankin said while considering cases like Daquilema Tenesaca’s. “Not that the Sixth doesn’t have any good laws, but put it alongside the Seventh and no reasonable practitioner would say that on immigration the Sixth is better.”
Whatever the broader legal considerations, the government has achieved its goal with Daquilema Tenesaca specifically - at least for now. According to court information, a Cleveland immigration judge dismissed the Chicago resident’s immigration relief case on June 26.
Still detained in Hopkins County over a week later, it’s unclear now how his case will proceed. Daquilema Tenesaca’s attorneys said they planned to appeal, but did not want to divulge too many specifics, citing attorney-client privilege.
What is clear, Videla said, is that a 19-year-old has been shuffled across multiple adult jails in a short time period. A young person held in legal limbo, even as the government holding him celebrates the anniversary of its own “freedom.”
“I don’t see any logical reason for this,” Videla said.