A Man Vanished After ICE Took Him

Vicente Ventura Aguilar spent his last documented moments doing something completely ordinary. The 44-year-old was moving to music with friends on a South Los Angeles street corner near a strip mall. Security cameras caught him at 8:40 on an October morning, laughing and dancing.

Five minutes changed everything. Federal immigration agents in masks flooded the corner. They deployed some kind of spray. Multiple people got arrested. Ventura became one of them.

What happened next nobody knows.

A man arrested alongside Ventura said the group ended up in ICE's underground processing facility in downtown Los Angeles. By the following morning, they were being shuttled toward deportation. Somewhere close to the border checkpoint, Ventura's body gave out.

He went down hard. His face hit the floor. His body convulsed. Blood started coming from his mouth.

The other detainees panicked and shouted for medical intervention. Federal officers called an ambulance and cleared the room. Nobody detained with Ventura ever saw him again.

That was more than three months ago.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement maintains they never had anyone matching his description in custody. Homeland Security doubles down, insisting their records show no arrest under that name on that date. The problem with this official position becomes obvious when you remember the surveillance footage exists. The eyewitnesses exist. The man who was visibly alive and then suddenly wasn't after federal agents took him existed too.

Ventura's relatives filed paperwork with Los Angeles police declaring him missing. They've walked through hospitals asking questions. They've visited morgues, searching faces for recognition. They've even organized searches in Mexico, gambling on the possibility that he was expelled so haphazardly that paperwork became optional.

Immigration advocates have escalated from asking nicely to demanding accountability with increasing volume.

Lindsay Toczylowski from the Immigrant Defenders Law Center pressed the issue in public statements. Federal agencies possess his photograph. They have his identifying information. Their biometric databases could locate him if they wanted to but haven't or won't.

"Where is he now? They claim that he was never in their custody, but they have his photo, they have his name, they could use their biometrics data to find him and tell us where he is, but they refuse to do so. How many other Vicentes are there? How many other people are missing? It's the lack of due process that leads to the chaos that results in people going missing like Vicente, and we demand answers for his case," Toczylowski said.

The federal apparatus has extraordinary technological reach. Biometric systems track millions. Facial recognition software can pick someone out of massive crowds. Fingerprint databases span decades. Yet a man who suffered a medical emergency while surrounded by federal employees has somehow been erased from every official record.

The Hill reported in October 2025 that according to a crowd-sourced website called "United States Disappeared Record," 5,784 individuals were reportedly "disappeared by ICE" beginning January 20, 2025. At Florida's Everglades detention facility, about 800 of 1,800 immigrants held there in July 2025 disappeared from ICE's online database. Another 450 were listed only as "Call ICE for details."

No tracking mechanism exists for people held in Customs and Border Protection custody. ICE's online locator system fails to update transfers in real time, leaving families to chase ghosts through a bureaucratic maze. Attorneys report clients being moved hours before scheduled appointments, rendering legal representation nearly impossible. The government maintains no comprehensive record of erroneous detentions or people who become unreachable while in custody.

More than 170 American citizens were wrongfully detained by ICE in 2025 alone, their citizenship apparently insufficient protection against a system operating without meaningful oversight. The United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances filed formal complaints with the U.S. government, categorizing these practices as enforced disappearances under international law. The terminology matters less than the reality it describes: people enter federal custody and cease to exist in any trackable form.

Vicente is not the exception. But his case is alarming.

Two possibilities present themselves. Either the system collapsed so completely that a person in government custody ceased to exist administratively, or someone made an active choice that documentation wasn't necessary. Neither scenario is acceptable.

@Santitos

@salinasmariasantos

Copyright © 2026 Maria Santos Salinas for FRONTeras.