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Katherin Guillen-Acosta’s journey to a federal immigration detention center began with a Durham County magistrate filling out a form he was never supposed to complete.
Guillen-Acosta was arrested on June 24 for failing to appear in court on two traffic misdemeanors from 2022. The magistrate filled out a form authorizing her release with a $1,000 bond and a warning not to drive without a license. Then, under a process established by a new state law, he began a process to refer Guillen-Acosta to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
But the new law mandated a referral to ICE if someone without legal residence faced a felony or certain serious misdemeanor charges. Guillen-Acosta’s charges of reckless driving and driving without a license did not require a referral.
“Many of us are here innocently,” she told the INDY, speaking in Spanish over a poor phone connection from detention. “The criminals are outside, and the innocent are inside”
“Creo que sin justo,” she added—I believe it’s unjust.
Guillen-Acosta isn’t alone. This year Durham County magistrates and judges have repeatedly referred people facing low-level criminal charges to ICE when they are not required to. In some cases the underlying criminal offense was as minor as a single trespassing charge. In at least four cases, an INDY investigation has found, the referral resulted in people being held in ICE detention.
Ten years ago, Guillen-Acosta’s brother Wildin became a local cause célèbre when he was detained by ICE while on his way to Riverside High School, where he was a student. In 2016, the INDY followed Guillen Acosta as she took a call from Wildin while he was held at the Stewart Detention Center in Georgia.
“He was here in the same detention [center],” she told the INDY in August, speaking from Stewart. “He knew very well how it would be here.”
Guillen-Acosta has been charged with a string of minor offenses over the years. This year alone she faced traffic-related misdemeanors in two different cases in North Carolina, including expired registration, speeding, and driving without a license. None of them fell under the mandatory ICE notification requirements of the new state law.
Guillen-Acosta, through a poor phone connection from the detention center, said she was detained on June 23 on her way to work—exactly where and why she was stopped was unclear. But the end result was Guillen-Acosta being booked for the missed court dates in Durham County. Her bond was posted, then ICE picked her up.
“Here in this detention center, they don’t treat us well. They treat us like animals, we don’t have—we can’t sleep,” she said. “They yell, they look down on us, the food here is disgusting, with roaches, the food is rotten and the same food every day.”
“It is a total hell, and many people here are here for misdemeanors like not having a license,” she continued. “They treat us like criminals.”
Just how often people charged in Durham County have been referred to ICE is unclear. Court records can only be searched by a person’s name or case number, and obtaining referral forms would require manually reviewing the records of every person brought to the Durham jail since October 1, when the new law took effect.
The detainers that ICE issues are not even shared by the sheriff’s office with the defense attorneys representing detainees in the criminal charges that landed them in the Durham jail, according to evidence submitted as part of a filing from a public defender.
Instead, the INDY found cases by confirming tips and winnowing a 30-day snapshot of arrests, manually reviewing hundreds of cases and finding at least four in which defendants were referred to ICE without a triggering charge.
There has also been a nationwide ramping up of arrests, with July seeing almost 50,000—the highest monthly total of the second Donald Trump administration. Guillen-Acosta’s immigration attorney, Jose Silva, did not comment on her case. But he did say that the courts are backed up and immigration cases are moving quickly.
“Detentions are happening almost casually,” he said. “We’re just doing the best that we can.”
In the first six months of this year, a total of 81 people in the Durham County Detention Center received ICE detainers. Without access to comprehensive details about those detainers, it is impossible to know how many of these people were referred to immigration authorities on minor charges that didn’t require referral under the law.
Adding to the difficulty, some people faced separate and unrelated charges that would trigger a referral to ICE, but were referred for the cases involving non-qualifying charges as well. Others faced charges under different names, with cases only being consolidated under one name later.
One defendant was marked on court paperwork as being a citizen or legal resident in a felony case against her. But in a separate misdemeanor case for the same defendant, the “citizen or legal resident” box was left blank and the district judge referred the defendant to ICE (although it is not clear if ICE ultimately issued a detainer).
Detentions are happening almost casually. We’re just doing the best that we can.
immigration attorney jose silva
According to the immigration rights group Siembra NC, almost 10,000 people were arrested in North Carolina by ICE between January 2025 and early August. This year, almost 75% of those arrests started with someone already in state custody.
“The pattern in the records is county jail after county jail: a person is booked on something ordinary, held, and handed to ICE,” Siembra NC said in a press release announcing the data. “This is the exact machinery that state law now requires.”
The new procedure for ICE referrals was laid out in state law 2025-85 last year and took effect October 1, after the legislature overrode Gov. Josh Stein’s veto. Besides dramatically increasing the number of offenses that would trigger an ICE notification, it also adjusted the deadlines and processes for notifying ICE when noncitizens are charged with certain crimes, and for detaining people for immigration authorities.
“Along the line maybe somebody may have lodged a complaint, but generally by the fact we’ve not heard a lot of complaints about it would indicate that it’s probably working well,” North Carolina House Speaker Destin Hall said in August when asked about the law. “We’ve changed that law a number of times in the past few years, and I’m open to changing it again, but I think this last time around we have it pretty tight.”
The North Carolina Administrative Office of the Courts sent out four emails to magistrates with updates on the new law, according to emails released to the INDY via public records request. One in October notified magistrates of a new form to be filled out when a judicial officer has to determine whether a person “charged with certain offenses is a legal resident or citizen of the United States.” The emails did not provide any detailed legal advice about when filling out the new form would be required.
Once ICE receives the referral form, it can issue a detainer. A state judicial official has to confirm the person being detained matches the information sent by ICE and then is required to order the person held. The person charged can be held for up to 48 hours after they would have otherwise been released (for example, by posting bond or resolving their charges) in order for ICE to come and collect them—although this does not mean that ICE always came for the people facing minor charges in Durham County.
The form that a judge is required to fill out, AOC-CR-663, even lists the triggering offenses under a section titled “findings”: “The undersigned judicial official finds that the defendant named above is charged with a felony, Class A1 misdemeanor under Article 6A, Article 7B, or Article of Chapter 14 of the General Statutes, violation of G.S. 50B-4.1, or an offense involving impaired driving as defined in G.S. 20-4.01.”
Filling out the form for someone who is not facing one of these charges is not illegal, according to Brittany Bromell, an assistant professor of public law and government at the UNC School of Government who has tracked and written about the law.
“The law as written doesn’t prohibit [judicial officials] from doing that,” she said. “It just requires them to do so in certain circumstances.”
Few elected officials, attorneys, organizations, or family members of those arrested wanted to speak on the record about defendants in Durham being unnecessarily referred to ICE. Many seemed unaware of the issue. The Durham County Public Defender’s Office and several private attorneys who represented people in these cases did not respond to requests for comment.
The chief magistrate for Durham referred all questions to the chief district court judge, Doretta Walker. Walker also issued a number of the ICE referrals herself. Neither Walker nor her immediate predecessor as chief judge, Clayton Jones, responded to repeated requests for comment and, in the case of Judge Walker, a detailed list of questions.
District Attorney Satana Deberry said that ICE referrals usually begin before her office is ever involved—at the very first time a defendant appears before a judicial official for bond. But she said she had heard about the issue anecdotally.
“I would say hypothetically, nobody should be released to ICE custody until the state has handled its business with them,” Deberry said. “That person has been detained at the request of the state of North Carolina, and the state of North Carolina should have—that person should have—his or her day in court in North Carolina before anything else has been handled.”
Deberry said her office had not filed any larger formal complaint with the magistrates’ office about the practice. She said that her office “tried to track it down” when they did hear about someone being taken by ICE while facing local charges. The only case she was aware of, she said, was one where the defendant filed a habeas petition requesting release—a motion her office did not oppose.
Nestor Alejandro Umana Barquero was arrested by the Durham Police Department in May and charged with three counts of simple assault for allegedly pointing a hose nozzle that looked like a pistol at several people, along with one count of resisting a public officer. The then-23-year-old was also facing other low-level misdemeanor charges after an incident in April.
None of the charges in either case were among those that require ICE notification under the new law.
Umana Barquero was nevertheless referred to ICE, which issued a detainer for the Honduran citizen on May 8.
Then, for weeks, he sat in the Durham jail.
In the habeas petition, Umana Barquero’s attorney argued he was being held on an improper judicial order. His attorney did not challenge the initial notification of the arrest. Instead she focused on the detainer that ICE had issued to the jail.
By the time his attorney filed the habeas petition on July 9, Umana Barquero had been sitting in jail for more than 60 days. The next day, the office of the prosecutor dismissed the charges against him—and Judge Brian Wilks denied the habeas petition.
It’s unclear when Umana Barquero was taken into ICE custody, but the INDY was able to confirm he was being held in immigration detention, most recently in Texas, before he disappeared from the system. The INDY was unable to contact Umana Barquero, and his public defender did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Marisa Mecke contributed reporting to this story.
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