A quiet Utah suburb sits at the center of one of the most dramatic deportation sagas of the second Trump administration.
Separation at the border. Midnight flights to El Salvador. Terminated legal status. Dread of detention and removal.
For the past six months, a torrent of executive actions have tossed the family of Uriel David, and the Millcreek community that sprung up around them, into the middle of the nation’s immigration-law enforcement overhaul.
Uriel’s family entered the country legally last year after qualifying for humanitarian parole, which they received along with a two-year work permit, according to the family’s lawyers. But actions taken by the White House have since split their family apart, terminated their legal status and thrown their futures into uncertainty.
Uriel was one of the 252 Venezuelan immigrants flown in March to the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, in El Salvador, where, according to his family, he experienced daily physical and mental abuse, despite the absence of any criminal record.
Three weeks ago, the 19-year-old was returned to Venezuela as part of a prisoner swap. His family, who recently received a letter from the Trump administration reversing their legal residency, is still trying to understand why he was taken and what to do next.
To the neighbors who embraced these strangers in a strange land, the debate over President Donald Trump’s handling of former President Joe Biden’s historic surge in immigration is no longer hypothetical. But that doesn’t mean the answers are always clear.
Last Tuesday, Uriel’s father, mother, brother and sister-in-law — who spoke to the Deseret News on condition of anonymity for fear of being targeted by federal agents — gathered with their newfound friends in Utah to discuss the issue shaping their lives.
The informal focus group included Democrats worried the White House bypassed due process for immigrants, Republicans concerned about the strain unrestricted immigration places on the population and independents tired of the partisan obstacles to immigration reform.
Despite this political diversity, the response from these Utahns was unified. In most cases, they said, immigrants — regardless of status — are a net-benefit to the economy and the communities who are willing to accept them and appreciate what they have to offer.
Uriel’s story
From the beginning, Uriel’s family members said they took pains to follow the law as they searched for a more stable future than the one they faced in Venezuela.
They fled the country in 2019 after the authoritarian socialist government threatened to incarcerate them for protesting corruption and election fraud.
Following a multiyear journey, including an unsuccessful attempt to settle in Colombia, the family arrived in Mexico in January of 2024, where they waited for seven months to schedule an appointment with immigration officials instead of entering the U.S. illegally.
In August 2024, the entire family was granted lawful U.S. presence under Biden’s expanded parole program that provided two-year work authorizations for more than 500,000 qualifying immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela.
Upon crossing into San Diego at the San Ysidro Port of Entry on Aug. 22, Uriel was detained by the immigration authorities checking his documentation who alleged his tattoos were gang-related — a claim he and his family denied.
The family was not given the chance to say goodbye, Uriel’s mother said. They entered without him and arrived a few days later in Utah, their state of choice because “to them, this is Zion and they wanted to come where they had brothers and sisters,” their lawyer said.
The next seven months were filled with court proceedings and false hopes that Uriel would be released from detention in San Diego. At one point, Uriel was given the option to continue with the asylum hearing process, which seemed to have no end in sight, or to be deported.
He chose the latter, telling his mom, “he was tired” of imprisonment. At the beginning of March he was taken to ICE’s El Valle Detention Center in Texas. On March 14, he told his family he would soon be deported, likely to Mexico or Venezuela.
On March 15, the family celebrated when they saw Uriel’s name on a list of released detainees. But within a few days they realized he had not been set free, he had been incarcerated in one of the largest prisons in the world, on the coastal plains of El Salvador, where Trump had paid $6 million to house “the worst of the worst.”
Uriel’s family prepared to reach out to the Utah governor and federal delegation requesting that they ask the president to free Uriel. Then, on July 18, the Trump administration announced the immigrants sent to El Salvador would be returned to Venezuela in exchange for 10 wrongly detained U.S. nationals.
Since Uriel and his 251 compatriots were freed, a dark picture has emerged of their four-month stay in CECOT. Several reports have emerged detailing regular beatings and assaults by prison guards in a facility that appeared designed to humiliate and discourage inmates into submission.
From the seclusion of a relative’s home in Venezuela, Uriel has struggled to tell his family what he experienced, they said, and wants to meet with a psychologist to “forget everything.”
“All we know is it was worse than the news shows in the prison and he was abused more than people can imagine,” Uriel’s brother said in Spanish. “It’s a place where they mistreat them physically and psychologically every day.”
Uriel’s 11 months of detention and imprisonment still hang over his family as they reach the end of their first year in America.
One of their reasons for coming was for Uriel to attend university and serve a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, his father said. They no longer believe that is possible, and they question whether they will be able to stay in the country at all.
Unprecedented problem and solution
Trump’s crackdown via arrests, detentions and deportations has been met by dozens of legal challenges, sometimes resulting in the release of detainees, or in other cases, confirming the president’s ability to shift immigration policy.
Supporters of the administration, including some local officials like Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, have defended the norm-breaking approach by pointing to the unprecedented levels of immigration that preceded it under Biden.
The wave of immigration from 2021 to 2024 was the largest in U.S. history. An average of 2.4 million people entered the country every year from 2021 to 2023, and an estimated 2.8 million entered in 2024, for a total of around 10 million people, according to Census Bureau data.
Never-before-seen numbers of border crossings followed Biden’s decision to undo Trump’s immigration orders from his first term, lower thresholds for asylum seekers, expand parole into a catch-and-release system and allow immigrants to await their backlogged court dates inside the country — changes that some said were illegal.
The subsequent population boom of foreign-born, and often undocumented, individuals that occurred during the Biden administration has had a number of negative downstream effects on public safety and public resources across the country, including in Utah.
Several school districts along the Wasatch Front saw English language learner enrollment more than double over Biden’s four-year term, with some individual schools scrambling to deal with increases that were three to six times larger than that.
Some crimes have increased in tandem with illegal immigration.
In 2023, there were 222 Utah children whose Social Security number was being used for employment purposes, and nearly 8,000 SSNs were being used under 3-10 last names, likely by noncitizens as a fraudulent form of identification.
Also in 2023, nearly 50% of serious car crashes in West Valley City involved an unlicensed driver, up from 30%. And in 2024, nearly 50% of the 120 hit-and-run cases that were solved in West Valley City involved an unlicensed driver.
Since Trump entered office, the immigration landscape has undergone a complete transformation.
In July, monthly Border Patrol apprehensions hit a record low of 4,598 across the entire 2,000-mile southwest border — around 500 fewer than the daily average under Biden, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement has reportedly arrested nearly 150,000 immigrants since January. Arrests have tripled across Western states, with arrests of those with no pending criminal charges or convictions increasing ninefold.
Since March, nine Utah sheriff’s offices, and the Utah Department of Corrections, have entered into 287(g) agreements with ICE, giving officials greater access to federal data, training and resources to identify the residency status of individuals in custody.
The agreements do not allow local law enforcement to participate in ICE raids, said Utah County Sheriff Mike Smith in a letter on July 29. But since Congress increased funding for ICE, the federal agency has tried to recruit Utah officers from partnered departments with a $50,000 signing bonus.
On Sunday, the White House claimed the U.S. is on track to achieve negative net migration for the first time in 50 years because almost no immigrants are being released into the country at the southern border, ICE removals are increasing and self-deportations appear on the rise.
A community embrace
Over the past year, Uriel’s family has encountered a country very different from the one they expected to find.
Their son has suffered horrors in a foreign prison for gang affiliations he does not have, that he may never recover from. Their work permit, which they waited and paid for, was revoked in an unexpected email from the Department of Homeland Security.
Their fluctuating legal status has caused them to avoid public places for fear of ICE sweeping in. Their constant state of anxiety has prompted thoughts of leaving the country all together even though they have no safe home to return to.
“We were looking for peace that we could possibly get in this country but it hasn’t been that way,” Uriel’s father said in Spanish through tears. “The American dream has become a nightmare for us.”
But when they reflect on the Americans surrounding them in their adopted Millcreek neighborhood, Uriel’s family can’t help but break into broad smiles.
They had arrived “practically without clothes;” their church ward members “clothed us,” Uriel’s mother said, and then furnished their home, took them on trips to the temple and provided medical care through a ministering brother, who is also a doctor.
One neighbor, Jim Barnett, said before the presidential election he “felt like we should put a border up, keep people out because of the amount of people coming in.” He then became one of the most relentless volunteers, “going and coming like a little ant,” according to Uriel’s mother.
“Since they’ve come, my tune changed to a certain extent,” Barnett said. “I’m so glad they came. I’m so glad they didn’t get stopped at the border. So for me, it’s been a little bit of inner turmoil of the policy versus having them in our society.”
‘A land of promise’
The six neighbors participating in the impromptu immigration roundtable took a positive-sum view of the social and economic impacts of immigration — even at historic levels and amid a broken system that encourages illegal border crossings.
With workforce shortages in many industries, businesses actually approached the neighbors with restaurant, carpentry, house cleaning and dog watching jobs for the family, the neighbors said. (Uriel’s mom was named “employee of the month” in July.)
Regardless of their partisanship, the neighbors said the political environment is especially frustrating because Uriel’s family goes out of its way to obey the law and contribute to the community.
Uriel’s father showed up early to volunteer at the city’s annual Fourth of July parade, the family obtained legitimate government documentation and they have been paying taxes and insurance, they said.
Government resources would be better used to target those who have committed crimes, not those who entered the country through previous programs, according to Travis and Sue Astle, who provided their yard for the meeting.
“It just feels like there’s this fundamental lack of freedom that we have here in America, and the people who are here legally shouldn’t feel this fear but they do,” Sue Astle said. “It’s a very dangerous precedent.”
The situation of the Uriel family highlights one of the issues many policy experts have with Trump’s approach to immigration, according to Jim McConkie, one of the three Refugee Justice League attorneys representing them.
It’s not that the administration can’t change the country’s policy on immigration, it’s that in its hurry to ramp up deportations the administration is ignoring rules related to parole, asylum and due process, McConkie said.
But for the Utahns who encircled Uriel’s family after their unexpected arrival, the point has less to do with legal process, and more to do with what their community and their country were founded on in the first place.
“The earth is full, and there is enough for all,” neighbor Brad Neff said. “America is, and should remain a land of promise — a place where we care for people that come here searching for prosperity, for religious freedom, for hospitality. I think that’s at the core of what most Americans believe."