A Year After ICE Detained South Bay Immigrant, Family Trauma Lingers

SUNNYVALE — Sitting on the sofa in her Sunnyvale apartment, Aby Peña blows a kiss into her pink cellphone as she says goodbye to her husband, Ulises Peña López, 2,000 miles away in Uruapan, Mexico. It’s not their first call of the day, and it won’t be their last. They’ve talked often since Ulises, 31, was deported in October.

It’s been a year since the couple woke up together in this apartment and began what they thought would be a mundane morning of family errands. Ulises, a carpenter, went downstairs to warm up the car, while Aby got their then-3-year-old daughter Emily ready.

An hour later, Ulises would be in the emergency room at El Camino Health in Mountain View, barely conscious, with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers stationed near his bed. His lawyers would later tell a court that ICE agents had beaten Ulises so severely he suffered a heart attack and a stroke, allegations the agency has denied.

Meanwhile, Aby would be on the phone with the local Rapid Response Network, frantically trying to locate her husband while soothing her wailing daughter, who had watched from the window as the agents forced her father from the car at gunpoint, wrestled him into handcuffs and drove away.

What happened that February day, in the early weeks of President Donald Trump’s second term, prefigured the often-violent immigration arrests that have unfolded across the country over the past year. And the lasting trauma, upheaval and financial strain for this one Bay Area family is an early example of how Trump’s campaign of mass deportation has upended life for countless American children and families in the months that followed.

“Today, the right side of my body is paralyzed. I’ve lost vision and hearing and sensation,” Ulises said by phone from Mexico. “Before that day, I was a normal person working in construction.”

Nearly 400,000 people were arrested by ICE last year, more than four times the number in 2024. Public attention has focused on the crackdown in cities like Los Angeles and Minneapolis, where federal agents have killed at least two people and observers have documented their use of aggressive tactics. But even in Northern California, where a planned Border Patrol surge was called off at the last minute last fall, immigration arrests have more than doubled. Ulises’ detention was just one of them.

With the help of pro bono lawyers, Ulises has appealed his deportation and the family has filed personal injury claims against ICE. KQED reviewed legal filings in those cases, as well as government documents, and interviewed Ulises, Aby, their lawyers and outside experts about what the last year has been like for the family and how it illustrates what is now unfolding for tens of thousands of other families across the country.

Under previous administrations, ICE sometimes violated the civil rights of immigrants — and its own policies — said Elena Hodges, an immigration attorney with Pangea Legal Services who’s part of the team representing Ulises. But now the intensity is escalating, she said.

“This level of violence is becoming more common and is increasingly embraced as just the routine course of operations,” she said. “High-profile harms to people, where they end up in the hospital, their car window is smashed … that tracks with a new level of political acceptance and encouragement that we’re seeing from the Trump administration.”

Over the past year, the administration has dismantled many of the internal watchdog offices at the Department of Homeland Security, enabling agents to act with impunity, said Doris Meissner, a senior fellow at the non-partisan Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C.

“So we are seeing them be more aggressive and less likely to be called to account,” Meissner said.

The arrest

It was a little after 7 a.m. on Feb. 21, 2025. Ulises was in the carport starting up his red Ford Explorer when unmarked SUVs suddenly blocked him in and armed men surrounded the car, shouting.

“That’s when it all started,” Ulises said. He said officers yelled racist epithets, pushed him to the ground, kicked him, then yanked him up and handcuffed him.

He said they did not show a warrant (the administrative warrant ICE eventually produced was dated four days after the arrest).

Aby looked on in horror from the terrace outside their second-floor apartment as her daughter watched from the window.

“I just remember seeing him shaking really bad,” she said. “I didn’t know, was it a panic attack or what was happening.”

Aby said she screamed to the agents that Ulises had a life-threatening medical condition and an important appointment the following day. Doctors had recently diagnosed a tear inside an artery in his neck that put him at risk of a stroke, court filings show. They were treating him with medications and closely monitoring him, Aby said. As the arrest was unfolding, she ran to the bathroom, threw his prescriptions in a plastic bag and handed them to an officer.

Ulises said officers drove him to a nearby alley and beat him again, his hands still cuffed behind his back.

“I thought they were going to kill me,” he recalled. “Suddenly, I couldn’t feel anything. I couldn’t see anything.”

He came to with an officer pressing on his chest, performing CPR. He heard another man call an ambulance. The next thing he knew, he was in the hospital, hooked up to tubes and wires and handcuffed to the bed.

ICE’s arrest report tells the story differently. There’s no mention of officers striking Ulises. The report says they handcuffed him without incident, but once he was in the ICE vehicle, Ulises told them he had a heart condition and “appeared to be panicking.” They gave him a pill from one of the prescription bottles, but he started coughing and spitting out pill fragments.

ICE said Ulises threw up a red substance and began convulsing, at which point officers uncuffed him and laid him on the ground. He began “violently coughing up phlegm and grabbing his chest,” ICE said. When he lost consciousness, they performed chest compressions until an ambulance arrived, the report said.

ICE did not reply to requests for comment for this story. Last year, shortly after the arrest, ICE did respond to KQED, and denied mistreating Ulises. At the time, an ICE spokesperson called the allegation that Ulises was beaten by officers “absolutely inaccurate.”

The aftermath

At the hospital, according to Ulises’ appeal to the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, “his hands and arms were bandaged, his face was swollen, and he could not move his right arm or hand.” A doctor indicated that Ulises had had a heart attack, the brief said.

Hodges, the attorney, said she waited many hours before ICE allowed her to see her client at the hospital — briefly, with armed officers present. Likewise, she said, ICE prevented him from speaking privately with doctors or his wife. When Aby was finally allowed 30 minutes with him the next morning, ICE officers took her cellphone away so she couldn’t photograph him, she said.

Soon after, Ulises was transported to Golden State Annex, a privately run immigration jail in northern Kern County, where his lawyers say he didn’t receive consistent medication or meaningful follow-up care.

In the following days, ICE took Ulises to a local emergency room twice, for chest pain, trouble breathing and neurological symptoms. “A CT scan confirmed that he had had a stroke — either that day or during his arrest, or both,” according to his legal brief.

During the nearly eight months Ulises spent in ICE detention, first at Golden State Annex and then east of Bakersfield at the California City Detention Center, his pain and neurological symptoms worsened, Hodges said. He suffered nightmares and flashbacks to the assault.

The ICE officers’ physical assaults and verbal abuse during the arrest, “shock the conscience,” according to his claim for damages under the Federal Tort Claims Act. And California Democrats, including Silicon Valley Rep. Ro Khanna, have recently called out deplorable conditions at ICE detention centers, including at California City.

Today, Ulises says, he walks with a cane, still in pain. Unable to work, he has no health insurance in Mexico. An aunt took him in. And Aby sends some money. But the doctors he needs are expensive, and a two-hour bus ride away in Morelia, the capital of Michoacan.

“I’m certain that if I had gotten adequate medical attention at the time, I wouldn’t be suffering like this now,” he said. “It would be a totally different story if I’d gotten care.”

Those left behind

It’s not only the physical ailments that linger. Aggressive immigration enforcement not only harms immigrants, but their family members, many of whom — like Aby and Emily — are U.S.-born citizens.

Abrupt family separations are traumatic for children, said Dr. Lisa Fortuna, who chairs the psychiatry department at UC Riverside. But when a young child like Emily watches the violent arrest of a parent, the experience can leave lasting scars.

“Providing treatment early and effectively can really help children,” Fortuna said. “But it is an emotional injury nonetheless, and it’s quite serious.”

Unlike many children who witness immigration arrests, Emily sees a therapist. But the little girl who used to sleep peacefully now wakes up screaming nightly. She’s fearful of strangers and jumpy when a car door slams. A year on, she is still replaying the event in her mind.

“We did a video call just two days ago, and my daughter asked, ‘Papi, are the men going to come back and hit you again? Does it still hurt?’” Ulises recounted. “That just broke me.”

The dislocation in Emily’s life only compounded after her father’s arrest. Aby, 32, who’d been a stay-at-home mom, had to go back to work as a licensed vocational nurse. Needing child care on an unpredictable schedule, she moved Emily in with her parents in Chico. Aby typically works three 14-hour shifts, then drives the four hours north to spend a couple of days with her daughter before starting the work week again.

“She doesn’t have me or her dad nearby now,” Aby said.

The arrangement runs counter to therapists’ suggestion that Emily’s recovery depends on a predictable routine, she said.

“She’s always having to say goodbye,” Aby said.

When Aby is home in Sunnyvale, the apartment feels empty. Her daughter’s closet is still full of toys and small pink dresses. Her husband’s watch is still on his nightstand, his razor in the bathroom – comforting reminders of the life they used to share.

The pair met a decade ago when she went to a restaurant where he was working. She was in nursing school, and he was training with the carpenters’ union. She admired that he was a hard worker and was happy to find that he loved to cook. When Emily was born, and Aby was recovering from a difficult pregnancy, Ulises soothed the baby to sleep on his chest.

The future

Ulises was 18 when he came to the U.S. in 2013. According to his appeal to the Ninth Circuit, he was fleeing the Jalisco Cartel after its members extorted his family and beat him, then — when he reported it to the police — murdered his uncle and cousins. Lawyer Priya Patel, with the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice, believes Ulises should have been considered for asylum at the time. Instead, he was swiftly deported under an expedited removal order. He crossed the border again, undetected, came to the Bay Area and built a life, unaware of that deportation order or the fact that it could be reinstated at any time.

Federal documents show that early last year, ICE’s Law Enforcement Support Center flagged Ulises’ whereabouts for the San Francisco field office. The ICE arrest report mentions several misdemeanor convictions from his 20s. The most serious is a 2019 assault. Patel said Ulises pleaded no contest, following a verbal fight with his wife after he’d been out drinking. He was given a suspended sentence, she said.

“There are four convictions, none of them resulted in jail time, other than one day,” Patel said. “And none of it involved physical violence.”

Nevertheless, the convictions may have marked Ulises as a target for ICE, under priorities spelled out by Trump’s border czar Tom Homan early last year to focus on convicted criminals.

Homan’s pledge to stay focused on the “worst of the worst” buckled in the face of Trump’s call for a million deportations in his first year, though. As of Jan. 6, just one in four people in ICE detention had a criminal conviction, according to the Migration Policy Institute. Ulises’ misdemeanors put him in that category.

That’s likely to make his appeal harder. But his lawyers hope to convince the judges of the Ninth Circuit that Ulises was deported without due consideration of the risk of persecution he faced in Mexico.

For now, Aby keeps working to support her daughter and herself and help Ulises get the medical care he needs in Mexico. She wonders if she should move to Chico to be with Emily. And then she wonders if she and Emily should move to Mexico to be with Ulises — though he doesn’t want his daughter to grow up there. Mostly, she’s hoping against hope that her husband will someday be able to return to California.

The trauma and strain Aby, Ulises and Emily are experiencing, a year after the arrest, is multiplied thousands of times across the country, as the government’s mass deportation campaign continues, said Fortuna, the psychiatry professor.

“This is a public health issue,” she said. “It’s creating psychological distress, at minimum, for youth and children and families and whole communities.”

With the future uncertain, Aby and Ulises try to stay connected through frequent calls and — when his internet connection is strong enough — video chats. And both agree, their prime motivation is ensuring Emily gets well and has a bright future.

“Whenever I call them, I can hear their smiles,” Ulises said. “I know what it means to be a parent: Your children are the engine that drives you, and you never give up. And that’s how it is for my wife and me. Whatever happens, we’re not giving up.”