December 21- 22, 2025 , Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico: This is an English translation of an original Spanish interview with Samuel Saúl Roque García, a 22-year-old migrant recounting his perilous journey from Mexico to the United States. He describes crossing through Nuevo Laredo, being held in a migrant warehouse with around 50 others, and boarding a crowded trailer. He details encounters with checkpoints, a harsh arrest by authorities who mistook him for violating the law because of his appearance, and a lengthy detention and deportation process spanning multiple facilities and months. Samuel reflects on racism and misconceptions about migrants in the U.S., expresses emotional resolve upon returning home, and shares his hopes to reunite with family, visit loved ones, and rethink his future after the difficult experience.
Video Credit © David Peinado/ZUMA Press
Interview Transcript
(original audio in Spanish, translated to English)
Interviewee: My name is Samuel Saúl Roque García.
Journalist: How old are you?
Samuel: 22 years old.
Samuel:
I crossed through Nuevo Laredo, through the Rio Grande, and honestly it wasn’t very difficult. It took me about two minutes swimming. We arrived at a place that was kind of like a small town, I walked for about 15 minutes. There were about 10 of us, women and men, and then the pickup came. They picked us up and took us to a kind of house, they call it a warehouse, where they put everyone who is crossing the border.
We were there for about 15 or 20 days. There were around 50 people in total. I stayed about 15 or 20 days until they told us, “how do you want to get out?” and a trailer came. In that trailer there were about 189 people that they put inside.
We had to go through about two checkpoints. I don’t remember exactly where we crossed the first one, but the second one was in San Antonio. From there it was very easy to get through, they didn’t notice. Even though immigration had dogs, they didn’t smell us, they didn’t detect us.
From there they took us to another kind of house, and people started coming to pick others up. Each smuggler who had his people would pick them up and take them north.
(Samuel refers to an internal system used in detention where people are given a code so someone outside can send them money.)
There was no mistake. He asked for my driver’s license and I only had an international license. Some officers accept an international license, others don’t. When he saw that my license was international, he opened the door, pulled me out by force, grabbed me, handcuffed me, and slammed me against the car. I told him, “let me just grab my things,” and he didn’t let me take anything—only my phone and the clothes I was wearing.
Then he smiled and told me, “I’m going to call immigration because you’re illegal and you have no right to be here.” And I hadn’t done anything wrong—I didn’t crash, I wasn’t drunk, I wasn’t high, I wasn’t smoking, nothing. The reason was that I look Hispanic.
He arrested me. I stayed there with him for about an hour while he did the paperwork, and then he handed me over to immigration.
When they told me, “you’re leaving,” at the second-to-last jail I was in, I thought they were going to… They took me from Kentucky to Louisiana by plane, fully chained, completely restrained. I couldn’t even eat. When they gave us food, we couldn’t lift our hands because they were chained to our waist.
When they told me, “you’re being deported,” I thought it was going to be fast, that they would send us by plane right away, but that wasn’t the case. They took us off the plane, sent us to another jail, and kept us standing in the cold for a long time.
Then they said, “okay, you’re on the list,” they put us back on the plane and sent us to Texas. In Texas they put us in places they call iceboxes. There are a lot of immigrants there. That’s where most of the people who are going to be deported are held.
In the last immigration jail I was in, almost everyone was Mexican. They dropped me off through Ciudad Juárez–El Paso. We arrived at the migration center and there were more than 500 people there—men and women, children, mothers with their kids, families. There were many people who weren’t leaving and stayed there because they had nowhere else to go.
I spent more than a month in detention just for not having legal status. There are many others who had already been there for a year and a half, two years, eight months, seven months, who had signed their deportation papers and still weren’t released.
It’s impotence and it’s racism, because the president is deporting people who may not be from that country but go there to work honestly and earn clean money. We work, we try to do everything almost by the rules, we don’t commit crimes like he says.
In the United States they think we’re criminals, that we go there to steal, to kill, to extort, when that’s not true. We go to work, to earn our daily bread, to help our families back home.
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