He wasn’t supposed to be there that day.
The coin laundry at 43rd Street and Broadway in West Palm Beach was where his wife worked, but she was tired that July morning. So as a good husband and father should, Aimer David Guillén offered to help.
He would work in her place, he decided, allowing her to stay and spoil their three children with motherly love.
Guillén never came home.
He was plucked from his life at the laundry July 16 and dropped into a country he had fled nine years earlier. Like many others who dare to leave Mexico, Guillén was searching for a better life.
And he found it in America.
“The only thing I have done in this country is work and work,” says Guillén, who lived in West Palm Beach and worked in construction and landscaping jobs. “The only problem is having a Latino-looking face.”
He was arrested, deported and treated like a criminal, he says, though he does not have a record. He is now in Chiapas, Mexico, with his parents, recovering from the nightmare he lived after his arrest.
That July morning, Guillén recalls, Border Patrol agents entered, demanding to see papers to prove he was in the United States legally.
Guillén had none to give.
He and a Guatemalan man who was washing clothes at the time were shoved into a van, onlookers say, while other customers fled to a nearby church, hoping a place of worship would keep them safe.
The men were taken to a detention center in Pompano Beach.
A Border Patrol spokesman could not confirm that agents were at the laundry that day.
At the detention center, Guillén was forced to wear an orange prison jumpsuit. He says he ate only when a guard let him buy chips and soda with the money he had with him when he was detained.
“Some guards are nice people, but others are racist. If they get upset, they scream at you,” he says.
Thirteen days later, Guillén left Pompano Beach in handcuffs and shackles and headed to Krome Detention Center in Miami-Dade County. He slept in a small cell with 60 other Mexicans and was given a piece of bread, a pear and apple juice daily. He did not drink the juice, he said, because there was no bathroom nearby.
In early August, he boarded a plane in handcuffs once again, this time on his way to Texas. There he was placed on a bus and dropped in Mexico City, where he was robbed by a taxi driver while trying to get to Chiapas.
“I do not wish anybody to live what I lived through. Look how they treated me,” Guillén says. “It is not fair that they treat an immigrant like a criminal. They bring you to your homeland like a criminal.”
Nicole Navas, spokeswoman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, would not comment on the conditions of the detention centers but said detainees receive a list of whom to call with complaints.
Guillén did not file one, but local immigration attorney Aileen Josephs did. She alleges that Border Patrol agents used racial profiling to detain Guillén and describes the alleged raid in the complaint with the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
While Josephs fights for immigrants’ rights, Guillén is in Mexico, trying to plan his new life.
Maybe he could farm, he says, or start his own business.
He patiently awaits his wife’s arrival in December and is happy that his children are now with him.
All of the children, ages, 8, 6 and 4, are American citizens.
Their father worries about them daily and asks himself often whether he has shattered their American dream.
“You can’t sacrifice them for me being undocumented,” Guillén says.
He promises that if they ever want to return to the only place they know as home, Guillén will gladly let them.
But their father says he will not follow.
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