This story was originally published by Mission Local <\/a>on June 10, 2026.<\/p>\n Alberto remembers his journey to the United States in 1990 well: He sprinted across the border from Tijuana to San Ysidro, California.<\/p>\n \u201cI was really skinny, and I could run,\u201d said Alberto, now 59, who is using a pseudonym to protect his identity. \u201cIt was an adventure.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n While he ran, his wife and their two sons, ages one-and-a-half years and four months, sat in the backseat of a car, posing as the family of the coyote that Alberto paid to smuggle them across the border.\u00a0<\/p>\n When the husband and wife finally reunited in Los Angeles, money was tight. They could barely make ends meet and did not have a stable place to live.<\/p>\n While Alberto worked an under-the-table job at a car wash, he learned how to get a legal work permit: volunteering as a confidential informant for immigration enforcement.\u00a0<\/p>\n He soon started as an undercover informant for federal agents. This meant working short stints at farms across the Central Valley, collecting names of undocumented workers working on the ranches in exchange for fake green cards.<\/p>\n He had to prove himself to be loyal and hardworking, he said, and worked without pay under the premise that, someday, he would be able to get a green card.\u00a0<\/p>\n After a couple years cutting his teeth, he was given a temporary work permit \u2014 though not a green card \u2014 in exchange for his government work; Mission Local reviewed a copy of that work permit. With that, he got a bona fide job as a janitor at a local hospital, and started to support his family.\u00a0<\/p>\n Now, after 36 years building a life in Fresno \u2014 becoming a surgical technician, buying a home, and paying taxes \u2014 he, too, has been swept up in the Trump administration\u2019s immigration crackdown.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n In October, Alberto was arrested<\/a> at a green card interview, which he had finally set up after years without any kind of legal status. He was released but then re-arrested at another scheduled immigration appointment in Fresno a month later, court documents show.\u00a0<\/p>\n The second time, Alberto was put in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center near Bakersfield for close to four months.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Over the last year, the Trump administration has used a wide array of tools to push forward its agenda to deport immigrants like Alberto.<\/p>\n From dismantling<\/a> legal pathways to citizenship to arresting immigrants without due process<\/a>, the \u201cdeportation machine\u201d \u2014 as some critics call it \u2014 has swept up thousands of people who for decades had been safe, including those who once worked for the very system now detaining and deporting immigrants.\u00a0<\/p>\n Alberto, the onetime informant who\u2019d helped federal agents arrest other undocumented immigrants, never imagined it would happen to him.<\/p>\n \u201cI understood I would be protected,\u201d he told Mission Local. But he wasn\u2019t.\u00a0<\/p>\n Working as a confidential informant in the San Joaquin Valley\u00a0<\/p>\n Alberto started working as an informant in 1992, around two years before he received temporary employment authorization.\u00a0<\/p>\n In 1994, when he got a work permit from the immigration agents, he quit his under-the-table job at the car wash and took an over-the-table position as a housekeeper at the Sierra Community Hospital in Fresno.\u00a0<\/p>\n Alberto said his boss at Immigration and Naturalization Services \u2014 the precursor to ICE \u2014 showed up at his new job, making an informal agreement with his supervisor at the hospital that every so often, Alberto would be allowed to take time off to go continue to \u201cwork\u201d at the ranches, the government\u2019s code for his informant duties.<\/p>\n Mission Local was not able to independently verify this agreement.<\/p>\n In 1996, when Alberto had been working for about four years as an informant, his boss gave him his most dangerous assignment yet. He was tasked with infiltrating farms, where rancheros, who managed the undocumented fieldworkers, were offering them fake green cards for working the fields.\u00a0<\/p>\n The setup was simple, if grueling: His superior at INS would give him a ride to the farms, which were in the Central Valley, from Sanger to Dinuba to Three Rivers and Alberto would pose as an undocumented worker looking for work in exchange for a (fake) green card.\u00a0<\/p>\n He lived among the ranch hands and endured long hours in the fields, working under the hot sun with little water. The laborers paid for their housing on the farm, along with water, transportation and food, often burritos.\u00a0<\/p>\n Alberto felt conflicted about his role, but justified the work: He believed the ranch operators were exploiting their workers. \u201cThose guys do a lot of wrong things,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n He feared he\u2019d be killed on assignment, leaving his wife and two young children alone. But the arrangement was his best shot at getting permanent status, he felt.\u00a0<\/p>\n On one of these undercover missions, Alberto said he discovered the identity of a \u201creally dangerous\u201d ringleader.\u00a0<\/p>\n When Alberto brought back the name of the ranchero leader and the make and model of his vehicle to his boss at INS, he thought it would be the ideal time to ask outright for his green card: Up to that point, he had been doing unpaid work with only a temporary work permits in return, and the promise of a green card was dangled in front of him by federal agents, he said.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Instead, Alberto remembered his boss laughing in his face, but then telling him, \u201cLet me see what I can do.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n He got something: A renewal of his temporary legal status, though no green card. And he was \u201cparoled\u201d for the second time into the country in 1996, according to an employment authorization card from the time reviewed by Mission Local, which allows immigrants to work legally while the status is in effect.<\/p>\n \u201cWelcome to the United States of America,\u201d Alberto recalled the Border Patrol agent saying after signing his new work permit.\u00a0<\/p>\n Alberto said after that, INS never called him to work as an informant again.\u00a0<\/p>\n Immigration attorneys say these kinds of tactics are common: INS, and today ICE, make promises to their informants that are rarely kept. Visas are dangled in front of those working for the government as a kind of bad-faith tactic<\/a>.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not just green cards. There is a special immigration visa, an \u201cS-Visa,\u201d known colloquially as a \u201csnitch visa,\u201d that is meant for people like Alberto who have provided information to law enforcement; Alberto has since applied for one. The government never responded, his attorney said.<\/p>\n Unlike parole \u2014 which is a temporary legal status without a pathway to citizenship \u2014 an S-Visa can provide a route to a green card and, ultimately, citizenship.\u00a0<\/p>\n But Jeffrey O\u2019Brien, a San Francisco immigration attorney who has been practicing for 17 years, said he has only seen a handful of successful S-visa applications in his career. They are exceedingly rare.\u00a0<\/p>\n Angela Warren, Alberto\u2019s San Francisco-based attorney, said her staff submitted an S-visa request when he hired her to help him get a green card in the summer of 2024. The government never responded.\u00a0<\/p>\n Alberto\u2019s former supervisors at INS are now retired, and his attorney said she has been unable to reach them to verify his work for the agency.<\/p>\n The American dream<\/p>\n Alberto now owns a home in a typically American suburban neighborhood in Fresno.<\/p>\n He lives with his wife, has a pool, a boat, and a second home he rents to one of his two adult sons. He has three grandchildren, and they take family trips to Disneyland and go fishing. He regularly attends a local evangelical megachurch.<\/p>\n Alberto still works for the same hospital system where he started as a housekeeper more than 33 years ago, and worked his way up: First cleaning rooms, transporting patients between procedures, sterilizing surgical instruments, and finally becoming a surgical technician.\u00a0<\/p>\n He never became a doctor, but his role is now highly technical. Alberto works in a Level II Trauma Center, a 24\/7 emergency unit meant to handle critical injuries, and ensures surgeons have the right equipment for operations like a limb salvage after an accident. He also trains upcoming technicians like himself.\u00a0<\/p>\n He owes it all to his INS-sponsored work permit: Even after it expired in 1997, Alberto managed to stay at the hospital. He never changed jobs, and the hospital never questioned his legal status.\u00a0<\/p>\n He also didn\u2019t travel out of the country, focusing instead on building his life here.<\/p>\n \u201cThe United States is the place for the dream I have,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n Broken promises\u00a0<\/p>\n When Alberto\u2019s mother fell ill two years ago, it was the first time he considered going back to Mexico. But without travel documents, it was risky. He no longer had active legal status; his work permit had expired decades earlier. Crossing a border could get him caught.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Alberto remembered sitting on his couch, feeling discouraged and depressed that he would not be able to see his mother before she died.<\/p>\n He now had money saved from his decades working at the hospital, so he decided to hire an attorney, and to try again for his green card. He was eligible through his U.S. citizen son.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI save lives every day, and those guys can\u2019t give me a permit to go see my mom,\u201d he remembered thinking at the time.<\/p>\n Under previous administrations, his likelihood of success would have been much higher.<\/p>\n Under the Trump administration, however, green-card approvals have been delayed<\/a> amid funding cuts and the gutting of the United States Immigration and Citizenship Services, the administrative agency tasked with processing immigration related applications. Alberto decided to try anyway.<\/p>\n \u201cI worked without permission because it was my only means of survival,\u201d Alberto wrote in his green card application. Now, he wanted to do it the right way.<\/p>\n The arrests\u00a0<\/p>\n In October 2025, Alberto and his lawyer showed up to a scheduled green card interview at a field office in Fresno.\u00a0<\/p>\n During the meeting, instead of filling out forms or answering interview questions, the USCIS officer paused the meeting due to \u201ctechnical difficulties,\u201d and left the room, according to court documents.<\/p>\n When the meeting resumed, \u201ctwo ICE agents, heavily armed, burst through the doors of the interview room,\u201d handcuffed Alberto and arrested him, the documents state.\u00a0<\/p>\n Arrests at immigration appointments have become increasingly common<\/a>. In San Francisco, at least 539 immigrants<\/a> were arrested at routine appointments in the first 10 months of last year.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cYou should be able to apply for a government benefit without going to jail,\u201d Alberto\u2019s attorney Warren said.\u00a0<\/p>\n