A Los Angeles teacher whose student was detained by federal agents while he walked his dog has told Newsweek that she believes mistaken bounty hunters plucked him off the street.
Lizette Becerra, who works within the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), visited Benjamin Marcelo Guerrero-Cruz, 18, in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention on Sunday.
“For about seven days, he could not change, he was in his pajama shorts and slippers. He couldn’t bathe. He couldn’t brush his teeth. He was sleeping next to a toilet where he had to wake up every time someone went so that he wouldn’t get urinated on,” Becerra said.
“It wasn’t until Saturday morning that he was finally able to shower and was issued clothes,” she said, adding that he told her he lost weight, as well.
Newsweek reached out to ICE for comment on Friday and Tuesday, but has yet to receive a response.
Teen Was Arrested While Walking His Dog
Guerrero-Cruz is currently being held in the Adelanto Detention Facility, on the edge of Victorville outside of L.A. Before that, Becerra said, he had been moved between two other facilities in the city itself since his arrest around two weeks ago.
“He says about 15 men, plain clothes with vests that said: ‘Immigration Police’ on them, in three SUVs, came up to him and just grabbed him and started calling him by another name,” Becerra said, adding that the teen tried to tell the men he was not the person they were looking for.
The agents told him they needed to take him to be fingerprinted anyway, to confirm his identity, and took his dog. Becerra said she believed the men were bounty hunters of some kind, who had been looking for a different person but still took Guerrero-Cruz in.
“These people had his dog, unclipped the dog and stomped at the floor so that it could run away. Eventually it did make it back,” Becerra said.
Guerrero-Cruz was taken to a post office parking lot, where he was held by the men before official ICE agents arrived and transferred him to federal custody. En route, he allegedly heard the agents bragging they would get paid at least $1,500 for his arrest and would drink well that night, Becerra said.
A ‘Funny, Sweet Kid’
Guerrero-Cruz came to the L.A. area in 2023, Becerra told Newsweek, where he joined her class for newly arrived immigrants wanting to learn English.
She taught him for five months before he headed to Reseda Charter High School, where he was due to start his senior year this past week.
“He was a very memorable kid. I knew exactly who he was. He was a funny, sweet kid,” the teacher said. “I remember that if we ever had independent work, a lot of times I had to pull up a chair right next to my desk because he just wanted to talk and so I would just hear him out.”
Becerra explained that many of the immigrant children she has worked with have some form of trauma or another, including separation from their parents and the difficulties of navigating life as an immigrant in the U.S. She said that she puts a lot of heart into her students and that she was heartbroken to hear of Guerrero-Cruz’s arrest.
“With everything going here going on here in Los Angeles, I kind of knew this day was going to come and I just was praying that it wasn’t, and it did,” she said.
The Van Nuys community has rallied around the student, raising thousands via GoFundMe to help with legal costs and to support his mother and siblings.
The LAUSD previously told Newsweek that it was committed to protecting every one of its students during heightened immigration enforcement in the city, and that safety measures had been heightened for the new school year.
Becerra said that, as a teacher, her job had certainly changed from how it was before the summer break. While she would check her classroom exits for potential active shooters, now she is on the lookout for federal agents who might take one of her kids.
“We as a school district and teachers at large are operating in a world where we assume that the law is still respected and that our rights are going to be respected, and, unfortunately, what’s happening on the street is not the case,” Becerra said.
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