After spending six days in a Tooele jail, Marco Antonio Mancilla says he was put on a plane that landed in at least five states over 24 hours. At the end of that journey, he was booked into the Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego.
He called that facility “infierno,” or hell. It was unsanitary and the food was terrible, he said, and it was degrading.
“I feel that one of our dogs lives better in someone’s home,” he said during an interview in Spanish, “than a person, than a Latino, in a detention center.”
The 51-year-old Mancilla is one of about 3,000 people who have been arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Utah since President Donald Trump returned to the White House, according to federal data compiled by the Deportation Data Project and analyzed by The Salt Lake Tribune. The arrest data runs through Oct. 15.
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Marco Antonio Mancilla talks about being detained by ICE during an interview in Millcreek on Wednesday, Dec. 3, 2025.
This year’s detentions — up 170% over 2024 — are part of Trump’s nationwide immigration crackdown.
Utah has so far avoided the flood of federal agents dispatched to cities like Los Angeles and Chicago. But Tribune reporting shows the enforcement blitz in the state has struck fear in immigrant communities and torn families apart as ICE has deported many more people, including children.
The second Trump administration, meanwhile, has discarded some protections for immigrants this year, removing key barriers to detentions and deportations — with federal judges at times blocking such moves.
The Tribune sent more than a dozen detailed questions to ICE and received no answers to those or a later inquiry. The agency had multiple days to respond but didn’t do so.
Generally, administration officials have said the surge in immigration enforcement is an effort to “return law and order” to the U.S. and that they’re targeting “the worst of the worst.”
Federal agents pulled over Mancilla in August as he was driving near 4100 South and Redwood Road, his lawyers said, and took him into custody. ICE alleged in court records that he had entered the country illegally in April 2006. There was no order from a judge for Mancilla’s removal from the U.S., his lawyers later told a court, and he had no previous criminal convictions. A Tribune search found Mancilla has at least 17 traffic infractions since 2010.
He ended up in the Southern California detention center, eating what he described as “food for dogs,” and receiving what he said were multiple $1,000 offers along the way from authorities to give up his case and get out of the U.S.
(Ariana Drehsler | The New York Times) The Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego, California, on Monday, Nov. 24, 2025.
A judge later ruled that he had been wrongly held because a new Trump policy to detain immigrants like him without a bond hearing was illegal. He has since posted bond and returned to Utah, and his immigration case is ongoing.
“My future is uncertain,” Mancilla said. “I trusted God, and I trusted the lawyer. But my life is shattered; it’s ruined. I have nine grandchildren and my three children and my wife, who is devastated. She is in a bad way psychologically.”
‘You don’t sleep so easily’
In all of 2024, ahead of Trump’s ascent to a second term, ICE made 1,128 arrests in the Beehive State. Those numbers have surged under the president’s second administration.
On the campaign trail, Trump promised to enforce the nation’s immigration laws more aggressively. A main pillar of his pitch was to remove criminals and gang members.
During Trump II, however, barely half (55%) of those arrested in Utah by ICE have criminal convictions. Among those deported from Utah, 59% had criminal histories, though some had pending criminal charges.
Gildardo Escobar is among those who were detained without a criminal record; a Tribune search showed he has six traffic infractions. He arrived in the United States with his father when he was 16, came to Utah in 1999 and has made a living cooking American breakfast favorites at Denny’s.
But Escobar’s simple, “very nice” life with his kids and his longtime domestic partner, Tammy Staples, whom he calls his wife, was upended on Aug. 4.
ICE agents pulled him over as he was driving to work at 6 a.m. along Redwood Road in Salt Lake City. They confiscated his phone, took him to two jails — one in Utah and another in Wyoming — and eventually booked him into a private detention center in Pahrump, Nevada, just outside of Las Vegas.
The 53-year-old Escobar said he endured months of frigid rooms, inadequate medical care and bad food.
“When you’re there, you don’t sleep so easily,” Escobar said during an interview in Spanish. “You have insomnia, you have depression, you have all kinds of worries.”
All the while, his family was struggling to make ends meet.
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Gildardo Escobar talks about his experience being detained by ICE during an interview in Millcreek on Wednesday, Dec. 3, 2025.
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Tammy Staples sheds a tear as her domestic partner, Gildardo Escobar, describes his experience being detained by ICE during an interview in Millcreek on Wednesday, Dec. 3, 2025.
“It was just hard,” Staples said. “I didn’t know what was going to happen. … We have four kids, and I’ve had to make sure they’re taken care of, go to work, do everything by myself. It was hard without him.”
Staples and her kids had to leave their home and give up their car, a judge wrote in Escobar’s case. Escobar would be held there for more than three months.
“The experience was horrible. I feel good because I am [now] with my family, but I was more worried when I was inside,” Escobar said. “I never thought I would be there.”
Escobar was born in Mexico, like many others who have been picked up by ICE in Utah since Trump’s Jan. 20 swearing-in. The five most common countries of origin for those arrested in the state since his second inauguration are Mexico, Venezuela, Honduras, Guatemala and Colombia.
After successfully challenging his detention in federal court, Escobar was released in November. He and two other men represented by the Utah law firm Stowell Crayk won a wrongful-detention lawsuit and all three men left the Nevada jail.
Attorney Adam Crayk called them “pioneers” in immigration law because their lawsuit is among a string of cases in which judges have rejected a new government policy adopted in July. The policy asserts that detention is mandatory for anyone who has entered the U.S. without permission.
For decades, immigration courts have interpreted federal law to mean that undocumented people who are arrested after they’ve lived in the country for years must be treated differently than people arrested at the border, U.S. District Judge Richard F. Boulware II explained in his ruling in Escobar’s case.
(Eric Lee | The New York Times) ICE officers and a Homeland Security Investigations agent arrest a man in Washington, Aug. 15, 2025.
New arrivals face mandatory detention, the judge wrote, but undocumented residents who have developed ties to their communities and don’t have criminal histories generally have the opportunity to be released on bond.
The new policy, he determined, unlawfully “subjects millions of undocumented residents to prolonged detention without the opportunity for release on bond, in contravention of decades of agency practice and robust due process protections” they previously had.
Mancilla, the man who was held in San Diego’s Otay Mesa, petitioned for a bond hearing on similar grounds.
A family torn apart
(Fred Ramos | The New York Times) President Nayib Bukele’s face adorns an apartment building in the Zacamil neighborhood of San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador, Jan. 24, 2024.
Since September 2023 and the inauguration, ICE has most often arrested people in or near Salt Lake City, data shows.
Those who are taken into custody are usually between ages 23 and 40. Young people were slightly more likely to be arrested under Trump, and all the deportations of children from Utah since late 2023 have occurred since Jan. 20.
In the 15 months and change leading up to the inauguration, the federal government deported 849 Utahns.
Then, 975 people were deported from the Beehive State in a seven-month span that started on Inauguration Day.
And the deportations have continued, driving that total higher.
Noe Fabricio Escamilla, who called Utah home for more than 20 years, was deported to his native El Salvador on Sept. 24. Escamilla alleges he was wrongfully deported and has sued in federal court in Utah, asking the government to return him to the U.S., where his family still lives. His youngest son is 4 and lives with nonverbal autism and neurofibromatosis, a rare genetic disorder characterized by tumor growth in the nervous system.
“My family and my children are my everything,” he said in an email through his lawyer, Kendall Moriarty.
In Utah, the 49-year-old Escamilla worked in construction and had never been convicted of a crime that would disqualify him from getting a removal order canceled, his attorney told the judge in his federal lawsuit. ICE detained him during a traffic stop on Aug. 27.
A Tribune search of court records showed Escamilla has at least 15 traffic infractions. More than 10 years ago, he was charged in three separate misdemeanor cases in Utah County. All were dismissed.
Escamilla had been the family’s primary earner before his deportation, Moriarty said, and now his family is struggling.
Since landing back in the country of his birth, Escamilla said he’s been working as an Uber driver.
“I do not earn enough money in El Salvador to help my family in the United States,” Escamilla said in the email. “[On Dec. 8], I started working at 6 a.m. and I finished at 7:30 p.m. I earned $25. I had to pay $15 in gas, and so I earned $10 for myself. Sometimes I can make as much as $15 for me, but it is so little.”
Escamilla entered the U.S. in 2004, when he was briefly detained at the border and then released, Moriarty said in court filings. Authorities ordered him to appear for an immigration hearing, the attorney added, but never gave him a copy of that order.
After his detention by ICE, Escamilla asked on Sept. 1 to have an immigration court reopen his immigration case and review his status. Such a filing, Moriarty said, should have prevented his deportation under federal law.
Instead, his lawsuit says, he was awakened at 3 a.m. on Sept. 24 in a Texas detention center, driven to an airport and flown to El Salvador.
Moriarty said she’s never seen a case like this, and if she and Escamilla win in federal court, the government would be ordered to return Escamilla to the U.S. to await an immigration court’s decision on his status.
If they lose, Moriarty said, they’ll appeal.
Life on shaky ground
The information compiled by the Deportation Data Project does not show, in most cases, where Utah detainees go between the time they are arrested and the moment they’re deported. ICE detainees in Utah, Moriarty said, are often whisked away to other states soon after their arrests.
The data does reveal, however, where detainees exit the country. The most common deportation site for those arrested in Utah under Trump is the border crossing at Nogales, Arizona, while other locations include San Ysidro, California, and Louisiana’s Alexandria International Airport.
Stepped-up immigration enforcement in Utah also has targeted Venezuelans. More than 85% of ICE arrests of people from that South American country from September 2023 to October 2025 happened after Trump reclaimed the Oval Office.
All 54 deportations of Venezuelans since late 2023 have occurred since March.
Mancilla, the released man who called the San Diego detention center “hell,” said he’s “determined” to avoid a similar fate. His legal team plans to fight his case by applying for the cancellation of the order to deport him.
But nothing is guaranteed.
“We live in fear here in this country,” Mancilla said. “We live under constant surveillance. We live with the anxiety of what will happen tomorrow with our cases, with our belongings, because it is uncertain.”