IT specialist hired to help Border Patrol was instead arrested by them 

Angel Camacho is a systems engineer with a master’s degree in telecommunications, a project manager whose work has provided for him and his family for nearly a decade in the United States.

So, he says he thought it was “just another job” last month when he was summoned to a Dania Beach office to do a site survey for a new intercom system.

But this was no typical office space: it was the U.S. Border Patrol station.

As requested, his employer submitted his driver’s license in advance for security screening and was told Camacho was “approved” for entry, according to a Jan. 5 email from a Customs and Border Protection employee. “We just need to know what time he is coming, so we can be prepared.”

The next day, when Camacho showed up, they were indeed prepared – to arrest him.

“I say, ‘Good morning. I’m Angel. And they say, ‘Oh yes, we are waiting for you,’” he recalled in an exclusive interview with NBC6 Investigates. “They say, ‘I have to detain you.’ I said, ‘What are you? Joking?'”

But it was no joke.

He went there to do a job, and instead, he said, got “handcuffs.”

Camacho is a Venezuelan asylum seeker with no criminal history, who immigration records reveal received temporary protected status after arriving in the U.S. on a tourist visa in 2016 and has applied for permanent residency as the spouse of an American citizen, with whom he is raising American-born children.

“I have a work permit, Social Security number, driver’s license, pay my taxes every year,” the 43-year-old homeowner said.

But what he doesn’t yet have is lawful status as a citizen or permanent resident.

And, amid the Trump administration’s efforts to meet its mass deportation goals, that meant detention.

Camacho said he spent a night in the Border Patrol holding area before being taken for what turned out to be a 30-day stint at the state’s Everglades immigration detention camp, what it calls “Alligator Alcatraz.”

“That’s the worst nightmare I’ve ever been in,” he said of the detention camp, saying he was mixed in with criminals. “That’s not a place for nobody, especially if you never commit any crime.”

But since it opened in July – when the president vowed it would house “some of the most menacing migrants, some of the most vicious people on the planet” – only one in four men housed there have criminal convictions and only 7% have convictions for violent crimes, according to ICE data through mid-October reviewed by NBC Investigates.

Now, with more people than ever – about 70,000 – in ICE custody, the government’s detention camps are receiving a greater share of people with no criminal history.

That has led to immigration lawyers flooding federal courthouses with demands that their clients be set free.

They’re called petitions for “habeas corpus,” a demand in Latin to “produce the body.”

Immigration attorneys Liliana Gomez and Deliane Quiles have been busy filing them for clients with no criminal history after the administration last summer suddenly began denying bond hearings for people who had been apprehended in the interior of the country.

“The law has been the same for the past 30 years, and all of a sudden the government decided to change the law, and we have this influx of litigation,” Gomez said.

NBC6 Investigates found a relative tsunami of those habeas corpus petitions being filed recently in federal courts in the Southern and Middle districts of Florida.

This time last year, there was an average of five filed each month; but beginning in November, the numbers skyrocketed to nearly 400 filed last month alone.

“Thankfully, a lot of my clients have been released after getting a habeas petition granted,” Gomez said, “but so far, we have to go to federal court. There’s no way to get immigration bond hearing before an immigration judge.”

That takes time and money, and now it’s getting harder after an appeals court in New Orleans this month ruled that some immigrants arrested inside the U.S. — not just those stopped at the border — may be held without bond hearings while their cases proceed.

It happened this month to the husband of a Maryland woman, who asked us to protect her identity.

“What they are doing is not fair,” she said through tears. “They are separating families.”

“The hardest part of this situation is that the children are the ones who suffer,” she continued. “You try to stay strong and everything but seeing them depressed makes you fall apart too.”

She was hopeful that Gomez and Quiles would be able to at least get her husband a bond hearing, but they had to call her with the bad news.

“It’s the worst call to make, to be honest with you,” Gomez said, “because this was a judge that had been granting these habeas petitions so far. So, we had hopes that it would be granted and her husband would be home soon.”

But that judge and others in the Southern District have changed their opinions, citing the appellate decision from New Orleans – a decision at odds with hundreds of rulings by federal judges in recent months who found people detained away from the border were in many cases entitled to a bond hearing.

In that sense, Camacho, the IT project manager arrested while trying to work at the Border Patrol station, is a fortunate one.

Because he did have a visa when he first entered the U.S. in 2016, he fought for and eventually got a bond hearing, posted the $5,000 and was released with an ankle monitor after 30 days at the Everglades detention camp.

“Am I a threat to America?” he pondered. “Come on. No. I think I’ve been doing the right things since I came here.”

Asked why Border Patrol decided to take him into custody, he answered, “Because it was easy. They didn’t catch me doing anything wrong. I just went there to work, and it was too easy for them to catch me and say, ‘This is an immigrant.’”

Asked on Feb. 17 for comment on what happened to Camacho, a CBP public affairs specialist said he “would be in touch soon” with a response. As of publication, the agency has not responded.