After running for their lives in Honduras, they now face deportation in the U.S.

KEY WEST, Florida - Every day now for the last five months, Nilsa Huete, a 41-year-old Honduran immigrant, tries to deliver a message of encouragement to her eldest daughter during the few minutes they are able to talk on the phone. Nelly, 23, was arrested for driving without a license and is detained at the Broward Transitional Center, a detention center in Pompano Beach, Florida.

"God willing, I hope that the judge is sympathetic, that he see you are a mother and that you need to be with your children," she says. She hangs up and bursts into tears in her kitchen at her home on Stock Island, just minutes from Key West, the southernmost city in the U.S.

The history of the Huete family is high drama; from the violence they fled in their home country, one of the most dangerous in the world, to their perilous journey north to Mexico and on to the United States. Since March, Monroe County sheriff's agents have detained five members of the family with the intention of handing them over to immigration authorities for deportation.

Her daughter, Nelly, and brother, Marcos Antonio, have spent months in detention centers struggling to avoid deportation. Three others, her son Yony, cousin Osman and nephew Leonel, were also detained in recent months and narrowly avoided being turned over to Border Patrol.

"It seems that life is bent on hurting us," she laments. Nearby, a dozen children in the family are playing, unaware of the situation. Among them are the 3- and 5-year-old children Nelly left behind when she was arrested.

Fleeing Violence

The Huete nightmare began in 2000 when they became the target of a vendetta in their native city, Choluteca. Nilsa said it was a ‘mara’ gang, which Univision has not been able to independently verify.

That same year, her cousin was killed; the following year, her uncle. Two years later her father was slain. Nilsa decided to escape after the funeral. “My brother and I, as we were the oldest, were supposed to be the next. That was what we heard, that they were going to do away with every last one of us, that they would drink the blood of the Huete family."

After several months in the Honduran capital working to send money to the four children she had at that time, Nilsa decided that she had to migrate to the United States. She began a months-long journey north through Mexico and across the border with Texas. Once in U.S. territory, she traveled by bus and eventually met up with an uncle who was living in the Florida Keys.

When she reached Key West in March 2006, a tourist city of palm trees and vibrant nightlife 160 miles south of Miami, Nilsa was clear on her plan: to raise enough money to send to her family and gradually reunite with her children.

In a city that thrives on tourism, it was not difficult to find a job cleaning hotels and inns and raising money to start bringing the rest of the family.

The journeys taken by her children and siblings weren't easy: they involved kidnappings, ransom payments, beatings in the desert, and minors staying at refugee centers before being turned over to the family.

In the Sheriff’s sights

If the family thought coming to Key West would end their problems, they were wrong. They went from being persecuted in Honduras to fearing deportation in the U.S.

It began with Nelly. A county official stopped her on March 19 while she was driving to the laundromat. The officers’ body-camera video footage shows how they stopped the young woman because the tint on her car windows was darker than is permitted. When the agents realized she had no license and that this was the second time they had stopped her for the same reason, they decided to call the Border Patrol. [The video footage is linked to this story]

Marcos Antonio Huete Hernández, Nilsa’s brother, was arrested on April 27 after a woman truck driver hit him while he was cycling to work. The case, reported in May by Univision News, caused shock around the country. The body-camera footage shows how one of the officers asked if Marcos was "illegal" even before he knew if he was injured or needed an ambulance. That was in sharp contrast to the officer’s kind attitude toward the driver, who was American.

Marcos was treated in the hospital for his injuries. But county officials who handled his case picked him up there, returned him to the scene of the crash and turned him over to the Border Patrol.

Just over a month after that incident, on June 10, Nilsa's other son, Yony, and his cousin Leonel, were detained for two hours by a patrol when they were found sitting in a parked car.

A local publication, The Blue Paper, obtained a copy of the arrest report. It stated the reason for the traffic stop was that their car was parked "partially in the road." The officers also wrote that they decided to call the Border Patrol to seek help with Spanish translation, even though video images show a Cuban who was at the scene helping with communication.

The detainees’ perspective is quite different. They say they were held for no reason: "Pure abuse by American racists," Leonel, 17, can be heard saying while he was handcuffed in the back of the patrol car.

In the audio of the video, one of the agents is heard insisting that he does not trust the young men because they "whisper a lot." Though nothing is found in the car, agents do not release the boys until the Border Patrol arrives and checks that both have asylum applications in process.

This was not the family's last encounter with Monroe County agents. On July 6, one of Nilsa’s cousins, Osman Torres Huete, 23, was arrested on his way back from the supermarket in his car. On the police video footage, an agent is seen explaining that he was stopped because the vehicle was registered under the name of someone with an expired license, and because of a faulty rear light.

When the officer realized that he was driving without a license, he sent Osman to jail in Stock Island. (In Florida, like many states, undocumented immigrants are barred from obtaining a driving license.)

Two days after the arrest, and as he was about to be handed over to immigration authorities, a Key West lawyer was able to get him out of jail by showing that there was an administrative error in the case.

Osman, who has already started working again as an electrician, is waiting for a hearing on the traffic case on September 13.

A City of Immigrants

With this succession of arrests, Nilsa feels persecuted. "Are they angry with my family? Imagine, there are already five cases involving the same home," she said.

But the sheriff's office insists it does not have an official undocumented handover policy and that the decision to call immigration enforcement agencies is at the discretion of each officer.

Monroe County Sheriff's Office press spokeswoman Becky Herrin declined to respond to Univision News's request that she address the officers’ criteria for dealing with these cases and why immigration authorities were always contacted.

“We will have no statement for you in response to your inquiry," Herrin wrote in an email.

The handing over of undocumented immigrants to immigration authorities has sparked controversy in Key West. In May, the city passed a resolution defining itself as a "host city" that largely depends on an immigrant workforce and recommended that local police officers do not ask for immigration status "unless it is essential for law enforcement."

Key West is just a small part of Monroe County, which spans more than 983 square miles of islands at the foot of the Florida peninsula. All the arrests of the Huete family took place in Stock Island, neighboring Key West.

Naja and Arnaud Girard, the publishers of The Blue Paper, a small digital media outlet in Key West, have investigated the delivery of undocumented migrants to immigration authorities since the beginning of the year.

Although neither the county nor the Border Patrol offers such data, they have found some patterns that are repeated in police records. "Naja searched the jail arrest records and, if you look at people and names, many are Hispanic," Arnaud explains.

Their newspaper is the only media that has followed up on these cases. They say they have been criticized and insulted on social media by people who assert the sheriff's officers are simply doing their job.

The Border Patrol and the sheriff's office did not provide data to Univision News on the number of undocumented detainees in the area over the past year. In the United States, arrests of undocumented immigrants increased by 40 percent in the six months since Donald Trump became president.

In January, Trump ordered that funding be cut to jurisdictions that deny cooperation with federal immigration agents.

Following an increase in reports of hate crimes targeting immigrants after Trump's election, Key West Commissioner Sam Kaufman promoted a resolution to reaffirm that no discrimination of any kind would be tolerated.

Kaufman has also asked the county to state its policy regarding undocumented immigrants clearly: “If you say, as the leader of a law enforcement agency, that we don't have a policy, how can we as members of the public ... feel confident that these are fair policies and that they will be applied without certain selection or targeting?” he said.

And that's where Nilsa's suspicions come in. "As soon as they see our face and see that we are Hispanic, they know that we do not have documents," she says. She claims that when she arrived in the United States, she did not apply for asylum due to a lack of information and fear of being deported.

Her daughter Nelly has been detained since March, as has her brother, Marcos Antonio, held at the Krome detention facility outside Miami. Her family has hired lawyers to try to avoid their deportation.

It hasn't been all bad news for Nilsa's family, though. Recently, the authorities informed one of her young daughters, Claudia, that they granted her asylum. She is the second in the family, after her granddaughter Suany, while other children and brothers continue in their asylum processes.

The arrests have left the family with bills totaling more than $15,000, between bail, lawyers and money for Marcos Antonio and Nelly while they are in detention.

Also, without the salary from Marcos Antonio's jobs washing dishes in a restaurant and painting houses, and Nelly's job cleaning a hotel, it is increasingly difficult to pay the bills.

"There are days when I feel like saying 'enough is enough,' especially because I'm in poor health," says Nilsa, who suffers from severe back pain and takes pills to get through the day.

"But I cannot throw in the towel because if I give up what would happen to my daughter, what would happen to my grandchildren, to my brother? They cannot return to their country. If the judge decides to return my daughter (to Honduras), it would be like sending her to the slaughterhouse."