‘Rights are being violated’: Kansas man without criminal history arrested and deported by ICE
by Sherman Smith, Kansas Reflector
December 10, 2025
TOPEKA — A roving patrol of federal agents chased Julio Rojas through the Olathe streets in August and, after capturing him, put a knee on his neck while they wrapped him in chains.
Like most of the people detained as part of the Trump administration’s mass deportation blitz, Rojas had no criminal record. The federal agents had no warrant for his arrest.
As the 25-year-old bounced from Kansas City to Oklahoma to Louisiana during 23 days in custody, Rojas never had the chance to talk to an attorney and never appeared before a judge. He was placed on a plane at 2 a.m. one morning and flown to El Salvador, where he remains.
“What has impacted me the most is being separated from my child, and to lose everything I had built in 10 years,” he said through an interpreter during a video call with reporters last month.
Rojas was in custody when his son turned 7. The boy remains here with his mother, who has permanent residency.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has dramatically escalated efforts to round up immigrants at President Donald Trump’s behest, often with disregard for their civil rights. The Trump administration’s fast-track deportation policies have been challenged at least 362 times in federal district courts, The Conversation reported. It has lost 350 of those cases before 160 different judges. The administration continues to defend the lack of due process in deportation proceedings.
Rojas’ traumatic experience is typical of ICE activity in the region, said Genevra Alberti, an immigration attorney in Kansas City, Missouri.
She described roving patrols in unmarked vehicles, with agents who won’t identify themselves or show ID, and who don’t explain why they are taking someone into custody.
Some agents, she said, “clearly get enjoyment out of arresting, detaining noncitizens, even those who have no criminal history and have families, and those people are just having a ball.”
“In a different time, the subjects of those arrests would have thought they were being kidnapped for real, by actual criminals, because of the way this has been done,” Alberti said. “However, because they know that this is going on now, they just assume it’s ICE, but they don’t know that for sure.”
‘Another rat to the count’
Rojas grew up in El Salvador and said he came to the United States at age 16 as an asylum seeker, trying to get away from gangs.
He arrived in the Kansas City area in April 2016 and said he struggled to find adequate legal representation. He missed a key hearing, and a deportation order was issued. But as he determined to work through a bewildering appeals process, he made a home in Olathe, started a family, and went to work for Verizon and AT&T, installing internet, he said.
His life was upended one morning in early August when four trucks approached him in his vehicle at an auto parts store. He said they pursued him for about 10 minutes before they stopped him.
He recalled an agent with a gun in his hand.
“He was repeating, ‘Get the f*** on the ground.’ Like, all the time, just yelling at me,” Rojas said. “So all that I did was that I kneeled. I put my hands up. And in no moment I was resisting. He came by, and he hit me in the back. And then he put his knee on my neck.”
The agents put chains on his waist, feet and hands, he said.
“That’s when this officer started saying, ‘There’s another rat to the count,’ ” Rojas said.
He was one of 32,364 people booked by ICE in August 2025, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a data collection center at Syracuse University. The data shows more than 70% of ICE detainees have no criminal record.
Court records show Rojas’ only interaction with the law was a traffic ticket in 2018 for driving without a license. He paid the $100 fine.
“At the beginning, the administration began to say the only people who would be deported are the people who have crimes in the United States,” Rojas said. “But in this moment, how immigrants’ rights are being violated, all of those people who have a deportation order, it doesn’t matter what the reason is.”
After he was taken into custody, Rojas said he overheard a call from Olathe police. They wanted to know why federal agents were chasing somebody through their jurisdiction.
The federal agent’s response, according to Rojas: “Tell that bitch to not mind our business.”
Olathe police Sgt. John Moncayo said “we don’t know anything about what occurred” with Rojas.
“It appears that Mr. Rojas’ story is embellished quite a bit, as we do not have any information to support his claims,” Moncayo said.
Moncayo didn’t answer a Kansas Reflector question about the police department’s relationship with ICE.
‘Making this normal’
Alberti, the immigration attorney, said she has clients who were pulled over by federal agents for “literally no reason other than how they looked.”
Then, she said, they are arrested and detained. Some are no longer here. Some are still in custody. None has a criminal history.
She described ICE enforcement in the Kanas City area as “being on steroids.”
“I have never seen or heard of this many sort of roving patrols happening here in this area before,” she said. “And what I mean by that is just ICE themselves pulling people over while they’re driving for no reason. ICE has no authority to pull people over for traffic infractions or anything like that, so they are literally just pulling them over because they look foreign. So basically, a lot of these people are just being pulled over for driving while brown.”
She said it is easy to run when you don’t know who is chasing you. Rojas described his arrest as the moment he was most afraid in his life.
ICE officers aren’t allowed to arrest someone without a warrant, Alberti said, unless they have probable cause to believe the person is a flight risk. But if someone has a removal order, as Rojas did, no warrant is needed.
“One of the scary things is ICE is making it normal to not identify yourself,” Alberti said. “I mean, on top of everything else, they’re wearing masks. Their faces are covered. They look like paramilitaries or bank robbers, for God’s sakes, and they’re making this normal.”
She urged people to pay attention to what is happening with immigration enforcement. Even people “whose hearts are in the right places” are overwhelmed by bad news and have stopped listening, she said.
“I get that it’s necessary for mental health purposes, maybe, to take a break once in a while from listening to the news and just hearing nothing but bad things all the time,” Alberti said. “But right now is not the time to do that. Take a day off and then go back and listen to what’s going on, because apathy is going to ruin this country.”
‘Very harsh here’
Rojas said he wore the same clothes for eight days straight at the ICE detention center in Alexandria, Louisiana. At times he went without a toothbrush or blanket. He had one minute one time to make a phone call.
“At no moment did they ever present me with an arrest warrant, did they ever let me see a judge. They never told me anything,” he said.
One night at 8 p.m., officials took him from his cell, held him somewhere else for a few hours, handcuffed and shackled him with chains, then put him on a plane bound for San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador. There, local authorities held him for eight hours to investigate whether he had any outstanding arrest warrants. Then they took him to a place called “the house of the immigrant,” where he was given clothes and shampoo.
He misses his son, and hopes to return to the United States someday, “in the most legal way possible.”
“In this moment, I have been two months without a job. And with the very, very different way that I was easily employed in Kansas City, it is very harsh here,” Rojas said.
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Immigration attorney Genevra Alberti stated that Rojas’ ordeal illustrates a rise in aggressive ICE operations in the Kansas City area, which includes stops of individuals who “appear foreign” and arrests made without warrants. Federal data indicates that over 70% of those detained by ICE in August had no prior criminal history.
Report the facts without all the blabber. Federal agents don’t need a warrant for his arrest, because he has a deporation order from not attending his asylum hearing. Maybe he should have worked on his appeals process instead of having a baby. He had 9 years to “work through a bewildering appeals process” and to “find adequate legal representation”. Nine years.
“His life was upended one morning”. Have you seen the videos where the Biden FBI barged into J6er’s home before dawn and terrorized the families? Rojas is not a victim. He had 9 years. J6er’s were in jail for up to 4 years for walking into our Capital. Kristi Noem, Homeland Security, warned that if you came into the US illegally, to cooperate now and leave voluntarily, collecting US money on the way out, that you could then apply to come back the legal way. Rogas didn’t take this option. Maybe the immigration attorneys should be advising lawful solutions instead of berating ICE/Law Enforcement, making ICE the enemy and law breakers victims. And now that Rojas is caught he “hopes to return to the US in the most legal way possible”. I think that ship has sailed. If he wants to reunite with his son and son’s mother, there are many other countries to take residency in.
Then to say that he only had a ticket for driving without a license. I suspect Rojas was pulled over for some type of infration, since the officer would not have known that he didn’t have his license without asking for one. Was he driving without a license because he didn’t have one or he left it at home?
I support ICE wearing masks to disguise their identity since migrant attorneys such as Alberti are whipping people into a frenzy with their untruthful rhetoric. A shameful way to make a living.
I recall many times Tom Holman and President Trump saying that whether you have a criminal background or not, if you came into this country illegally, you will be arrested and you will be deported. It’s been very clear. It came to this point, because of Democrate states/cities not cooperating to remove criminal illegals. Not only not cooperating, but creating barriers to impede the ability of law enforcement to do their jobs. Democrats supporting illegal criminals over Americans. That’s a story you should write.
It sounds like Rojas was treated better by our legal system than the J6 victims were when they were imprisoned. Write a story on the many hardships endured by the young to the elderly that had their civil rights violated. Not allowed to see/speak to their attorneys, moved around from jail to jail so family members did not know where they were, had food and water withheld, clothing and blankets withheld, overflowing toilets, medications withheld, rodents rampant in the jails, etc…. Where were the civil rights for these Americans?