May 28
2025
Detained immigrant family emigrates to Canada
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Marcos, Aracely, Madelin and Itzayana on the Rainbow Bridge. Photo by J. Dale Shoemaker.
A Salvadoran family previously detained for weeks in a makeshift cell at the Rainbow Bridge in Niagara Falls and separated by ICE has successfully emigrated to Canada and been reunited in Toronto.
The mother and her two children were admitted May 5. The father followed them two weeks later, after he was first detained at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Batavia and later released to the Vive shelter on Main Street in Buffalo.
Local advocates who assisted the family said it’s a rare happy ending for undocumented immigrants under the second administration of Donald Trump, who’s made no secret of his desire to deport as many migrants as possible.
“So many things had to work for this family to get this result,” said Jennifer Connor, executive director of Justice for Migrant Families, one of the groups that assisted the family. “This is definitely not going to happen for every family in this situation.”
Investigative Post first reported on the family’s detention at the border on April 1. The family spent three weeks in a makeshift, windowless cell that lacked a shower or walls between the toilet and their cots. The youngest child, four years old, would wake up crying in the middle of the night, hungry for lack of food.
J. Dale Shoemaker discusses his original report on WKBW 7 News.
In a subsequent interview May 18 with Investigative Post, the father, Marcos Guardado Portillo, 35, described the bleak conditions the family was forced to endure. The interview was conducted in Spanish with a translator present.
“We were pretty much in jail,” he said.
Investigative Post has since learned of at least one additional family held in similar conditions for lengthy periods at the border, a development advocates say is new under the second Trump administration.
As part of a broad-based effort to ramp up deportations, the Trump administration has targeted asylum seekers who previously presented themselves to border officials, as well as those previously granted Temporary Protected Status, according to the New York Times.
Also targeted are those showing up to immigration court for scheduled hearings.
Guardado Portillo and his family fell into another, emerging category: undocumented migrants fleeing the Trump administration and denied entry into Canada.
While Guardado Portillo’s family has been reunited, his brother Jamie’s has been split apart.
Guardado Portillo needed to post a $12,000 bond to gain release from the Batavia detention facility. Jamie’s wife sold her car to help raise the money. Less than two weeks after Guardado Portillo’s release, ICE agents seized his brother, who is undocumented.
Records show he’s now detained in Newark, at the Delaney Hall Detention Center.
“Now he’s going through the same thing,” Guardado Portillo said.
Crossing the southern border
Originally from a rural area in El Salvador, Guardado Portillo said he left school early to work in the fields to help earn money for his family.
By 2010, when he was 18 years old, Guardado Portillo said violent gangs were gaining a foothold in their part of the country. He had a new wife and a baby on the way. Life in El Salvador wouldn’t be suitable for his family.
So, he said, he joined a group of 120 migrants headed for the United States, guided by a smuggler, known as a coyote. First there was the days-long ride in a box truck, dozens of people packed together in a tight space. The box truck had no bathroom, only bags, which were eventually filled and hung from poles, the stench permeating throughout.
Once out of the truck, in Mexico, the group struck out on foot. Their journey from there was similar to that of many other immigrants from Latin America. There were long treks on foot, dodging snakes and mud pits, and camping out in the mountains. There were maneuvers around both Mexican and U.S. immigration agents, canoe trips across the Rio Grande River and more nights camping in the Texas desert.
Then it was another truck ride from McAllen, Texas, to Houston and finally a ride to New Jersey where he settled with his brother in Plainfield.
Crossing the northern border
Guardado Portillo’s wife, Aracely Serrano Ayala, made a similar journey two years later, once their child Madelin was two years old. The daughter was left in the care of her grandparents, who would raise her for the next 10 years.
Looking back, Guardado Portillo said he regretted not meeting his daughter until she was a teenager but felt his immigration was necessary to support his family.
In New Jersey, Guardado Portillo found work in restaurants and on construction sites. He worked as a sheetrock installer for 11 years. His wife found work in a factory.
Though they were apart from their child, Guardado Portillo said, “economically, I was able to stabilize my whole family, my parents and everybody else.”
When she was 13, in 2023, it was Madelin’s turn to journey via coyote to New Jersey, Guardado Portillo said. Unlike her parents, however, she presented herself to agents at the border. She made a claim for asylum as an unaccompanied minor, putting her on firmer legal footing. She joined her parents in New Jersey and enrolled in school. They were finally a family, including then-three-year-old Itzayana.
Fear of deportation
With Trump back in office, the family feared being separated due to deportations. Even though Guardado Portillo and his wife had no criminal history — according to both state and federal records — they were undocumented, meaning they could be targeted. Plus, the Trump administration changed the rules protecting children like Madelin who crossed the border without their parents, meaning she was at risk, too. Only the youngest, Itzayana, was a U.S. citizen.
“When she entered, she declared, she was protected,” Guardado Portillo said of Madelin. “But Trump shortly came in after and that’s when we started hearing that any kids that came in through that law would be deported immediately.”
“That’s when I started planning to go to Canada.”
The family’s journey began in mid-March, when Guardado Portillo’s brother drove them 400 miles from Plainfield, New Jersey, to the Rainbow Bridge in Niagara Falls.
Donate to support our nonprofit newsroomDocuments and suitcases in hand, they walked across the bridge and presented themselves to Canadian border officials to make a refugee claim. Both Guardado Portillo and his wife, Serrano Ayala, have family in Canada who are citizens and permanent residents. Under the Safe Third Country Agreement, the family was permitted to make such a claim, and believed Canadian officials were likely to approve them for entry.
But when the family crossed the bridge, a Border Services agent turned them back, claiming some names on birth certificates didn’t match other records. The agent accused them of presenting fraudulent documents, Guardado Portillo said. In reality, the names didn’t match due to marriages, he said.
“On the other side of the birth certificate, it clearly said, in English and in Spanish, why there were those discrepancies,” Guardado Portillo said. “But [the border agent] wasn’t believing us and said they were false documents. She just kind of shut down our case.”
The family was then loaded into a car and driven back across the bridge. That’s when U.S. Customs and Border Protection locked them up in a makeshift cell.
Held in makeshift cell
Both Guardado Portillo and Serrano Ayala — in an April interview with CBC — described bleak conditions: four small cots and a toilet in an otherwise empty room.
“There were no windows,” Guardado Portillo said. “Whenever anyone had to do their business, it was out in the open pretty much.”
One thing the “back room” lacked? Showers.
“We spent eight days without a shower,” Guardado Portillo said. “After eight days we told [an officer] we wanted to take a shower because it’s been a long time.”
The family was escorted downstairs into another room. Officers covered up security cameras and provided them with soap and a five-gallon shower bag, similar to those used by hikers and campers.
CBP officers fed the family frozen meals. The portions were small, Guardado Portillo said. If the meal was chicken nuggets, for example, they each got four. His youngest would wake up crying in the middle of the night, he said, afraid and hungry. He and his wife eventually began setting their portions aside so their kids could eat more in the middle of the night, he said. The two of them would eat dinner only after they fell back to sleep.
Officers provided the children with coloring sheets and would let them into another room to watch television, Guardado Portillo said. But when they were allowed outside, officers flanked them.
“They’d have five guards on us … because they were afraid we’d escape somehow,” he said.
After two weeks of detention at the Rainbow Bridge, on March 28, U.S. Border Protection agents determined the family’s documents were legitimate and that they ought to qualify for asylum in Canada under the Safe Third Country Agreement.
Officers approved the family to proceed to Canada while an Investigative Post reporter was present at the Rainbow Bridge. Along with Justice for Migrant Families Executive Director Jennifer Connor, the reporter accompanied the family across the bridge, leaving them with a Border Services agent.
Jennifer Connor with the family on the Rainbow Bridge. Photo by J. Dale Shoemaker.
At the time, Connor and other advocates believed the family’s detention in a makeshift border cell was over. It wasn’t.
At the Canadian border, the family encountered the same officer who had turned them back two weeks earlier. She again accused them of presenting fraudulent papers, Guardado Portillo said.
“They asked us, ‘What do you want? Do you want to be deported back to El Salvador or do you want to stay here longer, incarcerated for falsifying documents?’” he said.
“And I told her, ‘Ma’am, why would I bring my daughters back here, through all of this again, knowing it’s illegal? Why would I make them go through all that again?’”
After several hours, the family was put back in a car and driven back to the United States. Customs and Border Protection officers then presented the family with a choice: See an immigration judge or agree to be deported. They all said they wanted to see a judge.
But 14-year-old Madelin was traumatized and sobbing, her father said, and did not want to return to the cell. She begged him: “Dad, just sign to get deported back to El Salvador, I don’t want to be here anymore.”
Heartbroken, Guardado Portillo said he approached the officer again, asking to change his answer, so he could be deported with his daughter. Another officer intervened and urged him not to. It wouldn’t help anyone’s case, he said.
After six more days in the makeshift cell, Guardado Portillo was sent to the Buffalo Federal Detention Facility run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Batavia.
“My children are crying, my wife is crying, I’m human, so of course I was crying, too,” he said.
Serrano Ayala was given an ankle monitor. She and the children were released to the Vive shelter, run by Jericho Road Community Health Center. That was April 2. The family spent the next month at the shelter.
Guardado Portillo, meanwhile, was issued a blue jumpsuit and booked into ICE detention on April 3.
His bunkmate, he said, suffered from mental illness and would wake him up with cries or screams in the middle of the night. Some nights, he said, he couldn’t sleep. He eventually saw an immigration judge who issued him a $12,000 bond.
Through Facebook, friends, family members and other Salvadoran migrants living in the United States, Guardado Portillo managed to raise the money.
“They pretty much gifted me $10,000,” he said.
He borrowed the rest and won his freedom.
Guardado Portillo arrived at Vive on May 9. He missed his wife by just three days. On May 6, after 12 hours at the border station, including a five-hour interview, Serrano Ayala and the children were permitted to enter Canada.
After a week and a half, federal officials removed Guardado Portillo’s ankle monitor and he had his own marathon interview at the Canadian border.
After nearly two months apart, he rejoined his family on May 19.
“God willing, I’m going to spend time with them,” he said, approximately 22 hours before he was reunited with his wife and children. “I’m going to dedicate as much time as I can to be with them and spend time with them.”
His youngest, Itzayana, is now “glued” to her dad, Heather Neufeld, the family’s attorney, said. Just in time for her fifth birthday in June.
“All she wants for her birthday,” Neufeld said, “is a cake and … a family photo with both of her parents in it.”
Editor’s note: Stephanie Meija provided translation assistance for this story.
