EL SEGUNDO, Calif. — Many people sought safety in their homes when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, but that’s something San Bernardino resident and Nicaraguan immigrant Wilfredo Gonzalez couldn’t do.

At the time, he was held by Immigration and Customs Enforcement at the Adelanto Processing Center, a detention facility for people facing deportation about 80 miles outside of Los Angeles.

“It was frustrating because I had a work permit since 1998 through [Temporary Protected Status] until [former President] Trump canceled TPS in 2018,” Gonzalez said in a Spanish-language interview with Spectrum News 1 anchor Catalina Villegas. “And that’s when I was left behind.”

At one point, nearly 20% of the detention center’s population was sick with COVID-19.

“We were constantly in fear and trying to protect ourselves,” Gonzalez said.

Gonzalez, who had worked legally for decades as a truck driver and fell on ICE’s radar because of a DUI, said he was worried for his health every day.

That’s why U.S. District Judge Terry Hatter ordered ICE to protect detainees from the virus by reducing the detention center’s population.

Spectrum News recently acquired emails from late 2020 showing that after their efforts in court to stop the order failed, ICE leadership responded to the decision by using agency resources to drive a political narrative linking crime and immigration.

In a news release from Dec. 2020, ICE singled out six detainees out of the 250 the judge required them to let out, accusing them of committing crimes after they left the facility. It also characterized many people as repeat offenders, even though the vast majority hadn’t committed new crimes, and used the word “danger” to describe the depopulation.

“I went to court, and the judge told me that it wasn’t fair all the time I had spent in there,” Gonzalez said. “That I had been criminalized further over this DUI.”

“She said not even in a criminal court I would have spent so much time in there,” Gonzalez said.

Documents received by Spectrum News through a Freedom of Information Act request show the news release was primarily written and edited by two government officials at the top of ICE, including Tony Pham, then acting director.

Pham was also criticized just before the 2020 election when the agency put up billboards in the swing state of Pennsylvania, showing pictures of immigrants accused or convicted of crimes with the line, “Sanctuary policies are a real danger.”

He corresponded regularly about the news release, along with Jon Feere, then senior adviser to the director, who praised the news release as “a significant indictment of court-ordered releases.”

Records obtained by American Oversight, a nonpartisan watchdog group, show Feere worked closely with Trump-era White House adviser Stephen Miller on advancing a political narrative linking crime to illegal immigration.

However, a National Institute of Justice study released in September found that U.S.-born citizens are arrested more than twice as often as undocumented immigrants for violent crimes.

Doris Meissner, who served under Former President Bill Clinton as commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service — a precursor agency to ICE, said the Trump White House was closely involved in ICE operations and messaging.

“The White House played a very strong role in what was taking place at the Department of Homeland Security, what was taking place in law enforcement agencies,” said Meissner, who now works at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C

She said the Trump administration’s use of eight different ICE acting directors who lacked Senate confirmation left civil servants vulnerable to political overreach.

“Anyone in that position did not have the standing to push back on the reaching in that was happening from the White House,” Meissner said.

“The whole situation surrounding this issue that you’re looking at, it’s not the way the federal system is supposed to work,” she said.

Feere also praised the news release for its “indictment” of ICE’s alternatives to detention, a program that supervises some migrants through ankle monitors and other technology.

Meissner says it’s unusual for ICE’s leadership to publicly criticize its program. 

“It’s not what people doing an agency’s work would do,” she said.

Former President Trump frequently links crime and immigration at his campaign rallies, and Feere told the NY Post in May he’s sure he would be involved in efforts to sharply increase deportations if Trump is re-elected.

Both Feere and Miller contributed to Project 2025, a policy blueprint that calls for replacing thousands of federal civil servants with political appointees, which would greatly reshape and further politicize the federal government.

Feere’s current employer, the Center for Immigration Studies, is designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center for “repeated circulation of what nationalist and antisemitic writers.”

The Center of Immigration Studies sued over this distinction, but a federal judge threw out the suit.

Spectrum News asked Feere about his criticism of the judge’s order and ICE’s alternatives to the detention program.

“Under the Trump administration, ICE took public safety and transparency seriously and knew that judge’s order to release criminal aliens was going to endanger lives, and it clearly did, as evidenced by the re-arrest of these individuals for sex assault on a minor, battery, burglary and grand theft, to name a few examples,” he said.

“The dangerous releases also highlighted the ineffectiveness of [alternatives to detention],” Feere said. “As ICE has explained repeatedly, detention is the only way to ensure with 100% certainty that removable aliens will attend court hearings.”

Gonzalez, whose wife and children are U.S. citizens, cautions against generalizing a particular group as criminals.

“Criminals come in all colors and shapes, people say that Latinos are criminals, that we bring drugs so they can discriminate, but there are a lot of us that work and fight for this country, for our rights, for our families and for a better life,” Gonzalez aid.

“There’s why we’re here, not to commit crimes,” he said.

Gonzalez is now litigating his immigration case from home, hoping his days in detention are behind him.