Erwin Hernandez Rodriguez ‘26 was woken up early last Friday to news that his father had been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“I was frustrated, waking up right in the beginning,” Rodriguez said. “Why is my phone ringing so early in the morning? And then it’s just your older brother, crying and telling you that your dad’s been captured.”

Rodriguez’s father, José Luis Ceba Cinta, 44, was arrested on route to his work at a construction site in Washington, D.C., and is currently sitting in Virginia’s Caroline Detention Center, awaiting a court hearing on Nov. 25. The Lafayette confirmed records of his arrest on federal immigration dashboards.

Rodriguez, who has not had direct contact with Ceba Cinta since his detention, said his family is unclear about the exact details of the arrest. He did confirm, however, that Ceba Cinta was arrested alongside his father’s elder brother, Valentin Ceba Cinta, at approximately 6:30 a.m. on Oct. 17.

During his arrest, José Luis Ceba Cinta called his wife to notify her that he was going to be taken, Rodriguez said. Rodriguez added that Ceba Cinta later sent a text message to his wife, telling her not to tell their children about the arrest.

“He knows how much my little brothers and my stepmom depend on him,” Rodriguez said. “He’s really worried about how they’re doing without him. I’m sure his immediate thought was, ‘I need to get back to them.’”

Before being detained, Ceba Cinta was the primary source of financial support for his wife and four young children. He and his family are currently working with an immigration attorney to obtain a bond for release from the detention center.

“He was very insistent from the beginning to get a lawyer,” Rodriguez said. “He was already like, ‘sell the car, sell this, sell that,’ to try to get money to pay for the lawyer.”

Rodriguez has since organized a GoFundMe webpage that has garnered almost $25,000 in donations from 453 people as of Thursday morning. The webpage, which was created on Sunday, has drawn donations from many Lafayette College students and faculty.

Rodriguez said they eventually hope to secure a “cancellation of removal,” a form of immigration relief that allows individuals to avoid deportation and adjust their status to that of a lawful permanent resident, as well as an application for a green card.

The process will include documenting that Ceba Cinta was of “good moral character” during the entire period of his stay in the United States.

Ceba Cinta has lived in the United States for more than two decades since crossing the U.S.-Mexico border at 17 years old, according to Rodriguez. He is not Rodriguez’s biological father, but came into Rodriguez’s life when he began a long-term romantic relationship with Rodriguez’s mother.

“He was a great guy,” said Rodriguez, who met Ceba Cinta when he was three years old. “Not a lot of people are gonna want a woman who has two kids already.”

When Rodriguez’s mother died of cancer in 2011, Ceba Cinta took Rodriguez and his brother in as his own.

“For as long as I can remember, this guy has been my dad,” Rodriguez said. “I always tell him that, too.”

While Rodriguez said he has not experienced other incidents of friends or family members being detained by ICE, his family’s situation has become a common narrative amid the Trump administration’s aggressive action on what it has called an “invasion of illegal aliens.”

According to ICE’s self-reported statistics, there have been 26,606 arrests made by the department this year so far, and 113,431 made in the entirety of 2024. While the report’s introduction says the data will be updated quarterly, the actual data has only been updated through January.

The Washington Post reported earlier this year that ICE averaged 800 arrests per day in January and 600 per day in the first half of February before ICE stopped reporting daily numbers. The exact number of arrests ICE has made this year is currently unclear. One Sept. 21 report, however, recorded that ICE was currently holding nearly 60,000 people in immigration detention – a sharp increase in the total number of detentions compared to recent years.

Ida Namazi, an immigration attorney who practices in Alexandria, Virginia, said she noticed an uptick in ICE arrests in the D.C. area starting in June.

“We would see ICE agents standing outside the courtrooms three or four days of the week,” she said. “I will say that it has tapered off the past few times I’ve been to court.”

An Oct. 3 analysis from CBS reported that 40% of over 3,500 arrests by federal law enforcement in Washington were immigration-related since President Donald Trump’s August order to increase federal law enforcement and deploy the National Guard.

According to Lehigh Immigration attorney Michael Renneisen, the legal pathway for ICE detainees varies greatly between cases. He explained that an immigration judge is responsible for deciding case outcomes, which could include deportation with a ban from future U.S. reentries, or, on the other end of the spectrum, avoidance of deportation entirely.

Rodriguez said his family’s biggest fear is the uncertainty regarding the possible relocation of Ceba Cinta to another detention center further south.

“It’s just a matter of checking every day and hoping that he’s still where he is,” Rodriguez said.

This story was originally published on The Lafayette on October 24, 2025.