A Venezuelan family who followed the rules, booked their CBP One appointments, and quietly settled near the border has now walked away from the United States entirely. After a month locked inside the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, their 14-year-old daughter, they say, spiraled into deep depression and began vomiting repeatedly. Between the detention stint and what they describe as arrests and raids after release, the parents say they saw enough. They bought one-way tickets and took their daughter back to Venezuela.
The family had done what they believed the system asked of them. They scheduled an appointment through the CBP One mobile app, were paroled into the U.S. in February 2024, and moved to Las Cruces, New Mexico, while their immigration case wound its way through the courts. At a June 2025 hearing in downtown El Paso, an immigration judge dismissed the case. According to reporting by The Texas Tribune, ICE agents arrested the family as they stepped out of the courtroom and transferred them to the Dilley detention complex.
In the background, the federal courts were moving in a very different direction. Earlier this spring, a federal judge ruled that the Trump administration unlawfully revoked parole for many people who entered through the CBP One app and ordered the government to unwind those terminations. U.S. District Judge Allison D. Burroughs issued a 25-page memorandum that broadly covers app users who were paroled between May 16, 2023, and January 19, 2025, a group that government notices last year said numbered in the hundreds of thousands. The opinion is publicly available on CourtListener.
Life Inside Dilley
Conditions at Dilley have long drawn scrutiny. Firsthand accounts and smuggled letters from children held there described frightened kids missing school, spotty medical care, and a constant atmosphere of fear, according to reporting by ProPublica. The facility is run by private prison company CoreCivic under an ICE contract and was reopened in 2025, a move documented at the time by the Associated Press. Advocates have repeatedly pointed to those letters and other complaints as they push for tighter oversight of family detention.
Why They Left
After a month in custody, the family says they were released, dropped at a bus station in Laredo on July 5, and made their way back to Las Cruces. There, they were told to check in with ICE and were given a new court date in June 2027. On paper, that meant another formal chance to argue their case. In practice, the parents said they were done taking chances.
"As soon as we got out, I told my husband, we’re leaving," Carolina said, according to The Texas Tribune. The family later flew through Miami and then boarded a flight to Venezuela, using the one-way tickets they had decided were safer than another date in immigration court.
They are not the only ones weighing that kind of calculation. Immigration-court arrests have hung over the border region for more than a year. Researcher Joséph Gunther’s analysis found that El Paso ranked second nationally for arrests linked to immigration court hearings. His study, which cross-references EOIR and ICE data, estimates thousands of likely courthouse arrests and shows how a scheduled court appearance can function as what critics call an enforcement trap. For families already on edge, the choice can look stark: gamble on a court win years down the line or get out while they still control the exit.
The recent court ruling could eventually restore legal status for many CBP One entrants. For this family, that potential relief came too late. The trauma of detention and the fear that trailed them out of Dilley left, in their view, only one option: go home. Their story highlights how enforcement strategies and courthouse practices can quietly push people out of a system that was supposed to offer them a shot at staying.
