A petition is calling for Lyons, Illinois resident Abel Orozco’s right to due process after advocates say he was unlawfully arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in January near his home. Grassroots group Organized Communities Against Deportations (OCAD), alongside other immigrant rights organizations, are amplifying his case as part of a broader fight against unlawful ICE detentions, including the arrests of Orozco and twenty-one others now named in a federal class action lawsuit.
On the morning of January 26, forty-seven-year-old Abel Orozco headed out to pick up tamales before he and his wife went to Sunday mass. On his way back, ICE agents pulled him over and detained him without showing a judicial warrant, leaving his family to make sense of the chaos that followed.
It was later revealed, in a motion filed March 13, that federal agents were looking for another family member that morning. Yet three months later, Abel remains in a detention center in Indiana.
In an interview with the Weekly, Orozco’s wife Yolanda reflected on the life they’d built together. With just a small truck, a trailer, and a chainsaw, Abel built a life from the ground up, literally. For more than twenty years, he climbed trees across Chicagoland, running his own tree service company and supporting his wife and four children.
In one of the photos from a family album Yolanda keeps on the dining room table, Abel is perched high up in the trees and tied in by rope, boots braced against the bark, with his hands gripping a chainsaw, grinning.
Abel and Yolanda immigrated from Zacatecas, Mexico in the mid 1990s and Abel immediately started working for a tree cutting company and quickly learned the skills required to be a climbing arborist—the same skills he would hone to start his own tree cutting business years later.
Over time, as he continued to grow his business, Abel was able to purchase bigger trucks, such as a cherry picker, so he no longer had to climb trees by rope. The old, used mulcher was also eventually replaced with a new one better able to handle Abel’s expanding company, which serviced the South, West, and North Sides of Chicago, and even worked jobs in Indiana.
As Abel’s company grew, so did his family. They eventually welcomed a third and fourth child. The Orzoco family have lived in their single-story brick home in Lyons for over twenty years after they became first time home buyers in 2004.
“I have that day ingrained in me because of the sadness I felt when trick-or-treaters knocked on my door and I did not have candy to give them because we had just moved in,” Yolanda shared.
Jobs continued to pick up for Abel as he successfully managed and grew his company. He’d eventually be in position to hire eight to ten employees. All in all he’s been running his company for over twenty years.
Abel worked nearly seven days a week, typically waking up at 6am every day to prepare for the day’s work ahead. To begin his day, Abel’s first stop was always what he called “la yarda”—the gravel lot where he parked his work trucks overnight.
According to Yolanda, Abel treated his employees with respect and dignity, buying lunch for them almost every day.
When the work day was over for his employees, Abel would rush home and shower before he would head out again and conduct estimates for potential clients. By the time Abel would get home, it would often be 9 or 10pm.
Despite Abel’s dedication to his work, he always made time for his family, his wife said. He would rest most Sundays, unless he had a call for service. Even then, he made sure to schedule work on Sundays either early in the morning so that he could make sure he goes to church with Yolanda, or later in the evening once church was over and after sharing something to eat.
Abel loved hosting a backyard carne asada, or cookout, with his children and three grandchildren on warmer Sundays in the summer. He would often invite extended family and his neighbors over as well.
If Abel was not firing up the grill on any given Sunday, he and Yolanda had their favorite go-to restaurants.
Yolanda would let Abel know when she wanted to go out and he would make sure to make time to be able to share those moments with her. At times that meant Abel would start his day earlier than 6am so that he can get out of work early enough to spend time with his wife.
Yolanda said that an intense sense of heat rushed throughout her body that Sunday morning, at the sight of ICE agents.
She checked to make sure her door was locked and then alerted the household about ICE surrounding her property.
“I called my husband twice, he did not answer me. I sent him a message to see if he would see it,” Yolanda said.
A scramble to lock all the doors and close the window curtains ensued as Yolanda urged her family to get dressed and grab any documentation that may keep them from being detained by ICE.
According to Yolanda’s adult son Eduardo “Eddie” Orozco, ICE officials banged on the door and surrounded the home. It sounded like the armed men outside were trying to break his door in, Eddie recalled. He called the Lyons police department and pleaded with them to come quickly.
Eddie went outside to confront the ICE officials and began recording the interaction.
“What are you doing here? Get out of my house,” Eddie said. “You got my door open. Are you guys knocking or just trying to knock it down?”
One of the ICE agents approached Eddie as he began talking and stuck his hand out in front of Eddie’s phone to block him from recording while he demanded Eddie to identify himself.
Eddie refused to comply with these unlawful orders. “Don’t worry about my name, you gotta get up outta here dude,” he said. “It’s time for you guys to go.”
The video shows Eddie demanding names and badge numbers from the ICE officials, at which point the agents, without answering, start to leave the property.
Still recording, Eddie followed the ICE officials down his block as they made their way towards unmarked cars.
The video shows officials getting inside one of them. Eddie approached the car and thought he could hear his father yelling from inside the car. As Eddie stood near the rear left passenger side window the car ran over Eddie’s left foot. He said he heard the bones in his foot crunch.
Eddie dropped to the ground, falling on his back as he screamed in agonizing pain, the video shows.
Lyons police showed up to the scene about ten minutes after Eddie’s initial call. He did not tell the police the armed men were ICE officials because they had not identified themselves as such, though the video shows ‘ICE’ lettering on some of their uniforms.
A sergeant and two police officers arrived at the scene with no sense of urgency. The recording shows Eddie captured the officers walking up to him, without their patrol lights on, as he laid on the road after having his foot run over.
The sergeant asked Eddie if he needed medical attention. Eddie screamed, “Yes! I just had my foot run over by that car.” He told Eddie to calm down, claiming there was no reason to be yelling since he was standing close enough to hear him.
Though the video the Weekly had access to cuts off at this point, in an interview Eddie stated that when the ambulance came to treat his foot, he also saw paramedics tending to his father, as the ICE officials had not left the scene.
Eddie did not know it at the time, but it would be the eight minute video he recorded during those brave moments he tried to defend his father and family that led to the National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC) reaching out to the Orozco family.
A class action lawsuit filed on behalf of twenty-two people by NIJC alleged that Abel and others were subject to unlawful arrests by the Trump administration. One of the ICE violations in the lawsuit included the unlawful arrest of a U.S. citizen who was later released.
The arrests allegedly violate a 2022 agreement between community groups and the federal government that set limits on how ICE can carry out “collateral arrests” —the detention of individuals who are not the primary targets of enforcement actions. The agreement, which stemmed from a lawsuit over 2018 immigration raids, applies to six Midwestern states under ICE’s Chicago field office: Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Missouri, Kentucky, and Wisconsin.
Abel does not have a criminal record. Of the other twenty-one unlawfully arrested, some have traffic violations and one has a DUI, but no one has other convictions.
“ Every time you hear from this [Trump] administration about how they’re rounding up gang members, terrorists, the worst of the worst, you need to take a dose of reality and realize that you need to deep dig deeper to understand who exactly they are arresting,” said NIJC Associate Director of Litigation Mark Flemming, who is working on Abel’s case.
ICE did not respond to requests for comment.
According to the lawsuit, ICE officials were looking for one of Abel’s sons, who is decades younger and has the same first name. Despite Abel being in the process of applying for a green card, ICE reinstated a decades-old removal order tied to a brief visit Abel made to see his ailing father in Mexico years ago.
In the motion filed, Abel is asking the court to cancel his deportation order and instead allow his case to go through the normal legal process—starting with a Notice to Appear before an immigration judge. Abel had been in the process of applying to obtain lawful permanent residency prior to his arrest.
Abel was the family’s main breadwinner. Money immediately became tight following Abel’s warrantless arrest and eventual transfer to an Indiana detention facility. Utility bills and mortgage payments began to pile up, forcing the Orozco family to seek assistance from their church, family, friends, and neighbors. Fortunately for the family, loved ones and immigration advocacy groups have stepped up to provide support in their time of crisis.
A few raffles organized by Yolanda and assistance from the Community and Economic Development Association of Cook County (CEDA) have helped keep the lights on, keep food in the fridge, and a roof over the Orozco family for now.
On March 17, Yolanda and her son Eddie arrived at NIJC and walked into a press conference announcing the federal lawsuit filed on behalf of Abel and twenty-one others arrested by ICE without judicial warrants. Despite her nerves and ongoing pain from breast cancer, Yolanda spoke publicly for the first time about her husband’s arrest, describing him as a hardworking man with no criminal record, a father and provider who should never have been taken. When she could no longer stand, Eddie stepped in.
“He is somebody to look up to,” Eddie told reporters. “He is an honest man, and he should not have been arrested.”
At that same press conference, OCAD organizer Xanat Sobrevilla reflected on what this moment represented: a community pushing back. “It’s beautiful to see that in the moments of stress and most vulnerability with this administration, that we can still be a resource and a network of communities that allow us to defend ourselves and protect our constitutional rights.”
José Abonce is the senior program manager for the Chicago Neighborhood Policing Initiative and a freelance reporter who focuses on public safety, politics, race, and urban planning issues. He is an apprentice with The Investigative Project on Race and Equity and a recent New York University Arthur L. Carter School of Journalism graduate.