‘Seems Like a Betrayal’: They Fled Violence, Followed U.S. Asylum Rules — and Still Faced Deportation
On an overcast afternoon in April, Juan Pabon and his wife Joseline De Caires de Pabon sat at a sticky table in a McDonald’s in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood.
Outside, the stars and stripes flag flapped above the golden arches. Inside, Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off” played on the restaurant’s speakers.
This is a world apart from reality that Pabon and his family endured in order to find themselves in the relative safety of this disheveled McDonald’s.
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Pabon, a Venezuelan farmer, traversed the treacherous Darién Gap four years ago with his wife and two young daughters to seek asylum in the U.S.
Now, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has ordered them removed to Ecuador — a country they’ve never been to — without hearing their case. This, despite the fact that they sought entry to the U.S. using the government’s CBP One app, in keeping with federal policy.
“President Biden had ordered migrants to follow these regulations, and we entered in obedience to those rules,” Pabon said in Spanish. So the fact that they don’t get to make their case for asylum, he continued, “seems like a betrayal.”
Pabon and his family are among thousands of immigrants who entered legally during the Biden administration and now find themselves in the crossfire as President Donald Trump dismantles regulations his predecessor put in place in an immigration system that was already difficult to navigate.
The Migration Policy Institute estimates that the Trump administration has taken more than 500 actions on immigration in the first year alone.
The resulting changes include the one Pabon and his family experienced: the termination of asylum cases before they have the chance to be heard, with asylum seekers sent to a third country, like Ecuador.
The little-known legal principle that allows this maneuver is called a motion to pretermit.
According to DHS, these motions to pretermit are justified by the existence of Asylum Cooperative Agreements that certain countries, like Ecuador, have signed with the Trump administration, agreeing to accept asylum applicants from the U.S.
Such motions were once rarely used. But between November and March, when DHS recommended that their attorneys pause the tactic, they became a powerful tool for the Trump administration to meet its deportation goals.
In May 2025, the immigration court system reviewed approximately 360,000 cases nationwide, and DHS filed 361 motions to pretermit. In January 2026, out of about 345,000 cases, DHS filed 19,325 motions to pretermit.
Motions to pretermit cases filed by DHS in immigration courts nationwide from May 2025 to May 2026. This chart is based on case data directly from the Executive Office for Immigration Review. R. Taylor Robinson/Medill
Pabon’s journey
Pabon is from the small town of Cordero, Táchira, in western Venezuela, where he worked and lived on a farm.
He grew flowers, like lilies, as well as potatoes, beans and peas. But most of all he loved the animals they raised: cows, pigs, chickens and the stray dogs that roamed his neighborhood.
Then, on Dec. 3, 2003, his idyllic world was shattered. Pabon’s mother and brother, along with a third person, were kidnapped by armed men in a van. He reported their disappearance to the authorities, but his mother and brother were never seen again.
Pabon and his family started receiving threatening phone calls demanding money in return for his family. He paid them money and asked for proof of life, but they never provided one. He never found his mother and brother.
Pabon believes they were taken by members of the Anti-Extortion and Kidnapping unit of Venezuela’s Bolivarian National Guard. He filed a case with the Venezuelan court system, as he was determined to get justice for his mother and brother, but they didn’t see any results.
He spoke to the media about his belief that the government was involved and his daughters were visited at school, which the family took as a threat.
When he began to fear for the safety of his wife and two elementary-age daughters, Pabon decided to flee the country with them and make the dangerous journey to the U.S.
Pabon said their decision was motivated partly by his desire to bring his mother’s and brother’s cases to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in Washington, D.C.
In June 2022, Pabon and his family started their yearlong voyage.
“It wasn’t easy to leave the place where we were born, where we grew up, where we studied, where our friends were,” De Caires de Pabon, Pabon’s wife, told Borderless in Spanish.
They took a bus to Colombia, but quickly ran into trouble. Colombian soldiers took all the money they and dozens of other families had brought with them, forcing them to face the long and difficult trek ahead with nothing.
To reach Mexico, they first had to cross the Darién Gap, a roughly 66-mile stretch of treacherous wilderness between Panama and Colombia. This roadless natural barrier between North and South America is filled with dangerous fauna and flora as well as violent human and drug traffickers. Despite this, for hundreds of thousands of immigrants who cross it every year, it is the only viable overland route to the United States.
One night in the middle of their trudge through the jungle, Pabon said one of their daughters, Ana de Dios, fell down a deep hollow, injuring her hip and nearly breaking her spine. She was unable to walk and had to be carried.
They had to spend the night at the foot of a gigantic tree. They regrouped the next day in the rain and trudged on with his daughter still injured.
He said they walked for 11 days from 6 a.m. until dusk. They crossed deep rivers seeing people drown.
On the other side of the jungle, they made their way up through Central America. They worked menial jobs like cleaning houses and washing dishes in each country to earn enough to eat and pay a driver to get them one step closer to the United States.
Despite the hard journey, when they got to the U.S.-Mexico border in Juárez, Pabon was determined that the family would follow the rules established by the United States.
They downloaded the CBP One app and filled out the necessary forms to enter the U.S. and apply for asylum. They waited for their appointment with the U.S. government, living on the street or occasionally, in the homes of generous Mexicans in Juárez.
At one point, the situation at the border devolved into complete chaos, according to Pabon. But still, he remained patient.
“They opened up a few gates along the border wall, and everybody started crossing,” Pabon said. “They would tell me, ‘Hey, old man, you’re crazy, take your girls now and cross with us.’ I told him, ‘No, I am going to wait for my application. I am going to apply through my CBP One.’”
De Caires de Pabon got permission to enter in March 2023 through Arizona. Pabon and their two daughters were directed to enter through El Paso in June of the same year.
Upon entering the U.S., Pabon and his family moved to Chicago to complete their immigration procedures.
When Pabon and his family finally sat in front of the judge at Chicago’s immigration court on Feb. 20, 2026, he was ready. He had newspaper clippings about the kidnappings, documents from his legal proceedings in Venezuela, and his asylum application on hand.
Then DHS motioned to pretermit the case and send the family to Ecuador.
They had 20 days to file a response in English explaining why they should not be sent to Ecuador. They have since successfully filed the response, but only with the help of a lawyer the family can barely afford.
While Pabon had prepared extensively to explain why the family would not be safe if they returned to Venezuela, he fears they could also face danger in the nearby South American country.
Venezuelan immigrants say they experience discrimination – and danger – across many Latin American countries, just as they do in the U.S., due to tensions around increased immigration and xenophobic associations with gangs like Tren de Aragua. Hence, many Venezuelans expect they would be targeted for violence or abuse in Ecuador, even though it is not far away from their own nation.
“What guarantees do they [the U.S. government] give us that nothing will happen to us” when the family gets to Ecuador, Pabon asked. “If this is a country in which there is democracy, there is freedom, and there is justice, then those responsible have to be held accountable.”
A motion to pretermit
The concept of pretermission is not new.
Regulations allowing pretermission have existed for years, but until Trump’s current term, it wasn’t utilized often, attorneys told Borderless.
In February, among the cases that Borderless observed, 32% were pretermitted.
Just weeks before Pabon and his family received their pretermission orders, Borderless observed another Venezuelan asylum seeker, who will remain anonymous to protect his identity, as he stood on his one remaining leg in Judge Gina Reynolds’ Chicago courtroom, prepared to present his case for asylum. He had come to the U.S. because of fear of persecution in Venezuela, and had lost his leg in a trucking accident while in the U.S.
The case was pretermitted, and DHS recommended the man be removed to Ecuador. The asylum seeker and his attorneys were given less than 10 days to respond.
The attorney argued that, in Ecuador – a country he had never been to – a Venezuelan man with an amputated leg would face not only discrimination as a Venezuelan, but systemic barriers as a person with a permanent and debilitating disability.
Despite protest from the man’s attorney, the DHS attorney argued that all the points made were speculation, because the man had never been to Ecuador and, therefore, couldn’t know for sure that he would be in danger there.
Generalizations and speculative fears are not accepted as evidence in immigration court, according to Bethel Erastus, a professor of international law at the University of Aurora and a member of the asylum seeker’s legal team. He said a successful defense against motions to pretermit and send immigrants to a third country all but requires the respondent to have lived in the third country and experienced persecution there.
“It is very difficult to win it from the respondent’s perspective,” Erastus said. “It’s very difficult to say ‘I will be harmed if you send me to Ecuador.’ How do you know? You’ve never been there?”
In February, Borderless observed a Colombian asylum seeker, who will remain anonymous to protect their identity, and her family as they sat for an immigration hearing over the video platform Webex. What should have been a quick procedural checkup took a grave turn.
The DHS attorney motioned to pretermit the case and recommended that the family be removed to Ecuador.
The woman shook her head slowly side to side. “Qué vergüenza, qué vergüenza,” she said – “shame, shame.”
Vanessa Dojaquez-Torres, practice and policy counsel for the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said she thinks that pretermission paired with third-country removal is being used as “a fear tactic” to scare people into self-deporting.
A few months after the Trump administration discontinued the CBP One app that Pabon and many others had used to legally enter the U.S., the app was reintroduced with a new name: CBP Home. It now facilitates self-deportation.
People may decide to leave “voluntarily” because deportation based on an asylum case being pretermitted “comes with a lot of consequences on potentially ever being able to legally immigrate to the U.S. again,” Dojaquez-Torres explained.
She added that while immigrating back to the U.S. after being removed is not impossible, it is “very unlikely, depending on your circumstances.”
“Either way, the government gets what it wants, which is a reduction in migrants who want to stay here,” Erastus said.
After invoking pretermission and third-country removal frequently over the course of a few months, DHS shifted its strategy again, abruptly halting pretermissions that Borderless observed in Chicago courtrooms.
A March 12 memo obtained by the Seattle Times from the Department of Homeland Security called on government attorneys to stop pretermitting asylum applications on the basis of sending people to third safe countries. But it remains unclear if this is a temporary or permanent move, and applicants with pretermitted cases will still have to defend themselves against removal to third countries.
According to Dojaquez-Torres, despite the pause, lawyers are seeing asylum cases still being pretermitted and third-country removals still happening. The only difference is now DHS attorneys need a reason besides the existence of Asylum Cooperative Agreements to pretermit a case. Such reasons could range from an incomplete application to a single checkbox overlooked, she said.
The American Dream
In January, Luciano Pedota had never heard about pretermission until he came across the case of a Venezuelan man in Chicago with his wife and two girls.
“He wanted to pay for a lawyer. He didn’t want one of those pro bonos,” said Pedota, who leads the Illinois Venezuelan Alliance based in Chicago. “He actually had work. He says, ‘I work, and I can pay.’”
That man was Pabon.
Pabon went to the Illinois Venezuelan Alliance following his court date, looking for help.
When Pedota learned about pretermission, he was awestruck. He himself immigrated to the U.S. 32 years ago on a student visa, and stayed thanks to a series of three work visas before he finally acquired citizenship.
“I think I caught the last of the American dream as it relates to a pathway to being a citizen of the United States of America,” Pedota said. He was dismayed to see people arrive “with the same aspirations that I had 30 years ago—and somehow those aspirations were being crushed.”
Luciano Pedota, who leads the Illinois Venezuelan Alliance, helped Pabon navigate his case.R. Taylor Robinson for Medill/Borderless Magazine.
Pabon and his family are now working with a lawyer, to whom they had to pay $11,500 to respond to the motion to pretermit on their behalf, Pabon said.
On June 24, Pabon, along with his family and attorney, returned to Judge Curran’s courtroom to contest the motion to pretermit.
On July 10, Curran granted the motion to pretermit and ordered them removed to Ecuador.
Pabon’s family has 30 days from that date to appeal the decision to the Board of Immigration Appeals. His lawyer is working on the appeal, but it will cost him another $1,030. Without an appeal, the judge would issue an order of removal on the 31st day. The odds will likely be against them there. Like the immigration courts themselves, the board is part of the Department of Justice, under the executive branch’s jurisdiction, and the Trump administration has reduced the board’s size and replaced its judges.
Immigrants can appeal unfavorable BIA decisions to federal circuit courts. Pabon still has faith in such checks and balances in this country.
“Here, we are not living in a dictatorship. There is a separation of state institutions,” Pabon said. “The day that is lost, then there is no democracy here.”
Taylor Robinson is a graduate student in journalism with Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. This story was produced as part of a collaboration between Borderless Magazine and the Medill Investigative Lab-Chicago.
