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WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif. () — A federal judge is temporarily blocking the deportation of a longtime West Hollywood resident detained by ICE agents this week.
Alex Pereira-Alves is from Brazil, but the government was preparing to deport him to Guyana, in South America, a country he’s never even visited.
The Trump administration has made deals to send some deportees to countries they’re not from, which is how Alex could be sent to Guyana. That country has a long history of discrimination against the LGBTQ and still doesn’t recognize same-sex relations — being sent there could put Alex at risk.
Alex is being held at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center. A federal judge put his deportation order on hold, buying his attorney’s more time to fight it.
“On Monday he got a call from an ICE officer saying ‘you need to report Tuesday, downtown.’ Out of the blue, unexpected, sudden,” said Alex’s friend Jeff Markwardt.
It was a the routine check-in that Alex was suddenly taken into immigration custody. The Brazilian immigrant has called Southern California home for years, working as a security guard and personal trainer.
But a writ of habeas corpus could be Alex’s ticket to safety. It’s asking a federal judge to decide if the government is illegally detaining him. The court has until next week to respond on the grounds that Alex’s rights were violated.
“Because they did not allow him to do a credible fear interview with respect to Guyana, the country that they said they were going to send him to and he was under supervision, it was depriving him of his right to due process, so that is the basis of our habeas corpus, meaning you don’t have a right to hold him without due process,” said Alex’s attorney Jane Oak. “He cannot be removed from the detention center to any country at any time until we are fully finished with these submissions.”
Oak says an immigration judge issues a final order of removal in 2018, but also granted him protection from being sent back to Brazil — where he also feared violence on his life.
The Department of Homeland Security confirms that final removal order and said in a statement, in part: “On July 5, 2010, Pereira Alves legally entered the country with authorization to stay for six months. He illegally overstayed his welcome, in violation of our nation’s laws.”
“Literally he told me, ‘they’re going to kill me’ because he had learned maybe about what Guyana is like and what the plan was for him,” Markwardt said. “I’d never heard him in that state and then I told him ‘Alex we’re working on habeas corpus’ and then he started crying out of shock.”
But this doesn’t mean Alex won his case. The removal order still stands. The fight now is over whether his rights were violated when he was detained, and if he is deported, where he could be sent.
It’s still for Alex a better situation to not be sent straight from Adelanto to a country that he’d feel afraid to go to without his dog, without his belongings, without his belongings, he would prefer to be released from detention and then on his own terms leave with everything he needs with him,” Oak said.
DHS told Eyewitness News that Alex will remain in ICE custody at the Adelanto immigration processing center pending removal.
A major concern for Alex’s friends and family right now is his lack of access to his daily medications, and of course, the conditions reported at the Adelanto facility. Just last month, a federal judge ordered improvements to clean drinking water and medical care there, following a lawsuit after the deaths of two Adelanto detainees last fall.
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