As punishment for organizing a hunger strike in a Washington state detention camp, federal immigration agents forced 44-year-old Cuban national Rogelio Bolufé onto a plane early this month, threatened him with torture, took him to Ecuador, and left him there with nothing.
Sharing his story with the Prospect in Spanish via text, Bolufé described how agents told him that if he didn’t cooperate, they would put him in a full-body restraint for the entire journey, a common tactic that can kill people.
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Already, Bolufé had faced punishment by detention camp guards for filing civil lawsuits against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and for writing letters to members of Congress and to various media outlets. For those infractions, guards stole all of his legal documents and notes, his phone book, and his religious texts and objects, including the Quran, prayer beads, and a prayer rug. Immigration agents had moved him seven times in ten months to crush his organizing.
Bolufé lived in Miami, Florida, when federal agents detained him at a traffic stop in August 2025. First, they sent him to the South Florida detention facility known as “Alligator Alcatraz,” the tent city that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis built in a swamp in just eight days, which cost taxpayers almost $1 billion and is now closing.
They then moved Bolufé four more times, with stops at Camp East Montana in Texas, Torrance County Detention Facility in New Mexico, and Alabama’s Etowah County Jail.
Nineteen people have died this year inside Trump’s camps, which frequently provide inadequate medical care and inedible food.
Eventually, he ended up in the Northwest Detention Center in Washington state, where he organized La Union de Secuestrados por ICE, or the Union of People Kidnapped by ICE, joining with 140 ICE kidnap victims from that facility and Torrance County, who said that their inhumane conditions were emblematic of “a system that has turned human suffering into a business.” After all that agitation, ICE wanted him gone.
After the announcement of the union, ICE sent Bolufé to the Removal Operations Coordination Center and the Florence Service Processing Center, both in Arizona. From there, they put him on an airplane with Peruvians bound for Peru and Ecuadorians bound, like him, to Ecuador.
“They left me in Ecuador through an accelerated deportation that I consider retaliation,” Bolufé told the Prospect. “They removed me from the country without prior warning, without having signed any document and without adequately explaining what was happening. I was left alone with the gray uniform of my detention, without additional clothing, without money, without a single form of identification, without a cell phone for me to communicate and without knowing anyone in Guayaquil.”
Ecuador is a dangerous country, and Guayaquil is one of the most dangerous cities in that country, so much so that the State Department warns Americans against traveling there “due to terrorism and crime.”
“I was expelled from the United States without due process being respected,” Bolufé said, “even though I have an active immigration proceeding and pending appeal. I consider that to be an illegal and unconstitutional action.”
BOLUFÉ’S EXILE TO A SO-CALLED “THIRD COUNTRY” is emblematic of how the federal government is using transfers and deportations to stamp out collective action against its mass deportation terror campaign and inhumane detention centers. Nineteen people have died this year inside Trump’s camps, which frequently provide inadequate medical care and inedible food, and whose guards routinely retaliate against detainees.
The vast majority of people inside have never committed a criminal offense. Further, detention is not meant to be punitive. Yet in one of the camps he lived in, Bolufé said detainees were held with 86 convicted criminals.
“The ICE prisoners have worse conditions than the convicted criminals,” he said.
Advocates told the Prospect that ICE frequently attempts to break solidarity between detainees by moving them around. ICE removed 90 people from their units Wednesday morning at GEO Group’s Delaney Hall in Newark to break a hunger and work strike that hundreds of detainees have undertaken for the last 20 days. That’s on top of the 300 people advocates suspect ICE transferred out of Delaney Hall last weekend.
“These transfers occurred while GEO Group and ICE are systematically denying families visitation and cutting communications between them and their loved ones,” a coalition of advocacy groups, including Eyes on ICE NJ, said in a statement.
The advocates are demanding that GEO Group immediately restore full visitation and communication rights. Imprisoned immigrants have also expanded their demands, including that all women be released, with priority given to those under 21 years old, mothers, and those with medical conditions; that allegations of abuse be independently investigated, including against a female officer whom detainees have made multiple complaints of sexual abuse about; that legal representation and support be expanded; that GEO hire qualified medical staff, cleaners, and a new food supplier; and that it provide safe drinking water and fix the plumbing and ventilation, among other things.
Advocates note that since undertaking collective action, Delaney Hall detainees and supporters rallying outside have won several significant victories, like the release of all pregnant women and multiple people with medical conditions, plus “a modest investment in pro bono legal services” of $12 million from Gov. Mikie Sherrill (D-NJ), additional oversight inspections, and national and international news coverage.
Undertaking collective action like a hunger strike “is a mechanism of self-defense before so many constitutional violations,” Bolufé said. The United States promises freedom, justice, and equality for all, but none of that works when people are falsely detained and held indefinitely, he said. It’s more accurate to call detainees “kidnapped” than it is “prisoners,” he said, because there’s no legal argument to support prolonged detention when no crime has been committed.
“The Union of People Kidnapped by ICE builds solidarity and mutual aid in response to the constitutional violations and the abuses committed against immigrants. In the face of injustice, the separation of families and the violation of fundamental rights, our response is clear: unity, dignity and defense of the Constitution,” he wrote. “The strength of our community lies in the solidarity, the justice and the respect to the rule of law.”
Bolufé is now deciding what to do next. He applied for adjusted status under the Cuban Adjustment Act, which allows Cuban nationals in America for more than two years to apply to become lawful permanent residents. When he was detained, Bolufé had already completed biometrics data and an interview. He was simply waiting at home for his green card to come.
“I have to admit that my biggest concern is not myself,” Bolufé said. “My biggest concern is that this is not an isolated case, it is standard procedure of ICE, they are doing this as a usual practice. And they are destroying thousands of households, families, violating people’s rights, torturing, it is very sad that happens today in the United States.”
The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment.
Translation assistance was provided by Prospect writing fellow James Baratta.
