He voted for Trump. Then ICE detained his wife.

Bradley Bartell and Camila Muñoz had a familiar small-town love story, before they collided with immigration politics.

They met through mutual friends, had a first date at the local steakhouse, married after two years and were saving to buy a house and have kids. Muñoz was already caring for Bartell’s now 12-year-old son as her own.

But last month, on their way home to Wisconsin after honeymooning in Puerto Rico, an immigration agent pulled Muñoz aside in the airport.

“Are you an American citizen?” asked the agent. She answered no, she wasn’t. She’s from Peru. But she and her husband had taken the legal steps so that one day she might get U.S. citizenship.

Millions of Americans, including Bartell, had voted for President Donald Trump’s promise to crack down on “criminal illegal immigrants.” But eight weeks in, the mass deportation effort has rapidly expanded to include immigrants whose application for legal status in the country is under review.

Even those married or engaged to U.S. citizens are being detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, USA TODAY has learned.

In addition to Muñoz, USA TODAY has confirmed through attorneys, family members and documents that ICE has detained for weeks:

a woman in her 50s who has lived in the country more than 30 years and is married to a U.S. citizen;
a woman in her 30s with proof of valid permanent legal residency, whose father and siblings are U.S. citizens, and who first came to the U.S. as a teen;
a European woman in her 30s engaged to a U.S. citizen who overstayed her visa when she was 21;
a woman engaged to a U.S. legal permanent resident, with whom she has lived for nine years.

None of the women has a criminal record, according to a USA TODAY review of national law enforcement records. All were in an ongoing legal immigration process and felt comfortable enough boarding a domestic flight. Immigration agents swept each of them up at airport checkpoints in mid-February, in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Neither ICE nor its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, responded to multiple requests for comment.

Nora Ahmed, legal director of the ACLU of Louisiana, said immigrants in legal limbo of any kind should take precautions if they plan to travel.

“The unfortunate answer is they have to be worried,” she said. “If you are not a citizen of the United States, and you are going through an immigration process, your first thought needs to be: How can this process be weaponized against me?”

David Rozas, an immigration attorney representing Muñoz, agreed: “Anyone who isn’t a legal permanent resident or U.S. citizen is at risk – period.”

Bartell and Muñoz wore their wedding rings for the flight home, secure in the knowledge that the U.S. government knew they had applied for her green card. She had overstayed her original visa but, they reasoned, she had been vetted from the start, worked on a W-2 and paid her taxes.

Before agents led her away, Muñoz pulled off her wedding ring, afraid it might get confiscated. She shoved it into her backpack and handed it to Bartell.

He shook as he watched her disappear. He thought, “What the f— do I do?”

Looking for something lasting

Overstaying a visa is considered an administrative, not criminal, violation of U.S. immigration law, immigration attorneys say. It can result in a bar to returning to the U.S. for up to 10 years, or it can be lawfully forgiven, under a “waiver of unlawful presence,” if the immigrant’s spouse or immediate relative is a U.S. citizen.

But the U.S. government also has broad authority to detain immigrants, even when they have an application in progress with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

“If an individual is overstaying their visa, they are therefore an illegal immigrant residing in this country, and they are subject to deportation,” Karoline Leavitt, White House press secretary, said in a January news conference.

Bartell didn’t see it that way. Not when he met Muñoz in the small Wisconsin town where she had worked lawfully on a temporary visa. Not after they spent months filling out the USCIS paperwork to apply for her legal permanent residency.

He saw her as a funny, caring, hard-working woman who came legally, not one of the “illegals” who the president he supported promised to deport.

The town where they met, Wisconsin Dells – population 2,942 – draws tens of thousands of tourists each summer to a constellation of water parks, including one billed as the nation’s largest, Noah’s Ark.

Bartell grew up nearby, stayed and got a job with decent pay working maintenance in a factory. For Muñoz, the Dells region was an adventure. As a college student in Peru studying human resources management, she applied and was accepted to a work-study program, secured a U.S. visa and got a job picking up towels at one of the Dells waterparks in 2019.

When COVID-19 hit the following winter, with flights canceled and borders closed, she couldn’t get home, and she overstayed her visa. She stayed in the Dells, packing vegetables for a local farm and working food service at hotels. When they met, Bartell gave her his number on a scrap of paper. She threw it away.

But they connected a few days later on Facebook. He invited her to dinner. Muñoz teased that it better not be at McDonalds. On their first date they both confessed: They were looking for a relationship that could last.

Ramping up enforcement

ICE is under extreme pressure from the White House to ramp up enforcement. Top ICE officials, including the newly installed acting director, were re-assigned within weeks of Trump taking office, allegedly over frustrations that detentions and deportations weren’t rising fast enough.

The reality of immigration enforcement is that targeting convicted criminals requires time and manpower; it can take half a dozen agents to arrest a single person.

An airport checkpoint – like the one at the San Juan airport in mid-February – can quickly round up multiple people whose immigration status may be in limbo.

“ICE is really widening the net in a really chilling way in terms of who they are going after,” said Jesse Franzblau, senior policy analyst for the National Immigrant Justice Center. “People who generally don’t fit the profile of who they picked up before are being picked up now.”

It took days for Bartell to find his wife after she was detained at the airport.

It was nearly a week before Muñoz appeared in the ICE detention system. Her name finally turned up in an online locator, assigned to a privately run detention center in Louisiana. On a video call, her black curls hang askew. She wears a tan uniform, reflecting her lack of criminal record.

There are nearly 80 other women in the dormitory. The cost to taxpayers for detaining an adult was $282 per day in 2020, according to the American Immigration Council, a nonpartisan research organization.

Bartell worries about his wife. “Emotionally, I’m concerned for her,” he said. “It can’t be easy being trapped in a room with 100 other people. They don’t have anything in there. It’s just so wasteful.”

They keep in touch on 20-cents-a-minute phone calls. She worries about Bartell’s son, whether he is eating well or misses her Peruvian cooking.

The money the couple saved for a down payment on a home has evaporated into attorneys fees and savings to pay a bond for her release, if she’s given that chance.

Both of them have been thinking a lot about Bartell’s vote for Trump.

“I knew they were cracking down,” he said. “I guess I didn’t know how it was going down.”

He imagined the administration would target people who snuck over the border and weren’t vetted.

But his wife, “they know who she is and where she came from,” he said. “They need to get the vetting done and not keep these people locked up. It doesn’t make any sense.”

Lauren Villagran can be reached at lvillagran@usatoday.com.