82-year-old grandpa disappeared by ICE after losing wallet, family told he was dead, horrified as truth emerges

By now, it shouldn’t be news that ICE is equal parts cruel and incompetent. This is by design: senior Trump official Stephen Miller and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem have demanded that ICE arrest 3,000 people every day across the nation, with any ICE agents caught slacking liable to be fired.

As you might imagine, this inevitably involves ICE agents shrugging their shoulders and arresting everybody they possibly can. Sure, it’s evil and unjust, but what are they going to do? Find another job that doesn’t involve tearing screaming mothers away from their children? Yeah, right!

Anyway, all the above is how we get the horrific case of 82-year-old Pennsylvania grandfather Luis Leon. Leon is Chilean and fled Augusto Pinochet’s regime in 1987 after being tortured, successfully claimed asylum in the United States, and received a green card.

So, let’s underline this for the numbskulls in the back: Luis Leon was in the country legally, obtained his green card by following the legal route, and was not an illegal immigrant. Got that? Good.

But, sadly, following the law to the letter and being a model asylum claimant didn’t help Leon one bit. In June, he accidentally lost his wallet containing his green card and immediately contacted immigration officials to request a replacement. He arrived at the office on June 20, expecting to pick up his new card and get on with his day.

The nightmare begins

ICE had other ideas. They shackled the octogenerian, bundled him into the back of a van, and disappeared him. His wife, who had accompanied him, was detained for 10 hours for no apparent reason.

Leon’s family then began frantic efforts to figure out what had happened to their beloved grandpa, but ICE wouldn’t tell them where he was, what his status was, or anything to do with the case. Then an immigration lawyer contacted them to give them the worst news of all: he had died in ICE custody.

A week later, they were still reeling from that tragedy. Then the story took another unexpected twist. Leon was, in fact, not dead. A relative in Chile managed to discover he was somehow in a hospital in Guatemala, a country to which he had no connection whatsoever. Further inquiries revealed he’d been dragged from Pennsylvania to Minnesota, before being deported to Guatemala. Disturbingly, this appears to have been done in secret, as Leon’s removal wasn’t recorded on any ICE detention deportation lists.

His current physical and legal condition is unknown and it’s unclear whether he can be retrieved from Guatemala and returned to the United States. His family are planning to fly out to visit him, but the murky legal and political situation around ICE means he may be blocked from ever returning.

This is just one of tens of thousands of ICE horror stories. Make no mistake, one day this era will go down as some of the darkest years in the nation’s history – when law-abiding people can be snatched from the street by the government, flown out of the country, and dumped in some godforsaken hellhole.

Were it not for dumb luck, Leon’s family would have simply assumed he was dead and had been tossed into some unmarked grave. Meanwhile, he’d have been left to anonymously rot in Guatemala, just another body propping up the foundations of the Trump regime.