10/13/2026
"Jose Elder Villeda Salguero, who said he still hopes to obtain a visa or be granted asylum, the decision to travel to Erie to offer pay-what-you-can tree removal services to city residents affected by the storm is a choice he now regrets.
The father of five, including a 5-year-old daughter who suffers from nephrotic syndrome and is on a waitlist for a kidney transplant, said he was fitted with an ankle monitor, released, and has since returned to his family in Texas. The other men were not released, he said...
Salguero said he feels especially heartbroken for the men who were with him who have since been deported.
“They sent away people who left children here,” he said. “You go to work and this is what happened. To me, that is not right.”
Despite having a work visa, Salguero said he is worried he also will have to leave his family behind if he is ultimately deported to Honduras, and he is particularly concerned about his 5-year-old daughter.
“If I had known what could happen, I wouldn’t have risked going to Erie,” he said"
Jose and his crew came to Erie to help after the storm and they should not have been treated this way. ICE is not protecting our communities it's making them even less safe from the shooting in NYC to right here in Erie.
Jose Elder Villeda Salguero went down to the lobby of the Clarion Pointe Hotel in Erie on the morning of Sept. 10 for breakfast, just moments before chaos erupted.
When Salguero and his tree removal crew — who had traveled to Erie from Texas days earlier to help clean up debris left by a storm that ravaged the Pennsylvania city — arrived in the lobby, they were confronted by immigration agents at the front desk and they scattered.
One man was tackled against the front door of the hotel while fleeing from officers in the parking lot. Two men, both in gray polo shirts, took off toward different hotel exits with officers in close pursuit, according to footage of the incident obtained by the Post-Gazette.
Salguero — who came to the U.S. from Honduras in 2008 and has a work permit that is valid until 2029 — said he tried to leave through the back door but was caught and detained along with six of his crew members.
After Immigration and Customs Enforcement shootings during operations this year in Texas, Maine and Minneapolis, Salguero said he ran because he feared for his life.
“You’re afraid because you see how things are happening — that they shoot people like it’s nothing,” he said. “I said, ‘Well, I’d better start running.’”
The arrest and detention of Salguero and his crew members was one of the latest large-scale immigration enforcement operations in Erie, an emerging regional hotspot for ICE arrests.
The uptick in immigration arrests there has occurred even as Erie County Council decided in February to no longer allow ICE to house immigrant detainees in the county prison without a judicial warrant. It’s a step being taken by other counties around the country amid growing opposition to the federal agency’s tactics.
For some immigration attorneys in the Erie area, however, the decision has made their jobs more difficult.
Because the federal government can no longer hold immigrant detainees in the county prison without a warrant signed by a judge, immigration attorneys said ICE instead has been bringing them to a small Customs and Border Patrol Office in nearby Fairview Township before moving them to facilities across the country.
“They are transported to locations that are far away from their family, away from local counsel that knows their families or possibly worked to represent them,” Erie immigration attorney Andrea Amicangelo said. “They are pulled away from their home, their family, their network, and put in a place where accessibility is much more difficult.”
