On the day that Brian Ernesto Villalta-Ramos had a scheduled appointment at the Dallas Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in October, family members told him to skip the appointment to eliminate the risk of being arrested. He refused.
He had arrived in Dallas from El Salvador in 2024 – along with his girlfriend and her two daughters – and all of them filed for asylum less than a year after arriving, as generally required by federal law.
While he was at the office, Villalta-Ramos called his girlfriend, Danisela Gaitan. She said he told her he had been arrested. Villalta-Ramos had no criminal record and no pending criminal charges.
He has been at a detention center in Georgia since.
Villalta-Ramos was one of the more than 12,000 people arrested by Dallas ICE officers in 2025 after President Donald Trump took office. His detention also reflects a key finding of a Dallas Morning News analysis of immigration enforcement data: During the first nine months of Trump’s second term, 62% of those arrested by agents in the Dallas office had not been convicted of crimes.
Click here to read more on this report from our partners at The Dallas Morning News.