Emerson Colindres Baquedano, a 19-year-old high school soccer star with no criminal record, has been deported to his birthplace of Honduras just weeks after graduating from high school.
His mother, Ada Bell Baquedano-Amador, told the Cincinnati Enquirer that the teen, who has spent most of his life in Cincinnati, was detained when he showed up for a routine ICE check-in in Hamilton, Ohio, on June 4.
For most of the following two weeks, Colindres was held at Butler County Jail in Ohio. He was removed on June 17, possibly to another ICE facility in Louisiana, The Guardian reports. One of his teachers told NBC News that his family and friends were not informed of his whereabouts. He was deported to Honduras on June 18.
Colindres first arrived in the United States with his mother and sister in 2014, when he was just eight-years-old. Baquedano-Amador told the Cincinnati Enquirer that she applied for asylum, citing persecution from gang violence, but was later denied.
Baquedano-Amador and her two children received a final order of removal from ICE in Aug. 2023. Immigrants who receive a final order of removal are officially considered eligible for deportation, though the length of time between the order and their actual deportation can vary greatly.
The mom-of-two says that instead of facing immediate deportation, her son, then 17, was given an ankle monitor and ordered to participate in routine check-ins with ICE under a Biden-era policy in which the agency was instructed to prioritize deporting people with histories of violent crime or who were believed to pose a threat to public safety.
ICE monitors about 179,000 people through a system of routine check-ins, ankle monitors, and similar surveillance tactics, a policy designed to give flexibility to undocumented immigrants who were not considered priorities for deportation.
However, since President Donald Trump expanded the agency’s enforcement discretion powers in January, ICE agents can now conduct expedited deportations of anyone who has been issued a removal order, regardless of their criminal status.
In practice, this has led to a rapid increase in detentions and deportations of people without criminal records who attend routine ICE check-in meetings, as occurred with Colindres.
Though his mother and sister were named in the 2023 deportation order, only Colindres was detained at the June 4 meeting, and he was deported without his mother or sister by his side. Baquedano-Amador, who remains in Cincinnati, told The Enquirer she and her daughter were given 30 days to leave the country.
According to Baquedano-Amador, her son has not been to Honduras since he was eight-years-old, and his only relatives in the country live around four hours away from where he was dropped off by immigration officials in San Pedro Sula.
“How is my son going to make it over there?” the mother told The Enquirer. “He doesn’t know anything, and the country where we come from is very insecure.”
Colindres’ club soccer coach, Bryan Williams, told NBC News he had accompanied the teen to his last several routine ICE meetings. He and his family joined Colindres on June 4, only to see the teen escorted out of the building in handcuffs.
“Sadly, he’s not the only one. I think there are a lot of Emersons in the same situation right now,” Williams told NBC. “They’re all the same story, someone who was here doing everything they were asked, trying to make a better life for themselves and their family, and now they’re being detained somewhere.”
Williams and his family, alongside many of Colindres’ teachers and classmates, later joined protests in Cincinnati to call for the teen’s release outside of the Butler County detention center where he was held.
In Cincinnati, Colindres played for both his high school soccer team and the Cincy Galaxy Soccer Club, where Williams said he was a “star player” who dreamed of continuing his soccer career at a university in the coming months.
Speaking to NBC News, two of his teammates, Alejandro Pepole and Preston Robinson, both 18, said Colindres is an “inspiration” and “an overall good team leader” who “can just do everything as a player.”
“He had a dream to play at the next level in soccer and eventually play professionally,” added Robinson. “You could tell by the amount of effort he put in and how good he was, it was definitely possible for him.”
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