In September, longtime Gunnison resident Edwin Flores went to his annual check-in with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Aurora, just as he’d been doing for the last decade.
This check-in, though, ended much differently than those over the past 10 years did. Flores was detained by ICE and told he was being sent to Mexico.
Since then, lawyers, family and friends have been hard at work doing what they can to prevent Flores from being deported, but those efforts hit a snag last week after a hearing in Aurora. On either Nov. 23 or Nov. 24, Flores was moved to an ICE detention center in Harlingen, Texas. That facility is located less than 15 miles from the Mexican border.
All of this is just hard to believe for his friends in Gunnison, who know Flores as a hard-working owner of two small businesses here, including Facing Fear Tattoo and Samurai Construction.
Back on that day in September, Flores was driven to the ICE check-in by his close friends, Aaron and Seth Perry of Gunnison. It was a routine that had become normal to them all.
“Typically, I’d go with him, drop him off and he’d come out 45 minutes later and he’d be good for a year,” Aaron Perry said. “Obviously, nobody thought he’d just disappear and be in custody for no reason.”
Seth Perry had gone inside the facility with Flores, and was in the waiting room when a handful of ICE agents came out and called out for Flores. In just seconds, he was detained, quickly led away and hasn’t been free since.
“I was asking them what was going on, why he was being detained, and they wouldn’t tell me,” Aaron Perry said. “The guy told us he was being deported, so I asked them where. ‘Africa or Mexico,’ he said.
“I asked them if I was ever going to see him again.”
That’s when the ICE agent, in a tone that Aaron Perry said was “disrespectful,” turned and said: “Get a plane ticket to Africa or Mexico.”
“I’ve never had anybody in law enforcement talk to me like that,” Perry said.
Things inside weren’t going any better for Flores, whose shoulder was dislocated when he was taken into custody, Aaron Perry said.
Their focus has now turned to the next court date for Flores, which is Dec. 19. In the Federal District Court of Colorado that day, the government must provide their justification as to why Flores is being detained, said his attorney Leanne Reetz Hightower.
“Until then, we are just doing everything we can to make sure that he is in the United States,” she said.
“He has no rights,” Aaron Perry said. “He hasn’t been charged. Why has he been gone for two-and-a-half months?”
Background
While Flores has lived in the Gunnison area for about 20 years, his case dates back to 2014. That’s when he was granted what is called a withholding of removal, which is a type of relief granted to an individual who fears persecution in their country of origin. In Flores’ case, that country is El Salvador.
Since then, Flores has checked in once a year with ICE to ensure he continues to meet the conditions of their release. Among those conditions is that Flores remains law-abiding and he’s satisfied that requirement, Reetz Hightower said.
“So long as he has been in Colorado, there have been no crimes committed,” she said. “Not even a ticket. He has been an awesome member of the community.”
This same thing has been happening across the country this year, Reetz Hightower said.
“The policy has really been, detain first, figure everything else out afterwards,” she said. “That’s where we are with (Flores).”
Why and where
Reetz Hightower said that when President Donald Trump’s administration came into office in early 2025, the administration changed the long-standing policy and issued a new directive that said ICE offices should look closely at everyone who is in the country on a withholding of removal, as Flores is. The administration wanted to make it clear that someone with a withholding of removal status can be detained and deported to a third country.
In the past, the law was clear that if ICE was going to detain someone on supervision, it typically was due to one of two reasons. Either the person was a risk to their community or there was a change of circumstances in their home country that would mean they’d no longer have to fear persecution there.
“That’s the thing that’s really hard,” Reetz Hightower said “None of those conditions have changed for many people who are now detained. The government is saying, ‘We’re using this third option, and that’s to find a third country (to deport someone to).”
Removal to a third country has been used in the past, but very infrequently and typically only with people who have committed crimes. The American Immigration Council’s statistics from 2017 show that only 1.6 percent of the 1,274 people with withholding of removal orders at that time were deported to a third country.
Reetz Hightower has asked the government for any kind of commitment on record from the Mexican government that they will, in fact, accept Flores.
“The government has provided us with nothing to show that the Mexican government said that they would accept him,” Reetz Hightower said. “(We have) nothing that says they would give him safe passage.”
The primary goal behind the policy change from the Trump administration has been to deter the arrival of Central American migrants at the southern border by making it harder to obtain protection here.
But ask Aaron Perry and he’ll say places such as Gunnison are better off with people like Flores in them. He describes Flores as a selfless man. He remembers well when Flores met Wayne Trujillo, an elderly man with cancer here, and allowed Trujillo to move in. Many days, it was Flores who’d drive all the way to Denver to get Trujillo to his medical appointments.
“He’s a good person,” Aaron Perry said, “and he’s just gone.”
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