Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers look on after a bus with detained people left the DHS field office in Nashville where multiple immigrant rights groups gathered to protest what they believe to be a multi-agency operation to detain-noncitizens overnight in Nashville, Tennessee, U.S., May 4, 2025. REUTERS/Seth Herald
Correction: A previous version of this report mistakenly reported that the parents are green card holders. They are U.S. citizens and their son is a green card holder.
A Georgia couple believed they were voting for order at the southern border when they cast their ballots for President Donald Trump in the 2024 election. But that was before their son became caught up in the president’s massive crackdown on immigrants.
“This is craziness,” Deborah Rey told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution while sitting outside El Refugio, a hospitality house near Georgia's Stewart Detention Center, the second largest in the country.
On a recent Sunday, Rey and her husband, who live in North Carolina and are U.S. citizens, opened up to the publication after driving nine hours to visit their son as he sat behind bars at an ICE detention facility.
Their son is an Argentine Green Card holder.
“He didn’t say he was going to do this, that he was going to go after people who have been here for a long time,” Rey told the Journal-Constitution. “He said he was going to go after all the criminals who came illegally.”
The couple said they voted for Trump in last year’s election and told the Journal-Constitution they now “feel betrayed, tricked.”
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Their son, Agustin Gentile, is the father of two U.S. citizens, ages 6 and 8. Gentile was a toddler when he moved from Argentina to the U.S. in the mid-1990s.
“Verdi and Rey say they have shielded their grandkids from the severity of Gentile’s current situation in South Georgia, where he is clad in an orange jumpsuit and fighting to remain in the country,” according to the Journal-Constitution. “They told the children that he had to leave on an urgent trip.”
The couple told the publication they “of course” would not have supported Trump had they'd known the extent of the immigration crackdown.
“This was a massive deception what he did," Rey added. “Because the other side had shown us how indulgent they were (with immigration).”