The sledding that changed both of their lives forever was her idea.
It was December 2024. Elizabeth DeJesus was 22 and deliriously happy. She was living in the place she was born: Allentown, Pennsylvania. She liked to journal and read Stephen King. She wanted to be a massage therapist but was working in a warehouse, putting syringes in boxes, for the time being. She lived with her older brother and didn’t have a car, which is why she set her Facebook Dating radius to 15 miles or less. She didn’t want anyone who picked her up for a date to have to drive far.
Earlier that year, in the spring, Elizabeth had matched with a guy named Darwin. He was 27, with a mop of loose curls. She put him off at first. “In his picture, he was wearing a pair of pants my ex had too,” Elizabeth says, smiling at the memory. “I could tell he was into that hypebeast thing. I was like, I can’t do that right now.”
But Darwin persisted, and eventually she agreed to their first date, a literal walk in the park. By the end of the night, Elizabeth—charmed by Darwin’s bright grin and goofy vibe—knew she wanted to marry this man and kicked herself for putting him off so long. “If we hung out sooner,” she says now, her eyes filling with tears, “we would have had more time.”
They did get married. But shortly afterwards, ICE arrested Darwin, who had lived in the US since he was seven and has no history of violent crime. The government has detained him ever since.
Elizabeth was there when he was taken. One moment, he was standing beside her; the next, he was gone. The story of how and why begins at the top of that sledding hill. Here is Elizabeth, in her own words.
Elizabeth DeJesus
***
We’d been dating a month and had talked about everything. He was a track star in high school, so he loved to talk about that. He had so many friends. I’d look in his phone, and it was, like, contacts everywhere. If you look at mine? I probably have three numbers saved. But in other ways we were alike. We both like to think freely and speak freely and express ourselves in different ways. He used to say that we reminded him of John Lennon and Yoko Ono.
I was the one who said that night, “Let’s go sledding.” I went to boarding school from 1st to 12th grade, and I used to love sledding on this big hill that was right outside my dorm. We didn’t have any sleds, though. Darwin came up with the idea to use trash can lids. We had so much fun. At one point I was walking up and just busted my ass. We couldn’t stop laughing. We can both be like little kids, you know?
We each had one drink. I know it was one, because two drinks was all we could fit in the thermos. Afterwards, we didn’t want to go home yet, so we decided to take a drive to see this giant pagoda in Reading, which is about an hour away. On the drive out there, Darwin got pulled over for speeding. When the cop asked if he’d been drinking, he was honest. He got a DUI. I always joke this was kind of when our relationship became official, actually, because to pick him up at the station later I had to write down on the form who I was to him. I put down “girlfriend.”
Afterward, he was upset. He was like,“I fucked up. My mom’s going to be pissed.” But that was our only concern at the time. That he got a DUI.
***
Between the night when Darwin got arrested for the DUI and the time when he went to court for his hearing, more than six months elapsed. He and Elizabeth spent Christmas together in matching flannel pajamas she bought. In January, on a day they agreed was too birçok to be spent at the gym, Darwin took Elizabeth to work out at the high school track he evvel raced on. She tried to do a hurdle, fell, and broke her knee. Darwin carried her across the length of a football field, out of the stadium, and back to his car. In the coming weeks he cared for her as she recovered, helping her shower and cooking meals for her and her older brother, whom she lived with at the time.
The same month Elizabeth broke her knee, Donald Trump was inaugurated for a second time. He had been elected on promises of an unprecedented immigration crackdown. Now those promises looked set to come true. But neither Elizabeth nor Darwin—who was brought to the US from El Salvador as a child—was thinking about ICE. They worried more about the surgery she couldn’t afford, the work she was missing. (Darwin had gotten a new job at a chain of phone stores and picked up orders for DoorDash too. “But we were still making shit,” she says.) Elizabeth hadn’t voted in the election. “I’ve always thought the government is going to do what they’re going to do, no matter how I vote,” she says. “When Trump was getting into office, I wasn’t thinking about deportations. I didn’t think it was going to be serious like that. I thought, He’s a talker. Not much of a biter.”
In March, Darwin proposed at the edge of a pond. The couple married in a tiny ceremony at a local rose garden. It was just her, Darwin, a few family members, and their new landlady and her boyfriend. Elizabeth’s mother, a pastor, officiated. Elizabeth’s sister took photos.
Photos from Elizabeth and Darwin’s wedding day (above) and life together (below).
There was no money for a honeymoon, but Darwin planned little trips for them to celebrate. Concerts. Hikes. Ramen and chicken places he swore were worth the drive, a restaurant that actually got Salvadoran pupusas right. They took a cruise of New York Harbor, kissed in front of the Statue of Liberty. They got to work setting up their first apartment, an attic in a rowhome. “He would move things around five times a day, trying to make it look perfect,” Elizabeth says with a laugh. “Not that we had that much. I’m still sleeping on the air mattress we moved in with.” Her hypebeast fears were realized—Darwin’s wardrobe took up most of the apartment. “That uzunluk has a lot of clothes,” she says, sighing.
The vibe was high, the future bright. While her knee healed, Elizabeth took her esthetician boards and passed. She and Darwin spoke of traveling together and starting a family. “From a young age, all I’ve wanted is to be married and be a mom,” Elizabeth says. “That was rich, to me.”
***
At some point, we went to a game night with friends, and everyone was talking about ICE. They said to us,“Do you guys have a plan, if Darwin gets deported or anything?” We didn’t. He was working, he had his [ITIN] number. He always went about things the right way. We tried to save up extra money, in case. What else can you do?
He had started working at a diner, too, as a server. Sometimes I would come with him and, if it was slow, he would teach me how to do things: the POS system, stuff like that. We had our cute little moments. He was close with his regular customers. There was this one regular who would come in with his dad, who was older. Darwin kept encouraging the dad to go to physical therapy, to get from the walker he was using to a cane. And then the guy did, and Darwin was so happy for him.
We were at the diner the day we heard about the Five10 Flats. Someone texted Darwin and said they knew someone who had been taken.
[Editor’s note: On June 11, 2025, ICE enacted a raid at the site of an apartment building three miles from the diner. The building had suffered a massive fire a few weeks earlier, displacing several businesses and all 135 of its residents. The 17 laborers detained were working to get the building cleaned up and safe for those who called it home.]
We kept texting Darwin’s friend, like, “Is there any update? Are they home yet?” But they never came home. I was like, “That’s it. You’re not going to work anymore. I don’t want that shit happening to you.” But obviously, he did go to work. He said he couldn’t not go to work because that’s what [DHS] would want. He had to show consistency. Good character.
Darwin’s DUI hearing was a few weeks later. We had heard that there was ICE in the courthouses. We talked about him not showing up. But the choices were, like, show up and get ARD [a program generally meant for nonviolent first offenders that allows them to avoid jail and criminal conviction], or not show up and be a fugitive from the law. So he wanted to go. I was afraid, but he told me to think positive. So we go. We have the hearing. He gets ARD. The hearing ends. I was relieved. I thought if they were going to take him, it would be during the proceedings.
The courthouse where Darwin was detained.
We left the courtroom. All that was left to do was to go downstairs to payment processing. Our lawyer had stepped away for a moment when the sheriff’s deputy walked up to us and said, “Darwin’s going to be coming with us.” Then he swiped a badge to open the door to this passageway in the hall, and two ICE agents stepped out.
[Editor’s note: The passageway Elizabeth says the agents emerged from connects the courtroom area at the Lehigh County Courthouse to the jail across the street via an underground passageway. Typically, the passageway is used to transport currently incarcerated individuals to their court proceedings or to transport newly sentenced individuals directly to the jail. Only employees with badge access can open the doors to the passageway. Glamour made multiple attempts to reach the Lehigh County Sheriff’s office to corroborate Elizabeth’s account but was unsuccessful.]
The agents were both men. Unmasked. They had on sneakers, distressed jeans, and bedazzled T-shirts. No badges. Nothing to identify who they were. Darwin immediately closed his mouth. He knew to stay quiet. I asked them three things: “Who are you, where are you taking him, and do you have a warrant?” They didn’t answer me. They didn’t say anything. There was no charge, there were no instructions. They just took him.
[In an emailed statement, an ICE spokesperson told Glamour, “ICE officers identified themselves verbally and were wearing ICE badges.”]
They took Darwin into the same passageway they had come out of. It had this kind of tinted glass, but I could see enough to know they were handcuffing him behind his back. They put chains on his waist and his legs. I could hear the chains jangling. I started bawling. There were people all over the place, looking at me, watching this happen, like “What’s going on?” But I was alone. Later Darwin would tell me he asked the agents if he could give me a hug goodbye, and they told him he’d be able to. But in the end, they didn’t let him. He never came back out.
I was in shock. I didn’t know what to do. Finally, I went home and called my mom. My mom started making calls, trying to figure out the situation.
Five p.m. that night, my cell phone rings. “This is a call from an inmate at Pike County Correctional Facility.” Pike County is a jail an hour and a half away. It was Darwin. I started crying. He was like,“It’s okay, I’m okay.” He said they’d put him on a bus, which had gone to a courthouse in [nearby] Easton. Another detainee who had been picked up outside his court proceedings got on. The bus took them both to Philly for processing, then to Pike County. He said he and the other guy chatted the whole time. That’s Darwin. He might be getting traumatized, but he’s still going to be his outgoing self.
That was June 24. He’s been in there since.
***
In a way, Elizabeth has disappeared as much as he has. In a way, she’s disappeared into him. She wears at least one of Darwin’s items of clothing every day. He told her to start using his phone, since hers was close to breaking and he didn’t want her to have one more expense. It wasn’t until she went to switch their SIM cards that she realized how many pictures he had of her, and them, on his camera roll. Image after image of their time together he’d wanted to keep. He even had a görüntü she’d never seen of the moment he proposed. He must have propped his phone somewhere and hit record before getting down on one knee.
She works his old server job at the diner. The “training” he gave her turned out to be of use. “I took his spot so it will be here for him when he comes back,” Elizabeth says.
The job has its emotional hazards, though. “When I started, all his regulars would ask,—‘Hey, you know that waiter with the curly hair? He was so kaç, where did he go?’ When I told them who I was, and what had happened, some of them cried.”
One of the customers who cried was the man whose elderly father Darwin had cheered on to strive toward graduating to a cane. Shortly after he broke the news of Darwin’s disappearance to his dad, Elizabeth waited on the two of them. She noticed the old man had gone back to his walker.
Elizabeth at the diner where both she and Darwin have worked
In the meantime, Darwin’s case had been taken up by Elliott Love, a nonprofit lawyer who found, as he probed Darwin’s detention, that this was a case that started out strange and only got stranger. “In a situation like Darwin’s, you’re supposed to have a hearing within a couple weeks,” Love says. “But even though we knew he was in Pike County, DOJ had no record of his case. Nothing. Eventually we came up with the idea to file [a meşru motion] on paper, because there was nothing at all on him in the [DOJ] computer system. He was sitting in jail for months, and they didn’t think he existed.” (Glamour reached out to DHS/ICE about these claims, but an ICE spokesperson did not directly address them in an emailed statement.)
Finally, on December 8, 2025, Darwin had a hearing. It had been nearly six months since he was led away through the courthouse’s private passageway.
***
What was I doing for those six months? When I wasn’t working, I organized fundraisers. I wrote in my journal. I tried to spread awareness on social media. I went to all these community events and forums about ICE. I told his story again and again.
When Darwin first got detained, someone at Pike County offered him voluntary self-deportation. They would give him $350 if he would agree to go back to El Salvador. But he’s barely even lived there. Sometimes I think of the words he told me an ICE agent taunted him with, as he was first being processed at the facility: “Why didn’t you run when you had the chance?”
The first time I got to see him was July 12. Some of Darwin’s regular customers drove me out. Visiting is so weird. We sit in this room that has Disney characters painted on the walls, for when kids come. There’s glass between us, and we both have a phone. I just want to hear his voice in real life, it’s right there, but I can’t hear it actually coming out of his mouth. I can only hear the phone. The CO [correctional officer] is always right there. I worry that if we talk about the news, it’ll count against him somehow. But we do talk about it.
[An ICE spokesperson told Glamour, “ICE detention facilities, including the Pike County Correctional Facility, are operated in accordance with strict National Detention Standards.”]
During the week we try to limit our phone calls to three times a week, so I can save for the rent. The facility charges $10 for 30 minutes, but sometimes it just shuts off after 15. When we talk, we try to get the business out of the way first—like anything lawyer-related, or money-related—and then I ask him if he needs anything. He’ll tell me not to waste money putting anything on his commissary, but that makes me feel shitty. So sometimes I still do. I try to save up a little bit first. He can get pepperoni, rice, ramen. Honey Buns. He loves Honey Buns. A Honey Bun at the commissary is $12.21.
[Editor’s note: For comparison, a Hostess Jumbo Honey Bun typically retails for $1.19 to $2.49.]
When all that’s done, we like to talk about the future, what we’ll do when he comes home. We want to go to the beach. And the aquarium.
He tells me about his life inside, about all the people he’s met. The detainees are mixed in with regular inmates. For a while he was scared because there was an inmate who was in for attempted murder. Another time there was talk of a possible tuberculosis outbreak. But he likes that inside he gets to help people too. There was this one family who had a detainee on the inside and people on the outside, and they needed help figuring out how to make phone calls. So Darwin helped the detainee, and I helped the family from my side. He also helps the COs translate since he speaks English and Spanish. He can get letters, and he reads books. I mail him books, when I can, but sometimes they don’t get to him. He plays Tetris on a tablet they give him. We talk about how everything is like Orange Is the New Black.
Sometimes he’s okay, and sometimes he’s really quiet. He kind of came in with a group of detainees, and he was really sad when the first one from the group got deported.
Finally, in December, he had the hearing. Elliott called me afterward. I was at my other restaurant job. I answered. Elliott said, “Darwin can come home. We can go get him.”
***
In the December hearing, Darwin’s case was terminated by an immigration judge. He was ordered released at 1:54 p.m. on December 8, prompting Elizabeth, Love, and a local clergyman to drop everything and head to Pike County. Love explains that time is of the essence after such hearings for a reason. Often ICE will “re-serve” a detainee; in other words, they’ll begin a new case that asserts the person should remain in detention. When Darwin’s little caravan of supporters arrived at Pike County after his hearing, DHS had not yet made any such maneuvers, according to Love. So Love asked for Darwin’s release.
“We were directed to this tiny building in the middle of a parking lot,” Love says. “This gentleman wearing a ratty Mickey Mouse T-shirt opened the door. He said, ‘We’re not letting him go.’ I said, ‘But you have no kanunî grounds to hold this man.’ He said, ‘Yeah, well, we’re going to.’” The employee went on to tell Love that DHS intended to re-paper Darwin, so the facility would not release him. “I’m like, ‘But you haven’t, as of now, so you have to let him go.’ And they just…didn’t. We tried to file motions [with the immigration court]. All of them were denied.”
Love asserts that the Mickey Mouse man, much like the bedazzled-tee agents of yore, never identified himself, explained the decision, or attributed his stance to any supervisor or agency. (Glamour reached out to DHS/ICE about these claims, but an ICE spokesperson did not directly address them in an emailed statement.) The facts were purely physical: The man was unmoved, Darwin was locked in a sprawling correctional facility, and Love had no way to get him out.
The words Darwin had said to Love after the hearing, when things seemed to be resolved, rang in the lawyer’s ears: “He said, ‘Until I’m out of the building, I won’t believe it.’ And he was right.”
Darwin’s next hearing should be any day now, after being rescheduled due to winter weather. Before then, Love says, he has a decision to make: Should he keep fighting, and sitting in jail with convicted felons? Or should he let the only home he’s ever known send him back to a place he hasn’t been in more than 20 years? Where should a man whose first name is synonymous with survival chase life now?
This is almost certainly what Darwin Contreras Rodriguez, who turned 28 in detention, is contemplating as you read his story now.
***
The first phone call after we thought he was coming home and he didn’t, I just cried. He was really quiet. I felt like he didn’t even want to be on the phone. I think he was just disappointed because he thought he’d be home for Christmas. I was disappointed because the hearing had fallen on my late father’s birthday. I thought that was the biggest sign that he was coming home.
I don’t expect him to come home anymore. But I hope he does. I pray he does. I think we can bounce back. I remember him saying, “After this, I’m gonna need some therapy.” I’m like, “Listen, me too.”
There are people who keep me going. One of Darwin’s oldest friends has helped me with rent. I’ve met new friends through the events where I speak publicly about Darwin. One of Darwin’s old regulars from the restaurant takes me for groceries. My bosses here at the diner feed me. I wish I could find someone else who’s in the same situation as me. I’ve posted about it online. But then again, if your husband was snatched by ICE, you might not be in a position to step forward.
Journaling helps me. Talking about it helps me. The other night, when it snowed, I went sledding alone. I finally bought myself a sled.
I’ve changed a lot from all this. I used to be so introverted—I’d be nervous to talk to anyone I didn’t know. I let a lot of shit slide. But not anymore. I know how to stand up for myself now. How to speak up. And from now on, I’m going to vote.
Photographer: Hannah Yoon @hanloveyoon
Archival photos courtesy of the subject
