Family in shock at patriarch’s ICE arrest
Father, 55, has lived, worked in U.S. for nearly 30 years
Jesus Manzo Ceja walked out of his Napa home before 6 a.m. Wednesday intending to move his truck from a spot where he worried it might get towed. Instead he found immigration officers waiting for him in the dark with a warrant for his arrest.
Now the 55-year-old construction worker and father of three — who came to the U.S. nearly 30 years ago but never gained legal status — faces potential deportation to his native Mexico, according to family members.
They wonder if an arrest nearly 15 years ago caught up to Manzo Ceja amid the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown and this week’s big Northern California sweep, which ended Wednesday. They also worry about other undocumented family members being arrested, including Manzo Ceja’s wife, 54-year-old Guada-
lupe Manzo.
“We didn’t expect it at all,” the couple’s daughter, 27-yearold Brenda Manzo-Garcia, said Thursday at the family’s rental home. “When they took my dad, they asked for my mom, and she was too scared to come out of the house.”
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers serving administrative warrants cannot force their way into homes.
Manzo Ceja was one of 232 people arrested during the four-day Northern California operation by the agency known as ICE that launched Sunday and was designed to counter California’s sanctuary policies, which restrict local cooperation with deportation efforts.
The sweep, named Operation Keep Safe, has intensified distrust between the Trump administration and California’s liberal leaders, especially after Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf ’s extraordinary decision on Saturday night to help immigrants and their families by announcing that the sweep was imminent.
ICE did not release the names of people arrested or the circumstances, so the picture of those targeted has remained fuzzy. A Chronicle reporter met Manzo Ceja’s family at a Wednesday protest outside ICE’s San Francisco headquarters.
Agency officials said they generally focus enforcement on people considered threats to public safety. In this week’s operation, ICE said 115 of the 232 people arrested had prior criminal convictions, including some for violent offenses. But the agency also said it “no longer exempts classes or categories of removable aliens from potential enforcement.”
Arrests of undocumented immigrants without criminal convictions have risen sharply under the Trump administration. In the first three months of fiscal year 2018, which began Oct. 1, the San Francisco field office made 373 arrests of noncriminal undocumented immigrants — roughly 100 fewer than the entire 2016 fiscal year, during the Obama administration.
Among those detained this week, ICE said in a statement, was Napa resident Armando Nuñez-Salgado, 38, a “documented Sureño gang member” with four previous deportations to Mexico and multiple criminal convictions, including assault with a deadly weapon and hit-and-run.
Nuñez-Salgado’s family told reporters he had been brought to the United States as a child and had moved past the troubles of his early life.
In Bay Point, officials said, officers arrested a man with eight past deportations and a conviction for assault with a deadly weapon, and in Stockton they arrested a man with a conviction for committing lewd acts on a child.
Some of those arrested this week will be deported immediately, while others will begin hearings over their status in immigration court. ICE said some would be prosecuted for illegal re-entry.
The acting head of ICE, Thomas Homan, has said that because of sanctuary laws, officers would have to double down in California and would be forced to make arrests in communities because of their inability to pick up individuals from local jails.
He has also warned that ICE officers would inevitably come across other undocumented immigrants in the course of targeted actions and make what are known as collateral arrests.
The operation has left Manzo Ceja’s family members in crisis, worried that they will be split up. While two of his children, Manzo-Garcia and her 15-year-old brother, are U.S. citizens by birth, his wife and his 29-year-old son, who also lives at the home in Napa, are undocumented.
Manzo Ceja’s wife was pregnant with Manzo-Garcia when the couple and their 2-year-old son crossed into California from Tijuana in 1990, family members said. Over the years, they said, he has worked in the fields for a variety of Napa Valley wineries.
Last summer, he lost a vineyard job when his wife had multiple hernia surgeries, she said. Recently, he’s been juggling construction jobs while taking his wife to weekly medical appointments and his 15year-old son, Juan, to physical therapy. The teen had open heart-surgery as an infant, his mother said, and has needed constant care since.
Family members — who said Manzo Ceja had a valid California driver’s license — were shocked by the arrest warrant, saying they had never received any correspondence from ICE. Manzo Ceja’s wife said he spent three weeks in jail 14 years ago after an arrest for driving under the influence, and that he had been cited in the past for driving without a license.
Relatives said Manzo Ceja hadn’t been deported before, and had never returned to Mexico. They said he called his family Wednesday and told them he was in custody in Stockton. As of Thursday afternoon, they hadn’t received another call, and were trying to reach him.
“It’s hard to imagine to be without him here,” Guadalupe Manzo said. “He’s the head of the family.”