For months, immigrants imprisoned at the Aurora detention facility have been asking to be deported.
And yet, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has kept them there with no answers about when they will get out.
Cesar Eriberto Landazuri Marmolejo, who came to the U.S. last year with his wife and young son, asked to return to Ecuador to reunite with them after they self-deported last month. ICE detained him after an asylum hearing June 17 in Denver. ICE finally deported him Thursday.
Keooudone Phetchamphone, who came to the U.S. as a child from Laos in the 1970s, wants to return to Laos for a fresh start there, according to his sister. ICE detained him at a routine check-in Aug. 27. He remains detained.
Landazuri and Phetchamphone represent a growing population of detained immigrants in Colorado who are asking to be deported, many citing unbearable conditions at the Aurora detention center. But, despite the Trump administration’s mass deportation policy, they have languished behind bars, largely in the dark about when they will be freed.
“To have the Trump administration say we’re deporting everyone and I have clients desperately trying to get removed means the system is failing at every single level,” said Christina Brown, a Denver-based immigration lawyer who has worked on Landazuri’s case.
Previously, immigrants with no criminal history and low flight risk would regularly be released from detention while their immigration cases played out. But an ICE policy this year has made many immigrants ineligible for release. Several court orders across the country have challenged that policy.
Still, immigrants detained in Colorado are increasingly desperate for release, court data shows.
From Jan. 20 to Nov. 16, there have been at least 50 “habeas corpus – alien detainee” cases filed in the U.S. District Court in Denver. That is an increase from just 12 such cases filed during the same time period last year, according to federal court filings. A habeas petition is the last legal remedy available to someone who is incarcerated to challenge their detention.
Laura Lunn, the director of advocacy and litigation at the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network, said delays throughout every aspect of the immigration court process are causing the length of detention to “skyrocket.”
“Currently detention is being used as a deterrent for people to exercise their rights,” she said. “It’s heartbreaking when the best case scenario is for someone to be deported and even that doesn’t happen.”
ICE did not respond to questions about why the men have remained detained despite their willingness to leave the country.
In response to questions from CBS News about Phetchamphone’s case, an ICE spokesperson said they were waiting on travel documents from Laos. But Phetchamphone’s sister said the Laos embassy approved his travel to Laos in October. The Laos embassy could not be reached for comment.
Jennifer Piper, program director of the Colorado office of the American Friends Service Committee, said since July she has seen more and more cases of detained immigrants who are asking to be deported waiting to be freed.
“It’s clearly a policy, it’s not an accident that it’s taking this long,” she said. “It’s completely opaque and intentionally filled with uncertainty.”
Waiting to be reunited
Landazuri left Ecuador with his wife and young son in April 2024 amid escalating violence in their border town. They traveled through Central America and Mexico mostly on foot, bicycle and bus to reach the U.S. border more than a month later, said Landazuri’s wife, Arleth Mendez Vasquez.
The family survived a kidnapping in Mexico when they were held in a cage in the desert with dozens of other migrants until they could come up with enough money to pay to leave, Mendez said. The experience left them deeply traumatized and relieved to finally make it to Colorado, where relatives had already settled. The family applied for asylum.
Landazuri found work as a day laborer on construction sites and eventually became a janitor and then a handyman for a real estate company, Mendez said. Their now 8-year-old son began attending school. The family lived near City Park and visited the park and Denver Museum of Nature and Science often, Mendez said.
Their hopes of staying in the U.S. were dashed in June when an immigration judge denied their asylum request. As the family was leaving the immigration court in Denver, ICE agents arrested Landazuri and took him to the detention center in Aurora, separating the family.
Initially, the family appealed the asylum decision. But as time dragged on, Landazuri became more and more depressed.
He and three other men shared a room equipped with a toilet and thin mattresses, he said in an interview. Pleas to ICE for information about when he would be released went unanswered, he said.
To gain some sense of agency, he said he learned from another detainee how to make shoes out of discarded snack packaging. He was able to trade the shoes for food and telephone time. His teacher, like many others he encountered behind bars, got deported swiftly. Still, Landazuri remained there.
As the months passed, he became more desperate to reunite with his family. In early October, when he had not received a briefing schedule for the appeal after more than three months in detention, he decided to withdraw the appeal and ask for a removal order.
Brown, his lawyer, said she would have liked to request a voluntary departure so that Landazuri would not have a removal order on his record, but they feared that would take much longer.
“What I most want is to get out of here,” Landazuri said in Spanish earlier this month. “Not seeing my son grow, laugh, wake up. Out there every day is different, new, you get to see your child grow every day.”
“I want this nightmare to be over,” he said.
Mendez and the couple’s son returned to Ecuador in mid-October, hoping that Landazuri would be deported soon and the family could be together again.
ICE finally transferred Landazuri to Texas last week and deported him Thursday, 43 days after he withdrew his asylum application. He had to wear hand and ankle shackles for the trip to Texas and then to Ecuador, he said.
The family has to start over from scratch. Before immigrating to the U.S., Landazuri worked at a car repair shop as a fiberglass specialist, but he sold his tools and equipment and took out a loan to afford the journey north.
Seeing Landazuri again after five months apart was like “coming back to life,” Mendez said. Still, the family has a difficult road ahead. Friends have raised more than $11,000 to help them get back on their feet.
“We don’t have anything, even though we are together now, even though we have our health, we have to start from zero because you don’t buy food with love, you buy it with money,” Mendez said.
Waiting for a fresh start
Phetchamphone came to the U.S. as a child with his siblings and parents in the 1970s from Laos, said his sister, Pathoumma Phetchamphone Johnson.
He followed his siblings to Colorado from Utah in young adulthood, but Phetchamphone and Johnson drifted apart, she said. Phetchamphone was convicted of several crimes in the 2000s, including misdemeanor assault, felony property damage, and felony drug possession, according to a Colorado Bureau of Investigation background check. He served time in state prison and then was turned over to the Aurora immigration detention center where he spent six months in 2010, Johnson said, and received a final removal order.
Every six months to a year, he would check in with ICE as instructed, Johnson said.
For about the past 15 years, Phetchamphone has lived with Johnson and her family, first in Aurora and then in Castle Rock, and turned his life around, she said. He mentored immigrant youth and helped rebuild the Lao Buddhist Temple in Westminster after it burned down.
Before his ICE check in on Aug. 27, Phetchamphone’s lawyer sent an email to ICE saying Phetchamphone planned to self-deport as soon as he got his new Laotian passport. He wanted to return to Laos, where some friends have resettled, for a fresh start, Johnson said.
But ICE agents detained him at the check-in, Johnson said, and he has been at the Aurora detention center ever since.
Johnson reactivated her law license to be able to represent her brother and try to help get him deported.
“He’s depressed,” said Johnson. “He sees all these other people getting deported that came after him. They’re wasting taxpayer dollars detaining somebody who wants to get deported.”
Piper, the program director of the Colorado office of the American Friends Service Committee, worries about people who are detained without lawyers or support from organizations like hers.
Deportation used to feel like a loss, Piper said, but now for many people detained it is much needed relief from detention.
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