High school graduate facing ICE deportation weeks after earning his diploma: ‘I was just living my life’
An Ohio high school graduate is facing deportation to Honduras by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) just weeks after earning his diploma.
Emerson Colindres, 19, arrived in the United States with his family as an eight-year-old in 2014 but was detained during a routine check-in at an ICE facility in the Cincinnati suburb of Blue Ash on Wednesday June 4, according to members of the community who have begun campaigning for his release.
The Colindres family had sought asylum in the U.S., requesting protection from extortion by Honduran criminal gangs, only for their case to be rejected, their appeal denied and a final removal order issued in 2023.
Since then, they have participated in ICE’s Intensive Supervision Appearance Program (ISAP, a parole-like alternative to incarceration) without ever being overtly ordered to leave the country.
Bryan Williams, the teen’s soccer coach at local team Cincy Galaxy, told a local affiliate of ABC News that the three ICE agents who picked Colindres up had clearly been waiting for him.
“They informed us that they were detaining and deporting Emerson only,” he said. “No explanation was given.”
“Emerson’s one of the best kids I’ve ever met,” Williams continued. “We don’t know what we can do, but we’re doing whatever we can.”
Explaining the rationale behind the detention of the recent graduate from Gilbert A Dater High School, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said in a statement: “Those arrested had executable final orders of removal by an immigration judge and had not complied with that order.
“If you are in the country illegally and a judge has ordered you to be removed, that is precisely what will happen.”
The DHS also noted that ISAP “exists to ensure compliance with release conditions.”
On Sunday, Colindres’s teammates gathered outside the Butler County Jail in Hamilton where he is being held wearing “Free Emerson” T-shirts and spoke to him by phone for 20 minutes.
“I was just… living life, minding my own business,” Colindres told a local journalist on the same call. “And now I’m here.”
On the conditions in which he is being kept, he said: “It’s just awful. We only go out once a day – sometimes twice. [It’s] not a life someone who didn’t do anything should be living.”
Teammate Joshua Williams appealed for his friend’s release saying: “He didn’t do anything wrong. And they just took him away.
