Cristofer Ortega came to the United States as a child from Honduras. He was living in Plainfield, studying for a heating, ventilation and air conditioning license, following the path to the American Dream trod by millions of U.S. immigrants before him.
It ended with a traffic stop. ICE agents took him into custody and detained him for weeks. And then, despite Ortega’s lack of criminal record and his legal protection to become a permanent resident, they put him on a plane back to Honduras.
There, he says, he feels unsafe. Even sleep is no comfort.
In disturbing dreams, Ortega says, “someone’s coming for me.”
More than 5,000 people in New Jersey have been apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement since President Donald Trump took office in January 2025. That’s the ninth-most among U.S. states, according to data from the Immigration Enforcement Dashboard, a project that uses public data.
His legal fight, of course, highlights the constitutional and political fault lines over the Trump administration’s mass deportation effort. His detention and deportation point to a broader – and growing — consequence: the mental health toll for families, schools and communities across New Jersey.
“We don’t see daylight when we get fresh air. We’re not even able to look outside of the windows catching, like, pieces of sunlight,” Ortetga, 21, said during a telephone call from the Strafford County correctional facility in New Hampshire before he was deported.
He was blunt about his mental state.
“I wouldn’t be surprised that when I get out of here I have to go to therapy for a very long time, like I have been so much in my life,” he said. “It really changes you. There are times I don’t sleep. It’s horrible, I just think, ‘What’s going to happen? What’s going to happen?’ I wouldn’t be surprised if one day they woke me up around 4 a.m. and say, ‘Cristofer, pack up’ and say, ‘We are going.’”
Federal authorities sent Ortega to a detention center in Mississippi. Then they deported him to Honduras.
“I saw many grandparents — 60, 70, 80 — in custody crying every day. Many people I saw legit go insane,” Ortega said of his time there.
At one point, Ortega said he was told around midnight that the group was being deported.
“When we were on the plane, we were still tied up. And they were tightening it when we were on the plane and then 10 minutes before we landed, they took them off,” he said. “And when we got back here somebody says, ‘We don’t have any of your personal belongings. We just have your documents.’ I was like, damn, how was I going to call my family and let them know I am here, because when they moved me, it was around 12 at night. I wasn’t able to tell anyone. “
Ortega was detained by ICE in July while visiting family in New Hampshire. Attorneys say Ortega had been approved for SIJ, or Special Immigrant Juvenile status — a federal designation granted to young immigrants who have experienced abuse, abandonment or neglect.
The designation typically allows recipients to apply for a green card once a visa becomes available, and often protects them from deportation. Ortega, though, remained in detention for more than eight months, with no criminal record, before he was deported.
An ICE representative did not return messages seeking comment.
The circumstances surrounding Ortega’s detention remain deeply troubling, his attorney says.
“He was in New Hampshire visiting family, he was riding in a car, a passenger in his car stopped at a red light,” attorney Jessica Charniga told NJ Spotlight News. “Federal agents in an unmarked car pulled him and the driver out at gunpoint, according to Cristofer, and once they ran his ID, they found out he had a final order of deportation that he had received as a child when he was in proceedings with his mother.”
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Attorneys have been trying to determine whether federal agents were actually looking for Ortega, Charniga said.
“We believe it was an incident of racial profiling and do not believe they were looking for Cristofer specifically,” she said. Attorneys filed a Freedom of Information Act request with ICE for any enforcement requests that day. They were told that no such records existed, she said.
“ICE has never claimed they are detaining him because he is a risk or a danger,” Charniga said. “They know he has never been arrested and never had an encounter with law enforcement before that day in July.”
Before his detention, Ortega had been working toward an HVAC certification and building a future in New Jersey.
“He knows this is likely the end of the road,” she said. “He was visiting family; he had no expectation that anything like this would happen to him. This was a full-time student who was learning and enjoying his life to being detained and caged overnight is traumatic and this is someone who has already suffered trauma. By definition everyone with SIJ status has already been abandoned, abused or neglected so it compounds the trauma.”
Ortega says he still thinks about returning to the life he left behind.
“I want to go back to school I want to finish my HVAC,” he said. “That’s the first thing I want to do when I get out of here.”
Marisol Mondaca, a counselor who works with immigrant families in Monmouth County, says the emotional impact of immigration detention often extends far beyond the person being held. A bilingual clinician in The Source, a school-based youth counseling program at Red Bank Regional High School, Mondaca works directly with students and families, navigating the uncertainty and trauma that can follow a detention.
Cases like Ortega’s often ripple through households and communities, reshaping family dynamics and placing new emotional and financial pressures on young people, Mondaca said.
“In my daily practice I hear these stories over and over again, perhaps in different stages of the process,” she said. “Maybe a family just had someone detained, maybe a family just got in contact and they know they were able to locate this person, maybe the family is looking for funds to access bail bonds in order to get this individual out of incarceration or maybe this person has been deported and they’ve been in separation — so it’s at different stages but certainly on a daily basis.”
Mondaca says the young people often suddenly must take on adult responsibilities.
“They are forced to be over-parentified — meaning, so now the family is thinking, OK, so mom and dad have been deported or mom, the only person who lives with me, is deported. I am 18, a senior in high school, I will stay with the rest of the family. Now she has to shift her view and her world and say: ‘I have to have two jobs, I cannot go away to college anymore and I need to be my sister’s guardian now, take her to the doctors’ appointments, stay home when she’s sick because there’s no one else to take care of her.’ So these are the sacrifices.”
Mondaca says counselors recently formed a support group for students directly affected by immigration detention.
“We have 10 students that were directly affected by detention with a direct family member,” Mondaca said. “We provide space to talk about how they feel, because they have been parentified so highly that they have to be so responsible and strong and keep it altogether that there is no other place, besides a different place in school, where they can openly say: ‘This is really hard, this is difficult, I am scared.’ The victory doesn’t come when the individual walks out of that detention center. This is the beginning of a long, long road.”
She recounted an instance where fear persisted after release.
“A parent was picked up and able to get out on a bail bond and he wants to go to the same place to look for work — he’s a day laborer — and the mother and wife in this case and daughter are saying, ‘Please don’t go there. That’s where you got picked up,’” she said. “And he’s saying, ‘We need to pay for what we owe, for the representation you hired for me, and that’s all I know, is this corner, and I have to go.’”
For Ortega, there was no moment of resuming his life here.
In detention, he said, every night brought the same fear: that the next morning he would be told to leave the country he has called home since childhood.
Now, outside the U.S., Ortega said he is trying to blend in to remain safe.
“I try to come up with this image like I know what I am doing,” he said, “and someone’s coming for me, but it was extremely stressful and scary.”
