A San Antonio mechanic and his 9-year-old daughter have spent more than a month locked inside a South Texas detention facility after a routine traffic stop turned into an immigration arrest that swept up the little girl too. U.S. Representative Joaquin Castro is now demanding their release, saying Jesús Bracho was stopped by Texas state troopers simply arriving at work, and that federal agents later forced him to call his daughter Katherine out of hiding so she could be taken into custody alongside him.
According to Castro, Texas Department of Public Safety troopers stopped Bracho as he arrived at his job, then called in Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which took him into custody, as first reported by WOAI News 4 San Antonio. Before he was detained, Bracho reportedly told 9-year-old Katherine to go inside his boss's house, apparently trying to keep her out of the encounter. Castro says ICE agents ultimately forced Bracho to lure his daughter back out so they could take her into custody as well, leaving the child scared and unaware of where she was being taken.
Katherine is a student at Bonnie Ellison Elementary, a public school in San Antonio's Northside Independent School District that serves more than 750 students in Pre-K through fifth grade, according to Northside ISD. Castro says Bracho, who works as a mechanic, has no criminal record. The pair have now been held for over a month at what Castro's office describes as the Dilley trailer prison, the sprawling family detention facility south of San Antonio.
A Facility Built to Hold Thousands of Families
The site in question is the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, a 2,400-bed complex that federal immigration officials reopened last year under a five-year contract with private prison operator CoreCivic, according to The Texas Tribune. The facility had previously been shuttered before being brought back online to serve as a primary site for detaining migrant families.
Conditions inside have drawn scrutiny well before the Bracho family's detention. A March report from the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights documented that national ICE detention populations surged 75% over the prior year to roughly 73,000 people, straining facilities like Dilley and fueling complaints of contaminated food and a lack of overnight medical care. Castro's office has raised similar concerns before; Hoodline previously reported on his push to track a sick baby dumped at the border following a Dilley detention, and on his accusations that Texas National Guard troops were working inside the facility to assist federal deportation efforts.
State Troopers' Expanding Role in Immigration Stops
Castro says the traffic stop that led to Bracho's arrest was no accident of policy — he has publicly stated that Governor Greg Abbott ordered DPS troopers to help ICE arrest people and children in the community. That directive traces back to Abbott's Operation Lone Star 2.0, under which state police recorded more than 3,100 arrests tied to federal immigration violations in just the first eight months of 2025, according to the Polk County Enterprise. The legal groundwork for troopers initiating these stops was cemented in May 2026, when the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted a stay letting Texas Senate Bill 4 take full effect statewide, authorizing state and local police to arrest people suspected of entering the state without authorization and hand them to federal authorities, as reported by FOX 7 Austin.
The Bracho case is not an isolated one for San Antonio-area families. In May, Hoodline reported on the Alamo Heights bus stop arrests, in which ICE agents detained two elementary school siblings and their stepmother near a neighborhood bus stop before transferring them to Dilley, prompting Castro to intervene. A similar pattern played out in Tempe that same month, when a mother and son were detained by ICE ahead of the boy's school promotion day and sent to the same South Texas processing center.
Data Backs Castro's Claim on Criminal Record
Castro's assertion that Bracho has no criminal record fits broader national patterns documented by researchers. Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse found that roughly 70.8% of people held in ICE detention nationwide as of April had no criminal conviction, a trend that has climbed alongside expanded enforcement, according to Texas Public Radio. Castro has called on ICE to immediately release Jesús and Katherine, and has urged the agency to stop what he describes as fueling former President Trump and Governor Abbott's mass deportation machine.
The demand lands just two days after civil rights leaders, including Texas Civil Rights Project President Rochelle Garza, convened a public People's Hearing at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio to collect community testimony on the local toll of joint state and federal immigration enforcement. At that same hearing, San Antonio Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones criticized aggressive enforcement tactics, pointing to the trauma inflicted on local schoolchildren when parents are detained during morning commutes or routine traffic stops. It remains unclear what specific protocol, if any, governs how ICE handles the detention of minors when a parent is taken into custody during a traffic stop.
