Inside ICE’s Only Contract with a Blue State

As part of a 287(g) contract between state officials and ICE, Massachusetts continues to release prisoners into deportation—even as state lawmakers look to ban other forms of ICE collaboration.

Luis Perez waited 53 and a half years to be freed from prison. When his day finally came, on Jan. 16, 2025, he could practically feel the warmth and quiet of his daughter’s guest bedroom, where he planned to live after his release, and he could practically taste the home-cooked yellow rice and fried pork awaiting him. He was 73 years old, a lifetime removed from the murder he committed as a teenager after moving from Cuba to Massachusetts. 

In prison, Perez became a licensed minister and earned a community college degree. He mentored hundreds of younger prisoners in whom he saw the same societal failures that led him to prison in the first place: “Broken homes,” he said. “These were kids who got involved in gangs, who did drugs, who did robberies. No one wants to go to the root of the cases, but it’s not cut and dry.”

Just prior to his release, Perez has gotten a glowing review from the state parole board, which, he says, unanimously supported him, and made him feel as though he’d cleared every possible hurdle to freedom and had nothing more to worry about. His pre-release plan, which called for him to move in with his daughter, was approved at the prison. 

The day he was set to leave, he said goodbye to incarcerated friends and spent some final, heavy moments in his tiny cell. He walked out to the fence at the edge of the prison yard. “I wanted to look at it because I thought that was the last fence I was ever going to see,” he said. 

Prison staff came to show him out: “They said, ‘Are you ready to go?’ I said yes. I was happy,” he said. “After so many years, it was going to be something different for me.” On his walk from the cell block to fresh air and freedom and family, he was ushered through a doorway, on the other side of which stood three men he’d never seen before: ICE officers. They handcuffed him and drove him in a van to a detention facility in Maine. 

He spent 10 days in Maine, he said, before ICE put him on a plane bound for Texas, where he spent almost seven months in detention, before being ordered into a van that drove him, over three days and more than 1,000 miles, to Tabasco, Mexico, a place he’d never been before, and where he knew no one. There, at last, he was released. He bought and ate his first mango in decades.

“I felt happy for my freedom, but sad—no family with me,” Perez said over the phone from Tabasco in late January. He had nowhere to go and knew nobody there, and so he spent his first two nights sleeping on a park bench. He woke up to stray dogs sniffing and barking at him; he hadn’t showered in a long time.

I normally wouldn’t print Perez’s full name, as many in his position are understandably nervous to draw attention to themselves and risk retribution by the government. But he told me he wants his name and story published, and that he wants to advocate for other immigrants still behind bars in Massachusetts. “I’ve lost everything. I’m old. I don’t want to be hiding anything,” he said. “So I speak up. If I die, I die.”

Read more at Boltsmag.org.