Born in Guatemala and brought to the state at 16 to reunite with his parents, Cesar Reyes has studied and worked in Oklahoma City since, learning to call it home.
By his late twenties, he found himself advising Gov. Kevin Stitt as part of an ad hoc Hispanic Advisory Council the governor had assembled following his 2022 reelection.
Reyes said he used to take off work as a local hotel manager to attend some of those Council meetings.
"There was an agenda that they needed to pass – the grocery taxes bill," Reyes explained. "I also remember school choice. And so we were, in a sense, a bridge to the Hispanic community whenever it came to our local government."
He and Stitt took a selfie together when the council first met last year, which Reyes posted on Facebook, celebrating Latinos' increased influence in the governor's policy agenda.
"He basically said that we share the same values," Reyes said. "And that he needed to be reelected again to protect those values of hard-working families... Of God-fearing people. And so we were there for him when he wanted our vote."
Halfway through the 2024 legislative session, Stitt signed House Bill 4156, criminalizing anyone in the state without legal immigration status. And while the new law has been blocked in federal court before it could be fully enforced, twice, Stitt's affirmation of it has been a blow to the trust of Latinos in the state who supported the governor.
By November, Reyes was urging Latinos on Facebook to keep calm amidst the launch of Stitt's initiative called Operation Guardian, which focuses on deporting unauthorized immigrants already in Oklahoma's corrections system.
This February, Reyes was deported back to Guatemala. He has no criminal record.
Bright lights, freezing temperatures and cold cut sandwiches
"I was in shock," Reyes said in a June phone interview. "I was like, what about my pending process? What about my petition that I filed before?"
He was detained at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, field office in Oklahoma City while holding his three-year-old son in his arms.
"The officer that detained me took me into his office – we were in a waiting room – and he goes, he said to me in Spanish, 'es tiempo de regresar a Guatemala," Reyes said. "Just like that. It was so cold. No sympathy. It was like, almost, if they enjoy doing this to you."
He said the news came after more than a decade of appealing an immigration judge's 2012 removal order, navigating the official process for permanent residency with the help of various attorneys, and regularly attending three-month check-ins.
The last time Reyes saw his wife, when she came to pick up their son, there was barely time for proper goodbyes.
"I told her my account information…how to pay the mortgage of the house and just logistics on how to keep afloat with the different responsibilities that I had," he said. "I told her that she needed to be strong and that she needed to take care of our child, and that I was going to be okay. "That I would fight. Wherever I was, for us to be together again."
An officer then handcuffed Reyes' wrist to his waist, and both his feet to each other, and walked him to a holding cell.
The next two weeks, he said, were spent in a blur of constant bright lights, freezing temperatures, cold-cut sandwiches, and bumpy transportation, first to federal detention centers in Texas and Louisiana, then finally, to Guatemala.
He described one of the holding rooms he was bunking in at the Bluebonnet Detention Facility in Anson, Texas, with dozens of other detained Latinos from across the U.S.
"Those rooms, they are set up to really, really cold temperatures," he said. "You don't have a sweater. You cannot ask the guards to put up the temperature because they said that they do it perfectly, and they know a lot of people were getting sick and they couldn't give you medicine when you first got there."
The morning Reyes was flown to Guatemala, by then waiting at the GEO Group-run Alexandia Staging Facility in Louisiana, he said the guards cooked biscuits and ate them in front of the handcuffed prisoners.
"Meanwhile, they gave us, I remember, it was like a cold sandwich for breakfast, but they wouldn't take your handcuffs off," Reyes said. "So you will have to basically reach over your knees… to give your sandwich a bite. It was so inhumane."
As federal immigration enforcement rolls out, state and local agencies rush to help
In Oklahoma and across the country, people like Reyes are being scooped up during their regular appointments with federal authorities, transported across state lines, and eventually deported, while unidentified, masked federal officers are increasingly detaining people at work, home and anywhere else they might be. Criminals or not.
Meanwhile, Stitt has doubled down on Operation Guardian and its intended promise.
"Tim Tipton's in charge of that, and he put together a plan to work with the Trump administration for the criminal element that's here illegally, that are actually committing crimes to get them out of our prisons," Stitt said at a press conference this month.
Tim Tipton is Oklahoma's Public Safety Commissioner. Another one of his goals is to increase state and local law enforcement partnerships with ICE through what are called 287 (g) agreements.
Named after their section in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1991, the agreement allows for the deputization of local officers to execute immigration-related warrants and arrests, and to flag individuals for federal transfer once they are booked into local jails.
And since late February, that collaboration has spiked, according to a public records analysis by KOSU and The Markup, a California-based data newsroom. Of the 17 agreements active in Oklahoma, 14 have been formed since late February.
Both The Markup and the nonprofit investigative news organization ProPublica report that ICE has entered into more than 500 such agreements nationwide since January. And while some states like Texas and Florida have entered more agreements in total, only Oklahoma has five agreements between statewide agencies and ICE.
There are three types of collaborative enforcement models local agencies can enter to help crack down on immigration:
Jail Enforcement Model – Deputizes jail officers to interrogate people booked for local and state charges about their immigration status and flag them for ICE for federal transfer and deportation. Detainees can be held for up to 48 hours for immigration processing purposes.
Warrant Officer Model – Deputizes corrections officers to serve known administrative immigration warrants without giving them the authority to interrogate people to determine their immigration status.
Task Force Model – Deputizes local police, sheriffs, and state agents to enforce federal immigration laws while working their regular duties. That means they have the authority to interrogate people's immigration status and make arrests of those they suspect are in violation anywhere they have jurisdiction. This model had been essentially discontinued since the 287 (g) program began in the late 90s, but Trump has revived its usage.
Tipton said the implementation of his agency's Task Model agreement with ICE is still in its early stages.
"We've got about 40 troopers who've now completed the training, then we have to go through a credentialing process that is just now really taking effect," he said.
And until the relevant training is complete, Tipton says immigration arrests are done by ICE agents, even though Oklahoma State Highway Patrol officers – and other state agents – may be in the field with them, trying to locate someone with a state warrant in the country without federal permission.
All state-level law enforcement agencies are in a 287 (g) agreement with ICE. No jurisdiction in Oklahoma is jurisdictionally exempt from immigration enforcement.
While Tipton said the highway patrol is training 40 or so officers, the State Department of Corrections, OSBI, and the State Bureau of Narcotics each have their own group of trainees under the various enforcement models.
What's not fully clear is whether the number of officers trained in these early stages allows the state to practically enforce immigration across its entire geographical area. KOSU is still awaiting public records from all five agencies to determine precisely how many officers each is training and under what model, for a clearer picture.
Still, the chances of immigration-related arrests or jail detainments increase as individual local jurisdictions enter into their own collaborative agreements, which are layered on top of the state jurisdiction.
One example of that is Comanche County. The Sterling and Fletcher Police departments entered into Task Force Model contracts in early March and May, respectively. But the County Sheriff's Office does not have a 287 (g) agreement with federal authorities. Neither does the county detention center.
That means a Comanche County sheriff's deputy making a traffic stop today has no authority to interrogate someone about their immigration status, but an ICE-certified police officer at either of those police departments does. Separately, if a certified state trooper makes a stop in Comanche County or anywhere else in the state, they would have the authority to conduct an interrogation and arrest.
The lack of a sheriff's office or detention center-level agreement makes for a gap in enforcement in Comanche County. Technically, the only way someone would end up in jail and flagged for ICE is if they are arrested by Sterling or Fletcher police, or by a state trooper.
Unless the agencies are working together and they choose to press the relevant charges as they see fit.
Why the focus on 'criminals' translates to innocent people being arrested
Tara Jorden de Lara is an immigration attorney based in Oklahoma City. She said there is one key component to how Trump's mass deportation policies are playing out, whether it's in Oklahoma or elsewhere.
"One of the most important things happening under the present administration that they're doing very successfully, I might add, is criminalizing unlawful presence, even though that's a civil system and a civil violation," de Lara said.
"In general, unlawful presence is not a criminal violation, but they've made it so that human beings are being called illegal…just because they don't have proper documentation, whereas that's not actually a crime," she said. "It may make you removable under our civil immigration system, but it doesn't mean that you have a criminal record."
Reyes, for example, was detained during his scheduled check-in solely under the jurisdiction of federal ICE agents executing a civil deportation order, which they can legally do.
There's also the state legislatures bit, with House Bill 4156.
"And they're not calling it unlawful presence," De Lara said. "They're calling it impermissible occupation, which is just a term of art that I think they invented."
And then, there are joint enforcement operations, like Tipton mentioned, which target known criminal unauthorized immigrants, resulting in what attorneys are calling "collateral arrests" of otherwise innocent bystanders.
As for Reyes and many other Latinos in Oklahoma, they've lost hope in any kind of "legal way of gaining legal immigration status for themselves or their families.
"I feel like I was let down by the system, by the country that I call home," Reyes said. "I knew I was not an American, but I was doing everything the right way."
Any trust he had in American guarantees of freedom, he said, was left at the immigration office when he had to say goodbye to his wife and baby son, blinded by tears and an uncertain future.
"I thought America was freedom," he said. "I thought America was the land where I could make my dreams come true."
But, Reyes said, Trump has dangerously divided the country. He pointed to recent riots in Los Angeles stirred by mass immigration arrests. Days later, people protested President Trump across the globe under the rallying cry "No King."
"I feel like everyone loves America now because people are destroying themselves," Reyes said.
