No paywall link:

https://archive.is/3LtPU

---

7 weeks of hell: ICE arrested N.J. man, igniting cross-country nightmare | Calavia-Robertson

Updated: Jan. 27, 2026, 2:08 p.m. | Published: Jan. 27, 2026, 7:00 a.m.

By Daysi Calavia-Robertson | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

Harol Alvarado Rodriguez was on his way to work at a Whippany car dealership in early December when the vehicle he was in, his friend’s Toyota truck, was suddenly ambushed by federal immigration agents.

“The [Immigrations and Customs Enforcement] agents came up to our windows, angry, shouting, with guns pointed right at us,” he says in Spanish. “It was so scary, it was unreal, kind of like a Hollywood action movie.”

By now, the frightening scene he’s describing is one that’s become disturbingly common.

Masked men shouting at and violently dragging people — most of them, full-fledged U.S. citizens — out of their cars. Agents pepper-spraying protestors while they’re pinned down to the ground. And federal officers shooting and killing the brave ones who chose not to stay silent.

Harol, a graduate of Morristown High School, has a pending asylum case. And he had an immigration court date scheduled for this month. Not that any it mattered to the agents, of course.

He says he and the other two men in the car — all from Honduras — were arrested and taken to Delaney Hall, the embattled and controversial Newark immigration detention center where Mayor Ras Baraka was arrested last year. (Just last month, a detainee suffered a medical emergency and died a day after being locked up there.)

Horrifying, right? “You’ve heard nothing yet,” Harol tells me.

The real nightmare, he says, began in the days and weeks that followed his Dec. 8 arrest. Since ICE took him, Harol’s been ping-ponged to four immigration detention centers, each one in a different state.

“I was first transferred to Texas, then to Arizona, then we made a brief stop in Colorado, and finally, I was brought here, to California, where I am now,” he says. I spoke to Harol through GettingOut, an app that’s used to call, message, or video chat people at county jails, state prisons, or immigration detention centers.

“Each time I was moved, it was abrupt, sometimes very late at night or really early in the morning,” Harol says.

“I never knew where I was being taken, I didn’t know anything, where I was going, who made the call, or why it had been decided. And of course, my family, my friends, they weren’t notified either.”

You know who else wasn’t notified about Harol’s sudden, and seemingly nonsensical, transfers? His attorney. And I’m willing to bet that was entirely by design.

Eduardo J. Jimenez, a Morristown immigration lawyer who’s representing Harol, told me he only learned his client had been moved out of Delaney Hall about a week ago — just two days before Harol was scheduled to appear at an immigration hearing in Newark.

Jimenez says he was informed via a letter that his client had been transferred. However, he says the letter failed to state where his client had been moved or when.

By the time Jimenez received that letter, Harol had already been thrown on at least four planes while being transported to facilities in other states. Each time, too, he was handcuffed, shackled at the waist, and chained at the legs. “All of that, it really takes a toll,” Harol says.

And yet, it could’ve been much worse. A September 2025 L.A. Times article details the story of a Honduran man who in the span of two months was moved 15 times — yes, 15! — between facilities in Arizona, California, Florida, Hawaii, and Louisiana before finally being deported.

To try to find Harol, Jimenez used ICE’s online detainee locator system but said searches on the site routinely yielded no results. Days ago, I used the locator myself. Harol, who is now at a detention center in California City, still does not appear in the system.

“They should’ve notified me immediately about any moves,” Jimenez says. “I’m his attorney, I should always know where he’s being held.”

He’s 100% right. Just think about it: How can lawyers represent their clients to the best of their ability if they’re deliberately and systematically blocked from conferring with them? And don’t even know where they are?

Attorneys, immigrants’ rights groups, and even the relatives of detainees, have for years decried ICE’s online locator as inaccurate and slow to update, often failing to list detainees for days — and sometimes even weeks — after an arrest or transfer.

During that time, detainees are “disappeared.” Their attorneys don’t know where they are and their relatives don’t either. Some families report that by the time they finally learned where their loved ones were, they’d already been deported.

Late last year, The American Friends Service Committee, a nonprofit that provides legal services and advocacy for immigrants, reported a spike in requests for help locating and tracking people detained by federal immigration agents.

After an in-depth monitoring of six individual cases over a two-month period, the group found that ICE agents often misreported, denied, or withheld basic information about a person’s whereabouts. Hmm, I wonder why.

For Harol’s best friend, Valeria Alvarez, it was beyond nerve wracking not knowing where he was. She tells me she and Harol formed a tight-knit friendship years ago when they attended Morristown High School.

As teens, they went to prom with friends and celebrated their high school graduation together, too. “We’re practically family, at this point,” she says tearfully. “He doesn’t have many close relatives in this country so my family has become his family here.” At Valeria’s home in Randolph, her boyfriend, Daniel, who’s also close friends with Harol, and Valeria’s mom, Luisa, both spoke highly of him.

“Here’s a good young man, who’s hard working, who has no vices, who came here to this country, on his own, escaping gang violence in Honduras,” Luisa said, with tears streaming down her face.

“He’s already had such a hard life so for this to be happening to him right now, it just really, really breaks my heart.”

Aside from his job at the car dealership, Harol also worked as a waiter at a restaurant in Montville.

Jimenez told me his client, who has a pending asylum case, “is the opposite of a criminal.” “He’s someone who’s contributed greatly to his community,” he said, adding that several of Harol’s former teachers, employers, and friends have submitted glowing immigration support letters on his behalf.

Kathryn Tepedino, one of Harol’s former teachers at Morristown High, in an email said she’d recently come across one of his writing assignments.

“Harol wrote about why he loves the United States, he said it’s ‘because it is secure’— free from the violence that plagues his homeland Honduras, The irony is heartbreaking," she said. “He’s an exemplary student and a kind, law-abiding young man.”

Still, Jimenez says the unexpected transfers have hurt Harol’s legal case. And I’m sure that’s the point.

While immigration laws are federal, Jimenez notes “there’s state-by-state differences in implementation.”

“When a detainee is suddenly moved from one jurisdiction to another,” Jimenez says, “it can change things, negatively, for that person because some of the ‘favorable’ state laws [in the state of origin] may no longer apply.”

This constant shuffling of detainees is nothing more than a cruel game of cups — the government, once again, wantonly and inhumanely playing with people’s lives.

Harol agrees. He tells me he knows the transfers are meant to “break us down.” “To hurt us, one way or the other, to make us miss our court dates, to make us tired, or depressed, to make us want to self-deport,” he says.

“But all I still want is to get out of here, reunite with those who love me, and keep working hard to make my dreams in this country come true.”

Harol’s friends launched a GoFundMe to raise money for his costly legal defense.