A Dream Detained

It was the news I had been expecting to receive at any moment for months; the kind you try to steel yourself against only to realize that inevitability has no defense. The voice on the other end of the phone, trying to speak between sobs, was that of my long-time friend and colleague, Micky Jiménez. Micky, the executive director of the nonprofit Capital District LATINOS (CDL), struggled to deliver the chilling news: a beloved staff member had been detained during a routine immigration appointment just a couple of days shy of Christmas, 2025. Breydan Raul Moncada Rincón, an asylum seeker from Venezuela under protected status, was more than a staff member—he was family.

Raúl, as he is known to us, is a soft-spoken giant of a man whom we were able to lawfully employ as the custodian for our nonprofit’s headquarters. Somewhere there is a photo of him proudly holding the very first paycheck he had earned in his adopted home, smiling from ear to ear alongside a jubilant Micky. He had found his community in a strange new country and was filled with optimism. At the time, none of us knew the inhumanity and degradation that awaited him, or that the mood of an entire nation would turn so brutally against their darker neighbors.

Eight years ago, our organization made a significant investment in the community when we purchased a 150-year-old German Lutheran church located in the heart of one of Albany’s poorest census tracts. This historic building was thoughtfully reimagined and transformed into what is now known as the Cultural Empowerment & Community Engagement Center. The creation of the center marked the beginning of a new chapter, as we set out to systematically identify and address the greatest challenges faced by the Latino community throughout the Capital District. The social determinants of health emerged as our primary focus, with equal emphasis on the arts and culture as a means of empowerment and healing. This was the way to build a resilient community.

A couple of years later, when COVID-19 hit, the demand for our skills increased dramatically; we pivoted to a culturally appropriate vaccination campaign, which local government was unprepared to offer, eventually becoming a regionally acknowledged safe space and a bastion of bilingual (English/Spanish) social services. The pandemic experience prepared us for the wave of immigrants that crashed on our doorstep in May of 2023, carrying to us our beloved Raul.

He arrived in New York City by way of the southern border in the spring of 2022, just as thousands of others had—one more faceless soldier in the political war waged against “sanctuary cities” by Governors Abbott and DeSantis. New York City Mayor Eric Adams ended up besieged by thousands of homeless immigrants under a variety of statuses. When the City’s shelter system began to groan under the weight of so much need and desperate lives spilled into public view, the Big Apple became a national avatar for the failure of “blue cities” to put their money where their rhetoric was.

The Adams’ administration hatched a desperate plan to make the surge the problem of communities in upstate New York. A large Adams-friendly company, with no experience relocating immigrants, was hired to help these families and individuals relocate to local motels and settle into life in one room, find them employment, and permanent housing eventually. Unsurprisingly, their plan failed miserably.

When the buses began to arrive here, the region’s immigrant-facing not-for-profit network was called upon to fill the void—prominent among them was Capital District LATINOS. That is how we met Raul. Once he settled down, he volunteered at the Center to help our staff distribute food and clothing to other new arrivals, and he quickly became a pillar of support for his fellow countrymen.

Word of Raul’s capture spread through our community like wildfire. All our local partners were galvanized into action. But before we knew it, our friend was taken to a Buffalo detention center, and it would be days before we could reach him. We started a GoFundMe page to raise the thousands of dollars needed to hire a lawyer, pay for a release bond, and support his family who had lost their provider. Each step taken to free him was fraught with fear and emotion. Then, after several agonizing weeks, news arrived that he would be released. But he is not the same; we are, all of us, not the same.

As we ran the immigration gauntlet in New York, the atrocities of Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis were playing out. Scenes of heavily armed masked ICE agents dragging Latino men, women, and children through the streets, echoing dark chapters of America’s past, were displayed on millions of screens—a carnival of grotesqueries on a continuous loop.

While I edited and re-edited this story recently, the horrific fatal shootings of Johan Sebastian Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine, and Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston have shocked the nation once again. They were fathers and husbands; they were diligent workers up earlier than most, chasing a dream that cost them their lives. Now they join the 21 other immigrants shot by ICE and CBP and increase the number of fatal shootings to six. But there are other chilling statistics that we must sit with: since inauguration day, 2025, there have been approximately 52 deaths in ICE detention; more than 70,000 people are being detained throughout the country, and 6,200 of them are children.

What is lost in all this madness is one simple fact: Human history is the history of migration. It is the consequence of natural disasters, famine, and war; it is the instinctive mandate in every species to survive at any cost, to hurl ourselves into the unknown for the benefit of our progeny. Yet here we find ourselves, a nation of immigrants, who seem to have grown weary of our own humanity and of the ancient custom to welcome the stranger among us. Selah.

Bio: Born in El Barrio and raised in the South Bronx, Dan Irizarry is a writer, community activist, and founder of Capital District Latino Advocacy Through Inter-Neighborhood Outreach Services (CD LATINOS or CDL), headquartered in Albany, N.Y.  Founded in 2011, CDL’s mission is to “…create the conditions of success for the Latino community and other communities of color in the Capital District.”  Dan’s writing has been published in the Albany Times Union, the Schenectady Gazette, and the New York State Writers Institute Trolley Literary Journal.  He has appeared as a frequent guest on WAMC’s The Roundtable radio program and serves on the Board of Directors of the American Red Cross of Northeastern New York.