Editor’s Note: Within days of his inauguration in 2025, Donald Trump began fulfilling the promise he made during his 2024 campaign to “mass deport” anyone in the country without proper documentation. Since then, his administration’s immigration enforcement efforts have extended to those with legal U.S. residency, including U.S. citizens. This has led not just to mass deportations, but also to racial profiling, concentration camps, and even death. This fall, Good Faith Media is highlighting those whose lives have been upended by these activities.
Mohammad Nazeer Paktiawal
After being one of the few Afghans to make it out of Kabul after the U.S. withdrawal in 2021, Mohammad Paktiawal found work at a Dallas-area halal bakery and cafe. It was a far cry from his decade as an interpreter for the U.S. military in Paktika Province, one of the most dangerous regions in Afghanistan.
Paktiawal and his family were resettled in the U.S. with support from Catholic Charities. He had filed an asylum petition, completed his first asylum interview, and his case was pending when ICE detained him in front of his children as he prepared to take them to school in March of this year. As he was being taken away, his wife told the officers that he relied on an inhaler to live and attempted to give it to them before they drove away.
Later that day, he was admitted to Parkland Hospital for shortness of breath. At 9:10 a.m. the next day, he was pronounced dead.
Immigration officials later claimed that Paktiawal had previously been arrested for SNAP fraud. They also claimed not to have any record that he had assisted the U.S. military in the war in Afghanistan. Houston Public Media, however, reported obtaining a certificate Paktiawal received from the U.S. Army thanking him for his “sacrifice and service.”
In August, Dallas County released an autopsy report that stated Paktiawal died “as the result of anaphylaxis complicating acute asthma exacerbation.” He was 41 years old.
Rumeysa Ozturk
Rumeysa Ozturk was a 30-year-old graduate student at Tufts University when immigration officials detained her in March 2025. She was walking to an Iftar dinner. Ozturk said that in the car on the way to a Massachusetts detention center, officers told her, “We are not monsters,” and “We do what the government tells us.”
Later that evening, she was flown to a detention center in Louisiana. Two days later, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that Ozturk’s student visa had been revoked because of her Pro-Palestinian activism.
Amid fears that the government planned to deport her to Turkey, where she is from, a U.S. district judge ordered immigration officials to keep her in the U.S. She was held in detention for 45 days, most of which was in Louisiana. In May 2025, a federal judge ordered her released on bail.
Ozturk completed her Ph.D. in February of this year and returned home. In a statement to the ACLU, she said that the “state imposed violence and hostility” she received in the United States was simply a result of her co-signing an op-ed advocating for Palestinian rights.
Dr. Ozturk became a public face for the Trump administration’s efforts to revoke the legal status of international students in U.S. colleges and universities. According to Reuters, by January of 2026 the State Department had revoked at least 100,000 student visas. A State Department Instagram post last week celebrated “250,000 visa revocations.”
Omar Bautista Carvajal
In October 2025, Omar Carvajal was on his way to his English class in Chicago when he was detained by ICE. He had a work permit, an active asylum case, and, according to a CBS report, was deemed a low safety risk by the United States. While he was in detention, an immigration judge denied his asylum and ordered him deported to Honduras, despite the fact that he is from Colombia.
In July 2026, after Carvajal’s appeal to his order to be sent to Honduras was denied, he was deported to Colombia. Citing the loss of income to take care of their family, Carvajal’s wife and his two youngest children self-deported to Colombia to be with him. Their oldest child, Juan, stayed behind because he feels his best hope for a future lies in the United States.
“I’m alone,” Juan told CBS. “I don’t have my family, who were the people that every day was supporting me in every single part of my life, my happiness and making my dreams came true.”
Read more in this series.
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