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Arrests, deportations increase among Iowa immigrants, even without criminal convictions
‘I pray a lot that God will give him strength’
Nov. 26, 2025 5:30 am, Updated: Nov. 26, 2025 7:31 am
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Ariana Lopez, like many 7-year-olds, loves to draw. She often draws pictures of herself and her family, especially her oldest brother, Noel Lopez, who has always been one of her closest friends — despite their 17-year age difference.
Recently, whenever she draws Noel, she puts him behind bars.
On Nov. 19, Noel — who is a citizen of Mexico but has lived in the U.S. since he was 2 years old — was given a final order of deportation after spending almost six months incarcerated in jails in Iowa and Nebraska.
“It’s affected all of us, but she’s just a child. She heard everything when they arrested him. She went to see him when he was detained in (the Washington County Jail),” Ariana and Noel’s mother, Mercedes DeLa Cruz, said in an interview conducted in Spanish. “It stuck there, that image, there in her little head, to see that her brother was behind bars and she couldn’t hug him.”
‘He’s brave, and I thank God for that.’
Noel was arrested in Washington County in June of this year on a charge of possessing marijuana. The charge stemmed from a traffic stop a year earlier, in June 2024, when the car Noel was riding in was stopped by police and officers found marijuana.
Nathan Repp, the Washington County Attorney, said the yearlong delay in filing the charge was inadvertent, as the paperwork had been set aside while awaiting lab results.
The driver of the car, Mason Pounsavan, told police that all of the marijuana in the car was his. In August, the charge against Noel was dropped without going to trial. And in October, Pounsavan pleaded guilty to possession of marijuana and was sentenced to one year of probation and a $430 fine.
Despite the charge against Noel being dropped, he has remained in custody. That’s because U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement issued a detainer while Noel was in the Washington County Jail. A detainer is a request from ICE that the jail notify the federal agency if a person’s release is imminent, and that the jail hold that person so ICE can take them into custody.
“I’ll tell you right now, my family is strong. My kids, the others, they’re suffering a lot, because we were united, no matter what, united. Now there aren’t any celebrations. Now there aren’t birthdays. He had his birthday inside, and how am I going to tell him ‘happy birthday’ when I know it’s not a happy birthday?” DeLa Cruz said, in Spanish. “But he’s brave, and I thank God for that. I pray a lot that God will give him strength.”
Noel grew up in Mount Pleasant, Iowa, with his parents and his four younger siblings, all of whom are U.S. citizens. After graduating from high school, Noel moved to Iowa City where he met his fiance and worked as a landscaper to save money to hire an immigration lawyer and begin the process of seeking U.S. citizenship.
As a teenager, Noel and his parents worked with a lawyer to apply for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, which grants legal status to undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children. His application was rejected twice, and by then his family no longer had the funds to keep paying a lawyer for a third attempt.
“They wanted proof that he was in school in June of 2007. The school sent us something saying that classes were already out for the summer in the month of June, and we sent the school’s letter along to our lawyer to send in the application again, and they rejected it for a second time,” DeLa Cruz said, in Spanish “He told me, ‘Mom, don’t waste more money, maybe later we can figure out another way … Let’s wait until I can save up my own money.’”
The cost to hire an immigration lawyer has only increased, so Noel hadn’t yet begun the process when he was arrested earlier this year. His family has since been scrambling to find funds to pay both a criminal lawyer who helped get the drug charge dismissed, and an immigration lawyer who is working with him now.
In September, his lawyer, Benjamin Bergmann, filed a federal lawsuit against ICE and the Department of Homeland Security, claiming Noel had been denied the opportunity to request bond due to a “new, draconian policy” by the Donald Trump administration.
Despite their legal efforts, however, Noel is now facing deportation to a country he’s never known.
“He doesn’t know anything there. His country, everything for him, is here in Iowa,” DeLa Cruz said, in Spanish. “He doesn’t know my family, not even his grandparents, besides in photos. He doesn’t know anything about Mexico.”
Noel’s fiance is planning to relocate to Mexico in order to stay with Noel, and DeLa Cruz said she and rest of her family have been considering doing the same.
“(Ariana) says, ‘Take me out of school. I’d rather go to Mexico with him. If they send him away, I don’t want to live here.’ It’s such an awful situation, for me, because it hurts me, but it hurts her so much more. She says, ‘Why am I losing, not just my brother, but my friend, my best friend, my confidant?’” DeLa Cruz said, in Spanish, before the final decision had been made that Noel would be deported. “I tell her, ‘Yes, my love, but we’re going to hug him. Just have faith and patience. The lawyer is going to find a way, and if not, well, then we’ll go, because we aren’t going to leave him alone in a country he doesn’t know.’”
Immigrants without criminal convictions being detained, deported
Noel’s situation is not unique. The number of immigrants arrested by ICE in Iowa this year is at a record high, with at least 693 arrests made through the end of July, the majority of whom were men in their 20s and 30s, according to data gathered by the Deportation Data Project.
The Project, comprised of “academics and lawyers,” collects and posts public, anonymized U.S. government immigration enforcement data that’s obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests.
The 693 arrests made in the first seven months of 2025 is up from 298 arrests in Iowa in all of 2024, and 123 arrests in all of 2023. Those numbers are likely incomplete, according to the Deportation Data Project, because 19 percent of the arrests reported through public records do not note the state in which the arrest happened.
Like Noel, many of the immigrants arrested do not have criminal convictions, despite repeated claims by President Donald Trump’s administration that increased immigration enforcement this year is intended to target dangerous criminals.
In July, Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for public affairs in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, said ICE was arresting“ the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens.”
“Across the country, ICE agents are targeting dangerous criminal illegal aliens and taking them off American streets. Violent thugs ICE arrested include child pedophiles, drug traffickers, and burglars,” McLaughlin said.
In Iowa, from January through July, ICE agents arrested 406 convicted criminals, almost double the 222 convicted criminals arrested in 2024, according to data published by the Deportation Data Project. Meanwhile, the number of Iowa ICE arrestees with unresolved charges more than quadrupled, from 47 in 2024 to 226 in the first seven months of 2025.
Arrests of individuals with no criminal charges at all -- who are noted in the data as “other immigrant violators” -- also has doubled, from 29 in 2024 to 61 in the first seven months of 2025.
The data shows a total of 1,114 people arrested in Iowa between 2023 and July of 2025. Among those, 762 were listed as departed, meaning they left the country either by deportation or some other means, like voluntary removal. Only 12 of the 762 people who were listed as departed did not have a final order of removal from ICE, meaning 750 were ordered removed by a judge.
The departure numbers show a similar trend to arrest numbers, with the number of convicted criminals who departed almost doubling between 2024 and the first seven months of 2025, jumping from 187 to 323, while the number of those with only pending charges who departed having increased by more than six times in the same period, from 24 to 152.
The number of individuals without any conviction who departed increased from zero to 36 in the same time period.
Charges faced by ICE detainees often minor
The arrests dataset does not include information about what kinds of convictions and pending charges the ICE arrestees had, but a separate dataset collected by the Deportation Data Project, which focuses specifically on deportations, does.
The second dataset is less reliable for state-specific data because 84 percent of the 528,441 national deportations listed between 2023 and the end of July 2025 don’t identify the state where the deported individual was apprehended.
Of the 573 deportations from Iowa listed in that dataset, none were aggravated felons, though 431 had other criminal convictions, and 118 had pending criminal charges.
The charges listed range from minor to severe. Some examples include driving under the influence, with 116 convicted individuals deported; larceny, with 18 convicted individuals deported; sexual assaults, with 11 convicted individuals deported; and homicide, with one convicted individual deported.
Des Moines immigration attorney Raziel Argueta said he isn’t surprised to hear that many of the charges against individuals being deported are minor, as that matches up with what he’s seen among his clients this year.
“I had a client, a young male who was detained … The only thing he had on his record was a speeding ticket and then a driving without a license. ICE, in the hearing for the bond, said ‘This is a criminal. He is a convicted criminal,’ and I said, ‘He's got two traffic tickets, that he's paid,’” Argueta said. “I'm willing to bet that most Americans would not classify themselves as criminals for having received a speeding ticket once in your life.”
Argueta said the increased enforcement for minor charges has shown up both for individuals with previous convictions, and for people whose charges are still pending. He’s also seen multiple cases this year of someone being detained for weeks, and sometimes deported, after a simple traffic stop that, for a citizen, would have resulted in nothing more than a fine.
“In the previous administration, (immigration officials) would generally focus their resources on individuals with serious convictions,” Argueta said. “I had a client this year who was arrested for allegedly shoplifting at Walmart, $30 worth of stuff at Walmart. That's not something that last year or two or three years ago, we would have seen result in being detained by ICE, because even if that individual were to plead guilty as charged, admit to the facts, it wouldn't render them ineligible for asylum or for … the green card.”
Different interpretations of law result in different outcomes
Argueta said he has worked with a number of people this year who have been detained, and sometimes deported, without having any criminal charges. In most cases, those detentions have happened during regular check-in visits that are a required as part of multiple paths to legal immigration.
The detentions come as a result of expanded interpretations of immigration enforcement laws like expedited removal, a process that allows immigration officials to deport immigrants without granting them a hearing before an immigration judge.
Before to this year, expedited removal could only be used for immigrants arrested within 100 miles of a U.S. border who had been in the country for less than two weeks. Earlier this year, the Trump administration expanded the policy to apply to immigrants anywhere in the country who have been in the U.S. for less than two years.
In July, another new policy was implemented, stating that anyone alleged to have entered the country illegally is subject to mandatory detention. This is the policy that allowed for Noel Lopez to be kept without bond and resulted in his lawsuit, along with several other federal lawsuits from immigrants and immigrant rights organizations.
As the lawsuits have been adjudicated at the federal level, lower level judges — like those in the Omaha immigration court, where many immigrants detained in Iowa have bond hearings — have been inconsistent with their application of the rule, according to Argueta.
“We had one judge in Omaha say for the longest time, ‘I am not buying this argument. I am not going to accept the government's position that they're subject to expedited removal. I'm going to proceed with giving them a bond.’ And you had another judge in the exact same period of time say, ‘I absolutely agree that this individual, this client, is subject to expedited removal. Therefore, I do not even have jurisdiction to hear this matter,’” Argueta said.
Another issue Argueta has run into this year is clients suddenly being moved to detention centers in different parts of the country, making it much more difficult for him to set up times to talk with them to work on their case.
Argueta said those transfers are “the biggest concern to due process and to the well-being of the clients” this year.
“Almost half the time when we have a client … they’ll actually end up being transferred to a detention center in Louisiana, and it’s considered the hell hole of immigration,” Argueta said. “Your chances of your client being given a bond by any of the immigration judges down there is almost nil.”
‘The laws are very complicated … I’m scared for my life’
One of Argueta’s clients who was arrested without a criminal conviction, but was later released on bond in Des Moines, is Alfredo Lastra, an Ecuadorian immigrant who came to the U.S. in 2023.
Lastra fled his home country and came to the U.S. on foot after being threatened and extorted because he refused to participate in gang-related drug trafficking.
“I came alone because I couldn’t bring my family. For one, because I traveled through a dangerous jungle, and also because of the cost.” Lastra told The Gazette in Spanish. “I fled, and my wife and my two kids stayed there with their grandfather. And I’m here trying to save money to see if I can bring them, because they are still in danger.”
When he reached the U.S., Lastra was detained in Texas for about four months before being released to live in Iowa with his in-laws. He then applied for asylum, a process that allows people who are fleeing danger to enter the U.S., without applying for immigration documents first, and begin the legal immigration process from inside the country.
His asylum case still is pending, but on June 6 of this year, he was arrested in Des Moines after the car he was riding in was stopped because the officer believed the vehicle registration did not match the driver of the car.
Lastra told The Gazette he was getting a ride to work with a few other immigrants on that day, and the Des Moines police officer who pulled the car over asked each passenger in the car for their IDs and work permits. Lastra said he didn’t have a physical copy of his work permit yet, because it had been granted but was still being processed, and he had left his immigration papers at home, but he gave the officer his passport. The officer then told Lastra there was a deportation order against him, and arrested him.
Later, after he’d been transferred to ICE custody, Lastra said the immigration officials told him there was no deportation order.
“I have papers. I applied for asylum. I have a lawyer,” Lastra said, in Spanish. “They told me that I didn’t have a deportation order, but said that since they had already brought me in, that by law they had to process me to send me to jail, to wait for a judge to give a ruling on whether I could leave on bond.”
Lastra was released on bond about a month later, on July 1, and his next court date for his asylum case is scheduled for Dec. 13. He said he’s glad to be free again, but the detention scared him, since he’s tried to follow the legal process as closely as he can.
“The laws are very complicated, and sometimes I’m hesitant to present myself for my hearings, because you hear so many things, so many things that people say, and it’s scary,” Lastra said, in Spanish. “I’m scared for my life, because if they end up sending me back to my country, something could happen to me there.”
Comments: (319) 398-8328; emily.andersen@thegazette.com
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