As part of our ongoing conversations with the region’s major immigrant-serving organizations in the DC, Maryland, and Virginia area, TANTV’s reporting uncovered that DMV’s immigrant community is caught in an information vacuum fueling confusion, panic, and preventable legal harm. This crisis is compounded by due process violations happening out of public view and a social safety net offering only one to two months of support for families who need far longer after losing a breadwinner.
Advancing that conversation, TANTV spoke with Atenas Burrola Estrada, deputy program director of the Detained Adult Program at the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, about how a sweeping escalation in immigration enforcement is pushing detained adults from the region into a legal system that increasingly denies them the right to challenge their custody.
Why It Matters
The stakes extend far beyond individual detainees. When a primary breadwinner is detained or deported, families in Maryland, Virginia, and DC can lose housing, health coverage, and access to basic care within weeks, Burrola Estrada said, describing a case involving a four-year-old with sickle cell disease whose only authorized caregiver was suddenly taken into custody. Amica Center, a DC-based nonprofit that has represented detained adults in the capital region for more than two decades, says its practice has changed more in the past year than at any point in its history, as clients once held locally are now scattered across detention facilities in Louisiana, Texas, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and California.
This pattern echoes what TANTV has previously documented about the region’s long and often hidden history of immigration detention, a system that has historically operated with limited public visibility even as it profoundly shapes local families’ lives.
What’s Happening
Burrola Estrada described her organization as having become an “accidental nationwide provider,” continuing to represent Maryland and DC residents no matter where ICE transfers them after arrest. That geographic dispersal reflects a broader shift: detained individuals are increasingly held far from their communities, their attorneys, and their families, making legal representation and even basic communication with loved ones significantly harder to maintain.
The most consequential change, according to Burrola Estrada, involves due process protections themselves. She said immigration courts, which operate under the executive branch rather than as independent judicial bodies, have seen judges removed from their dockets or fired for rulings that conflict with administration policy. That dynamic has pushed the fight over detention rights into federal district courts, where judges are not bound to the executive and have overwhelmingly sided with detainees in habeas corpus petitions challenging mandatory detention. Legal analysts have noted a dramatic surge in this litigation strategy nationally, with federal habeas filings tied to immigration detention rising sharply since early 2025 as detainees seek release through the courts after being effectively barred from bond hearings.
Historically, habeas corpus was considered a last resort for detained immigrants, pursued only after all other legal remedies were exhausted. Burrola Estrada said that calculus has flipped, with thousands of habeas petitions now filed nationwide specifically because detainees are being denied earlier avenues, such as bond hearings, to seek release.
Third-Country Removals Explained
Among the most consequential and least understood tactics is the use of third-country removals, in which the government deports someone to a country that is neither their homeland nor a place with which they have any prior connection. Burrola Estrada said this affects two distinct groups: people who won legal protection in immigration court barring their return to their home country because of risk of persecution or torture, and people with final removal orders whose home countries refuse to accept them.
In the first category, she said Mexico receives the largest share of these removals, and many individuals sent there, particularly Guatemalans and Salvadorans, are subsequently pushed back into the very countries U.S. courts ruled they could not be returned to. The Council on Foreign Relations has confirmed that nearly a dozen countries, including Mexico, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Eswatini, Panama, Rwanda, South Sudan, and Uganda, have agreed to accept deportees with no ties to those nations, often in exchange for financial or diplomatic concessions. Amnesty International estimates roughly 15,000 people were removed to third countries in 2025 alone, with about 13,000 sent to Mexico specifically.
Burrola Estrada also pointed to removals involving African nations, describing U.S. pressure on countries there to accept individuals who have nowhere else to go. A widely reported case saw a group of deportees flown toward South Sudan intercepted en route and left detained in Djibouti, unable to complete their journey or return home, illustrating the legal limbo these removals can create. She said many receiving countries carry U.S. State Department travel advisories warning citizens against visiting, underscoring the risk faced by people sent there involuntarily.
She additionally described so-called Asylum Cooperative Agreements, arrangements under which the U.S. argues that migrants who could theoretically seek asylum in another country should be barred from applying in the United States. Burrola Estrada called this a workaround of asylum law as written by Congress, which guarantees that anyone who reaches U.S. soil and fears persecution has the right to seek asylum, even if that claim is ultimately denied.
The Toll on DMV Families
For families in the region, the human cost is immediate and severe. Burrola Estrada emphasized that immigrant households are resilient but not immune to catastrophe when a working parent, spouse, or sibling is detained for an extended period or removed. Children, including U.S. citizen children, can lose access to healthcare and stable housing within a short window, she said, a pattern that mirrors what TANTV found in its reporting on DMV immigrant families struggling to find trusted information amid rapidly shifting enforcement policy.
Mutual aid networks have stepped in to fill some gaps, providing everything from grocery assistance to help getting children to school when a parent has been detained. But Burrola Estrada was direct in saying that detention itself, regardless of who in a household is taken, has the capacity to destabilize an entire family’s finances and stability. That instability is intensified by the same information gap TANTV previously reported on among local news outlets, which has left many immigrant residents unsure where to turn for accurate guidance, as detailed in our earlier coverage of the local media information gap fueling the DMV immigration crisis.
What’s Next
Burrola Estrada said the courts remain the most active battleground, particularly two federal appellate circuits that have sided with the administration’s stricter interpretation of mandatory detention, even as district judges within those circuits continue granting habeas relief on due process grounds. That legal tension is likely to intensify as more cases work through the system nationally, with advocacy groups continuing to track third-country deportation agreements as they expand to additional nations.
For DMV residents, Burrola Estrada urged direct community engagement over reliance on national media coverage from any single outlet, encouraging residents to connect with local mutual aid groups, volunteer, or donate to organizations providing legal and social services to detained neighbors. She said the fight over due process protections for detained immigrants will continue to be decided case by case in federal courtrooms, even as the human toll compounds in communities like North Bethesda and across the region.
This TANTV News immigration coverage was made possible by a grant from Lenfest Institute of Journalism and URL Collective, nonprofits supporting local news. TANTV DMV is covering immigration enforcement developments across the DMV region
