A day that started with a routine immigration appointment for one Santa Barbara family ended with them separated across state lines.

Jonathan, Joani and their 2.5-year-old son Kaleth were detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers in March after showing up to a scheduled appointment for their immigration case in Thousand Oaks. 

(Noozhawk agreed to only use the family’s first names in this story for privacy and safety concerns. The family spoke to Noozhawk in Spanish; for this article, their quotations have been translated into English.)

“It was not fair what happened to us. We always did things by the rules, we never missed a meeting,” Joani said.

The family’s detainment at their immigration appointment follows a shift in federal immigration enforcement activity that local immigrant nonprofit, 805UndocuFund, has reported.

“Recently, enforcement actions have increasingly moved into residential neighborhoods and public spaces, often targeting individuals at jails or scheduled immigration appointments,” 805 UndocuFund leaders said in a May press release. 

Jonathan, Joani and Kaleth

Jonathan, Joani and Kaleth are asylum seekers from Peru who have been navigating the immigration system for two years.

They believe the March appointment was a ruse for their detainment because soon after they arrived, they were met with a group of ICE agents.

Then, they were separated.

Joani and Kaleth were sent to Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Texas, also known as the South Texas Family Residential Center. They spent two weeks there until their release in early April.

Jonathan was sent to the Adelanto ICE Processing Center in Southern California, located in San Bernardino County. He remained there until his release in early May.

“We were calm. The only thing I said was to not separate me from my son because that was what I was most scared of,” Jonathan said.

Neither of them knew where the other one went. 

“I arrived in Adelanto, and they wouldn’t tell me where (Joani) was at all. Even if I asked, they wouldn’t tell me,” he said. 

While at the center, Jonathan faced delays in accessing medical care and faced mistreatment before he was released in May, he said.

“Once a week they would feed us chicken, but what really hurt is that they would throw it in your face,” he said. “They did not let us eat sometimes, or if you wanted a second helping, they also would not let you, they grabbed you and threw the plate.”

“It was so humiliating.”

He also recalled getting sick, suffering from debilitating headaches and asking for medical care but faced delays in getting seen.

“They did not pay attention to me, they did not attend to me,” Jonathan said. “Other detainees would tell me, ‘Here, you have to be dying for them to pay attention.’”

He told his lawyer about the repeated lack of medical care, and the lawyer called the center. Jonathan said he was seen quickly after his lawyer called.

“When I arrived at the medic, he was annoyed because I had called my lawyer,” Jonathan said. 

After his medical appointment, Jonathan said he was led to a small, cold room with a bed. He believed he was taken there as punishment for calling his lawyer.

“It was so cold because they change the temperature to cold, and they don’t give you a blanket, nothing,” he said.

He said this made him fearful of telling his lawyer anything else over the phone because the calls were recorded and monitored.

He said he never gave up on being reunited with his family. He recalled thinking, “’I have to endure this and keep fighting.’”

Joani said it took two days to travel to Dilley, and Kaleth was in distress the whole time.

“I couldn’t count how many (moms and kids) there were because there were too many,” she said.

Joani said she was given deportation papers that would have her sent to Ecuador, but she refused to sign the papers because it was not her home country. 

She recalled how Kaleth got sick, refused to eat and frequently cried.

“(Those weeks) were horrible… the despair in knowing that my family had been separated,” she said.

Kaleth ate only crackers and drank apple juice, Joani said.

“The food they gave us was inedible and the water, also, was not drinkable; we had to find water ourselves,” she said. 

She also said the lights at the center were always on, making it extremely difficult for the two to sleep.

Joani’s release came after she was featured in a Univision news segment that caught the eye of Columbia Law School professor Elora Mukherjee.

Mukherjee, the director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School, filed a habeas corpus brief for Joani and Kaleth.

But their release was dependent on securing a sponsor, proof of residence and a plane ticket booked within a specific time window. 

That’s where the LEAP, a local nonprofit where Kaleth attended childcare programs, stepped in.

“We had two hours to pull that together,” said Lori Goodman, executive director and CEO of LEAP. “I don’t know how (the lawyer) could have made that work if we weren’t there.”

Goodman said she turned to her LEAP network for financial help and opened up an emergency fundraiser, raising $15,000 in five days.

“We were going to make it happen no matter what,” Goodman said. “I wasn’t going to let money be the deterrent.” 

The nonprofit also made sure Kaleth was able to see a doctor soon after he arrived in Santa Barbara after hearing about his sickness.

“It was devastating for the other parents in our community because they were connected with other families in similar situations,” Goodman said. “…There was a sense of tremendous loss and fear.”

After Joani and Kaleth returned to Santa Barbara, they tried to get back to their “normal life” while continuing to fight for Jonathan’s release.

But when they returned, they found out their landlord had thrown out their things.

“She thought we had been deported, she threw away our bed and all of our things, ” Joani said. 

A LEAP board member was able to help connect Jonathan with legal representation to get him out of the Adelanto center.

Local community groups — Drivers Listos, Immigration Legal Defense Center and 805UndocuFund — put out a call for a volunteer to drive him from the release location to Santa Barbara. 

“There’s a place outside of the detention center like a Dairy Queen or something where they drop them [off],” Goodman said.

When Jonathan arrived in Santa Barbara, it was an emotional reunion with Kaleth. 

“That day I don’t think he slept until 1 a.m., he stayed up playing with me, super happy,” Jonathan said.

Detainees Report a Lack of Medical Care, Drinkable Water at Adelanto Center 

While Jonathan is no longer at the Adelanto ICE Center, others still inside report similar experiences. 

Congressman Salud Carbajal — whose district covers Santa Barbara County — met with seven detainees in May, three of whom were local men. (Jonathan was not one of them; he had been released a few days prior.) 

“It was very depressing and disheartening to see this facility and the folks that were there,” Carbajal said, calling it “a jail, a prison.”

He met with a Goleta resident who had been in the center for four months, a Santa Maria resident who had been held for 19 months and an Ojai resident who had been there for seven months. 

Carbajal said it was disheartening to hear the testimonials of the people he met with.

The congressman’s office did not share the names of the residents Carbajal met with because they did not have authorization to share their information with Noozhawk. 

The men told Carbajal there was a lack of access to medical care, showers, drinking water, cleanliness, legal representation and recreation opportunities.

He said detainees told him it would take days for someone to acknowledge a medical request, like Jonathan’s experience.

They also shared concerns about the available drinking water and told Carbajal the water from the faucets doesn’t taste good. 

While the center would bring in big containers of drinking water, it often would be hours after they were emptied that they would get refilled, they told him. 

“That was really alarming,” Carbajal said. “They felt they would go hours, four, five, six hours, half a day without getting the replenishment of drinking water for themselves.”

Carbajal said that while the facility might look clean at first glance, “the lack of adequate services when it comes to recreation, medical services, legal representation, access to basic toiletries” concerns him.

An ICE spokesperson told Noozhawk in an emailed statement that all Adelanto detainees are provided with “proper meals, water, medical treatment, and have opportunities to communicate with their family members and lawyers.”

“In fact, ICE has higher detention standards than most U.S. prisons that hold actual U.S. citizens. Detainees have access to the same water supply as Adelanto residents, with water readily available at all times through water fountains and coolers. The recreational area, which includes fitness equipment and a soccer field, is open daily for up to six hours.”

Adelanto detainees participated in a hunger strike on May 19, days after Carbajal’s visit, CALÓ News reported. 

On May 28, more than 100 detainees signed and submitted a petition of writ, a legal document that requests a higher court to intervene. A copy of the petition, which said detainees are attempting suicide, was shared with CALÓ News by Congresswoman Judy Chu. 

California Senator Sasha Renée Pérez, who represents portions of Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties, wrote a letter to Attorney General Rob Bonta to request an investigation of the facility’s conditions.

On Wednesday, three members of Congress representing California districts, including Chu, Jimmy Gomez and Pete Aguilar, also wrote a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, demanding an investigation into the facility.

Their letter also listed a series of questions about the conditions and requested a response by July.

805UndocuFund, White House Release Numbers on ICE Arrests

Jonathan, Joani and Kaleth aren’t alone.

Federal immigration agents have arrested hundreds of Santa Barbara County residents since President Donald J. Trump took office early last year, according to numbers reported by the federal government and local activist groups.

805UndocuFund, which independently documents ICE arrests along the Central Coast, said at least 870 immigration-related arrests have been made locally since January 2025.

“Every person taken from our Tri-County region ends up in those same facilities. The violence happening in our streets is directly feeding the crisis of maltreatment and death occurring behind closed doors in detention centers,” said 805UndocuFund Executive Director Primitiva Hernandez in the press release.

Nonprofit leaders also noted there has been an increase in immigration-related arrests from early 2026 to May 2026, compared to the same time period last year. 

President Trump’s administration confirmed that hundreds of people have been detained in Santa Barbara County in immigration-related arrests in a newly-launched and controversial “Aliens” page on the White House website.

The website’s sci-fi, extraterrestrial theme and wording with bright green lettering — “They Walk Among Us” — chronicles ICE arrests across the country. It has drawn backlash for its language comparing undocumented immigrants and non-U.S. citizens to extraterrestrials.

The page reports 556 people have been arrested in Santa Barbara County, with its data spanning back to early 2025 to as recent as last month.  

A New Normal for the Family of Three

Jonathan, Joani and Kaleth are now in Goleta. Jonathan has found a new job and Kaleth has returned to LEAP, where he was reunited with his classmates and teachers.

“(LEAP) has been a great help to us in this whole process and has helped us even months after,” Joani said.

But Joani said the time spent at Dilley changed Kaleth. The toddler is going to therapy to overcome the trauma he experienced at Dilley.

The family has launched a GoFundMe to help rebuild their lives, which has raised roughly $10,000 as of Friday morning.