Ricardo Calderon and his daughter in an undated family photo. Calderon says he never got a chance to present evidence from his asylum case in court. (Courtesy of Esther Calderon)
On an early morning in June, 31-year-old Ricardo Calderon left his wife and two children in the family's apartment in Ann Arbor, Michigan, climbed into his car, and began driving off to his job as a roofer.
Moments later, vehicles suddenly blocked him in, Calderon told Law360. Men got out and surrounded his car. A masked man demanded he open the car door.
Calderon said that at first, he refused. But when one of the men threatened to break the window glass with a club, he gave up. He was brought to an immigration enforcement office in Detroit, then a detention center in rural Michigan. Inside the lockup, he hoped his family members could hire an immigration lawyer.
Calderon and his family had already gathered evidence about the gang killing of a relative in their home country, Honduras. They had filed an asylum claim and were scheduled to appear in immigration court for a final hearing in August, he said.
Calderon hoped that if he got a lawyer, he could win release on bond. And maybe, just maybe, he and his wife could win their asylum case and stay in Michigan with their 7-year-old son and 4-year-old daughter, both of whom were included in the same asylum case.
Calderon waited inside the lockup while his wife and sister talked with immigration lawyers. As weeks passed, his hopes began to fade.
Two immigration law firms refused to represent Calderon, saying they didn't have the resources to take on his case, his sister Esther Calderon later told Law360.
A third law firm was willing to represent Calderon — if the family made an immediate payment of $12,000 — no installments, all the money up front, she said.
The family couldn't afford to pay.
"I started to get more depressed," Ricardo Calderon told Law360 in a Spanish-language interview. "Because my time was running out, and I didn't have an answer, if they were going to help me, and all that."
As of late July, Calderon had been locked up for weeks, still had no lawyer, and said he had been attacked by gang members inside the detention center. He was facing a deportation order and had no apparent way to fight it.
"So we are just, you know, waiting for a miracle," his sister wrote in a July 24 text message to Law360.
As the Trump administration follows through on campaign promises to arrest and deport millions, immigrants are increasingly finding that hiring a lawyer is impossible.
New policies are making immigration cases far harder to win — and far more expensive for lawyers to handle, especially when the clients are already locked up in detention.
Immigration lawyers across the country are overwhelmed with demand. Some immigration lawyers told Law360 that they are routinely turning down clients.
The lawyers also spoke of the mental strain of fighting a government that's bent on deporting as many people as possible.
The increasing inability to find legal representation is a problem not only for immigrants, but also for their U.S. citizen children, who may be detained and expelled along with them, and for other U.S. citizens or authorized immigrants who are swept up in immigration arrests.
The difficulty of hiring a lawyer goes hand in hand with other Trump administration actions against immigrants, including summary arrests of immigrants showing up for court dates and new restrictions that make it harder for immigration judges to grant relief.
The result of these and other federal actions is the same: Immigrants lose.
Under President Donald Trump, more and more immigrants have little to no access to due process — no real chance to prove in court that they deserve asylum protection or another form of immigration relief.
In some cases, they may have no chance to prove that they are an authorized immigrant or a U.S. citizen that the government has arrested by mistake.
Critics like Timothy Snyder, a historian of European dictatorships and mass killings, say the Trump administration's attacks on immigrant due process harm everyone and move the nation closer to authoritarian government.
His argument: If immigrants don't have due process, then no one is safe.
"It is due process, and due process alone, that allows you to demonstrate that you are a citizen," Snyder wrote in a blog post earlier this year.
"Without it, the masked men in the black vans can simply claim that you are a foreign terrorist and disappear you."
Photos of a Corpse
Calderon said the story of his family's emigration to the U.S. began in 2021 in Honduras.
A gang that was active in the area began pressuring family members to join, including his wife's cousin, 29-year-old Cristian Mauricio Meza, who was living with their family.
Calderon said that when the family refused the gang's recruitment efforts, the gang retaliated against the relative.
"So they came and took him from the house where we were living," Calderon said. "And then about two days later, he was found dead."
His body was in horrific condition. "They shot him 14 times," Calderon said. "They knifed him and burned him. He was bound hand and foot."
The gang made threats. "They told us that we would be next."
Law360 was unable to verify the account of the killing through news media coverage in Honduras, and Calderon said he no longer had access to documents related to the killing.
However, Honduras has struggled for years with widespread violence and extortion by organized crime groups. The violence, corruption and poverty have prompted many Hondurans to flee.
Calderon and his wife left for the United States with their young son and daughter in October 2021.
After a lengthy journey across Guatemala and Mexico, they finally walked into an official border crossing point at Calexico, California, and requested asylum, Calderon said.
The family's decision to present themselves to border officials and request asylum was a common one.
Border officials often told migrants to appear for a future immigration court date in the U.S. interior, and let them go.
Released from custody, Calderon, his wife and their children took a plane to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where Calderon's wife's sister had settled.
Ricardo Calderon and his family in an undated photo. Calderon and his wife left Honduras for the United States with their young son and daughter in October 2021. (Courtesy of Ricardo Calderon)
Calderon and his wife had gathered evidence to support their asylum claim, including details of the killing of his wife's relative.
"We had photos of him, what he looked like when they discovered his body," Ricardo Calderon said. "We had his death certificate. We had some audio recordings that we received in Mexico from the same gang."
Immigrants from Central America often lose their asylum cases. One key factor: U.S. asylum law mainly protects people who face oppression from a government, not from a private actor like a gang.
Still, immigration law was changing all the time. Smart attorneys could help clients craft a case that could sometimes win, despite the narrow asylum rules.
That is, if the immigrants could get an attorney. For Ricardo Calderon and his wife, it was proving difficult.
The exact details are unclear, but Calderon's sister in Memphis, Tennessee, shared messages with Law360 that suggest the family's initial asylum application was filed by the nonprofit Michigan Immigrant Rights Center.
But Ricardo Calderon said the family never managed to hire an attorney who could offer them full representation in immigration court.
"No, we didn't have one because the numbers that we called, they didn't answer — and there were some who told us they couldn't take our case, and others who don't take asylum cases," he said.
Ricardo Calderon would never make it to the August court date. His June arrest would throw the couple's plans into turmoil.
Slimy Beans in a For-Profit Prison
It's unclear why the authorities arrested Calderon. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement didn't make an official available for an interview.
But the Trump administration is arresting and detaining thousands of people in the U.S. interior.
The president has painted this as a necessary step, portraying immigrants as bloodthirsty criminals, but the data doesn't back up his claims. Researchers from the federal National Institute of Justice and the libertarian Cato Institute have concluded that immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than U.S. citizens do. That's true even when the immigrants are in the country illegally.
As of this month, about 59,000 people were being held in ICE detention, and 71% of them had no criminal conviction, according to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, or TRAC, which collects and publishes government records.
Calderon and his sister said he has no criminal record. Law360 searched federal and Michigan databases and found no criminal records that matched Calderon's name and date of birth.
After the men surrounded Calderon's vehicle on the morning of June 19, he was brought to an immigration office in Detroit.
He said he was asked to sign a document to accept deportation back to Honduras.
"I told them I wasn't going to sign a deportation agreement, that I wanted to see a judge," he recalled.
He said he was transferred to North Lake Processing Center in Baldwin, Michigan, a small town about a 200-mile drive from Ann Arbor.
The prison had been closed until recently, but days before Calderon's arrival, as the Trump administration expanded immigration detention, it was reopened as an immigration lockup run by a private company, the Geo Group Inc.
Calderon said conditions were grim.
"They give you beans with corn. The beans are canned, but all slimy — in bad condition. The first two weeks I was there, I lost weight because the food wasn't good."
"I lived a very ugly experience there."
Activists rallied on July 4 against the North Lake Processing Center, a prison that was recently reopened as one of the largest immigrant detention centers in the Midwest. The rural Michigan facility is run by a private prison company, the GEO Group, and houses immigrants detained by ICE. (Jim West/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
Lawyers Start Saying No
With Calderon locked up, his wife in Ann Arbor and sister Esther Calderon, who lives in Memphis, began calling lawyers.
Esther Calderon shared text messages that appear to show that the family consulted again with the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center, a nonprofit legal resource center.
Susan Reed, director of the center, told Law360 she can't talk about the Calderon case.
But she said Trump administration budget cuts have cost the nonprofit organization a $375,000 federal grant to run a help desk at the Detroit Immigration Court. A big federal grant to represent unaccompanied children is at risk, too. The instability has prompted dozens of staffers to quit, she said.
Under Trump, the statewide organization has lost roughly half its lawyers — from about 50 attorneys in January to just 27 lawyers now, she said — and it's lost several nonattorney support staffers, too.
Every day, five to 10 people call the organization's free hotline for immigration detainees in Michigan, she said.
And most of those detainees are receiving bad news. Though the nonprofit still offers free legal advice, the organization stopped offering full representation in new detention cases around Sept. 10, Reed said.
"We just really understood we did not have capacity to take new cases."
She said detention cases are "incredibly difficult."
"The detention facilities are far away. People are moved around from facility to facility. Clients don't have access to their paperwork or documents."
She said the experience of being locked up often leads immigrants to accept deportation. "And that's something that immigration enforcement authorities understand — that detained people very, very often simply give up."
She said the situation puts a big emotional strain on the staff.
"And you have to say no to a lot of callers who desperately need our help," she said. "Because there's just no way to sustain and serve people well at a certain point when you're beyond your capacity."
Unable to find a lawyer through the nonprofit, Ricardo Calderon's wife contacted Farah Al-khersan, a solo immigration lawyer in Ann Arbor.
A paralegal replied in a Spanish-language email.
"Unfortunately, our office lacks the capacity to take on a case like this one, which requires many months in court," the email reads in part.
In an interview with Law360, Al-khersan said she can't talk in detail about what happened in Calderon's case due to attorney-client privilege.
But she said detained clients usually need her to prepare a written motion for release on bond and to do the work under "a huge time crunch."
It can take days to gather the necessary documents from the detainee's friends and family, such as any marriage certificates, birth certificates of any children, and details about how the family would pay the bond amount.
And Trump has taken steps that restrict judges from releasing immigrants on bond, making the bond request process all but hopeless, Al-khersan said.
Once a judge denies bond, it only gets worse. Immigrants have to wait months in prison for a hearing. Most don't want to do it and accept deportation, she said.
Several times a week, families of detained immigrants contact her office, she said. She almost always turns them down.
"In the last few weeks, I haven't taken a single detained case," Al-khersan said.
She's the only attorney in her law firm, and she sees rejecting these cases as a matter of self-preservation. She said she wants to focus on other cases where her help could make a real difference.
"If I could take every case, I would. But I have to prioritize my resources, just to conserve my own sanity and emotional toll that we're all experiencing as removal defense attorneys."
$150 For an Initial Consultation
The Calderon family contacted another Michigan firm, Immigration Law PLLC, and spoke with a nonlawyer staffer.
"They were asking us to pay $12,000 before they could even start looking at paperwork and all that," Esther Calderon said.
For the 27-year-old, who works as an administrator in a health clinic, the financial terms were impossible.
"Because $12,000 is not something that I can just give out, not even on a credit card," she said.
The initial consultation alone cost $150, according to a photo of a receipt that she shared with Law360.
As Ricardo Calderon's wife in Michigan and sister in Memphis searched for a lawyer, they exchanged text messages and images including this one. It shows the $150 receipt for an initial consultation with Immigration Law PLLC. Law360 redacted Calderon's address in Ann Arbor, Michigan. (Courtesy of Esther Calderon)
The principal of Immigration Law PLLC, attorney Brad Thomson, didn't respond to requests for comment.
Esther Calderon said she regretted that she couldn't help the older brother she'd grown up with in Honduras, part of a big family raised by a single mother.
"I have always felt that I need to look out for him, and he always looks out for me."
Far Fewer Immigrants Have Attorneys Today
Calderon's wife and sister told him the bad news about the immigration law firms. "At that point, I began to lose all hope of going free," he said.
The stories of immigration lawyers refusing to represent clients might surprise Americans who grew up watching TV shows and movies that depict police officers reading Miranda rights to someone they have arrested: "You have the right to remain silent ... You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you."
But this right applies in criminal cases. In deportation proceedings, the immigrant generally has no right to a free lawyer. Immigrants must either find a lawyer who's willing to work for free or at a big discount, or gather enough money to hire an attorney for pay.
Without a lawyer, immigrants usually find themselves in an impossible situation: facing off against a trained government attorney who argues for their deportation.
Even children sometimes have to face government lawyers alone. Without lawyers, immigrants almost always lose.
Today, the overwhelming majority of immigrants in deportation proceedings are appearing without a lawyer, according to data from TRAC.
One factor: not enough lawyers. At the start of this year, the American Immigration Lawyers Association counted only about 17,000 members in the U.S.
Even before Trump took office, there were too few immigration attorneys to handle an influx of new immigrants that had swelled the immigration court backlog to 3.3 million cases, TRAC wrote in a January 2024 report.
"Five years ago, noncitizens had found attorneys in 65% of all pending cases in the court's backlog. Today, this proportion has dropped to just 30%," the center wrote.
By the 2025 fiscal year, that proportion had dropped even further, to about 23%, meaning that fewer than one in four immigrants now has a lawyer.
It's Happening Everywhere
Stories like the Calderon family's struggle to hire a lawyer are increasingly common, said Jeff Joseph, a Denver immigration lawyer and president of the board of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.
"You have this perfect storm of more demand for services, less able and willing attorneys able to do it, and the cost of providing legal services has also gone up," he said.
In addition to the Trump administration's funding cuts to legal aid nonprofits, the federal government is also placing far more immigrants in detention, he said.
The administration has also made it much more difficult for lawyers to represent immigrants who have been detained, Joseph said.
"In the past, if somebody gets arrested and detained, you have a minute to meet with them, figure out why they're being detained, prepare a bond motion and get it before a judge," he said.
"Now you don't have a minute anymore. People are getting arrested. They're being moved around from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Attorneys are having to basically follow their clients with habeas corpus motions as they're being moved around from state to state."
The cost difference is dramatic, he said.
"If you had me estimate, I'd say it's probably three times more expensive to defend an immigration case now than it was under Trump 1.0," Joseph said.
And the government won't settle cases through negotiations, he said.
"In every single case, there's no there's no settlement, there's no negotiation," Joseph said. "Every case is going to full-scale war."
In the long term, Joseph said, the solution is to train more immigration lawyers by encouraging law schools to learn the specialty, and to deregulate some elements of immigration law practice to allow more clients to access resources. In the short term, lawyers are fighting the government in court.
In Memphis, another immigration attorney, solo practitioner Andrew Rankin, said demand for his services is heavier than he's ever seen, and he's likewise rejecting clients. "It's saturated. I have to turn away one out of every two people that call me."
"Dead serious. Because I have to manage by my moral code and my ethical code, how much I can take at once."
Unseen Attackers
Calderon said his first immigration court hearing inside the detention center came on June 27.
In Michigan, detention center hearings usually are held by immigration judges assigned to the Detroit Immigration Court, who often appear by video, said Kathryn Mattingly, a spokesperson for the immigration court system.
Calderon said he told the judge he didn't have a lawyer. He asked the judge if he could leave detention, maybe with a bond or with an ankle monitor.
"Then the prosecutor told the judge no. And then the judge told me he couldn't do it," Calderon said.
A few days later, he said, he was sitting outside in a patio area in the detention center when people approached.
"They came up to where I was sitting and then I felt a blow in my back. And when I tried to turn around and look, I felt another blow and I fell over."
He said he covered his face to protect himself, and he still doesn't know exactly who attacked him or why.
But based on what another detainee said, he believes the unseen attackers were Venezuelan gang members.
Law360 asked private prison company Geo Group to respond to Calderon's statements about bad food and the attack by other detainees.
Company spokesperson Christopher V. Ferreira referred questions to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
ICE didn't respond to requests for comment.
Calderon said he wasn't seriously injured in the attack, but the incident rattled him. He didn't want to be locked up anymore.
On July 16, Calderon arrived for another appearance before the judge at the immigration court within the lockup.
"Then he told me if I wanted to wait for my next court date, I would have to wait there, detained," Calderon recalled.
"Or I could ask for my deportation."
"Because of what had happened to me inside, I didn't want to stay in detention, because of that fear."
He accepted deportation. An online database confirms that on July 16, he was ordered removed from the United States.
He said he never got a chance to present the evidence from his asylum case: the photos of the corpse, the death certificate, the threatening messages.
He recalled that on the day that he was ordered deported, he was one of 10 detainees appearing before the judge. He said none had a lawyer.
A screenshot from a government website shows the deportation order against Ricardo Calderon. Law360 redacted Calderon's A-number, the number the government assigns to people in immigration cases. (Court Documents)
Flying Back in Chains
Calderon's deportation wouldn't take place for several more days. He said he was transferred to Virginia, then Louisiana, where a deportation plane took him to Honduras on July 28.
"To tell the truth, I was crying as I came back. I was crying as I came back because I couldn't believe I was returning once again to the place that I had left, knowing that they [the Honduran gang members] were going to hurt me."
"So I didn't know what I was going to do. And what's more, I was coming in chains. I came with feet and hands handcuffed, in chains."
"So I came sad because I had left my family behind, and I didn't know where I was going and where I would stay."
One of his wife's relatives picked him up from an airport in Honduras and took him to her home.
He recalled all of this — his family's journey to the U.S., his arrest, detention and deportation — during an audio interview from Honduras via WhatsApp.
Calderon said that during the weeks he was locked up in immigration detention, he told his son and daughter in phone calls that he was away working.
Now, he finally told them the truth.
"When I got here to Honduras, I told them to forgive me for not telling them, but now I'm in Honduras."
"And they started to cry, and told me they wanted to come here with me."
Around the same time, his wife was packing up his clothes and other belongings to send to him. "And the boy and the girl said that they could fit in the box too, and that we should send them here, that they wanted to be with me."
Ricardo Calderon and his daughter. Calderon was deported to Honduras on July 28. (Courtesy of Esther Calderon)
Calderon and his wife hadn't yet decided what to do. They were considering bringing her and the children back to Honduras, then finding a safer place to live somewhere else in the country, he said.
Law360 isn't publishing his city within Honduras in order to protect his safety.
In subsequent text messages in August and September, Calderon declined followup interviews, saying he was busy working.
In the Aug. 5 interview, he said his effort to stay in the United States might have turned out differently if he had a lawyer.
"I say it would have been good. Because the last lawyer who advised my wife said that I could have won my case. Because we had a good asylum claim."
He sees the situation as fundamentally unfair.
"It's an injustice that they're doing," he said.
--Additional reporting by Marco Poggio and Britain Eakin. Graphics by Jason Mallory. Editing by Haylee Pearl.
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