Stepping onto the sweltering desert field, they were the underdogs, but the neighborhood was so proud. A Queen Anne Little League baseball team had, for the first time in years, won the Washington State Tournament and advanced to the West Region tournament. As fans, we tracked the games nightly on a baseball app and got texts from friends and families who were hunkered down in Nogales, Arizona, for the two weeks of play.
But on July 22, my brother, who had logged onto the popular game-watching app GameChanger, noticed the best player wasn’t in the lineup. Could he have been sick? No, because he’d still show up as a member of the team. But his name had disappeared from the roster. After a nail-biting hour of confusion, we learned why.
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Two years ago, Queen Anne’s star player, whom I will anonymize for safety and privacy reasons and refer to as “Roberto,” a 13-year-old known for his speedy fastballs and great sportsmanship, had come to the United States from Nicaragua as a humanitarian parolee with his family as part of the Biden-era Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, Venezuela (CHNV) Humanitarian Parole program — a program that the Trump administration abruptly terminated on March 25, 2025. On May 30, the Supreme Court ruled that President Trump was allowed to terminate the program, crushing the hopes of starting a new, better life in America for families like Roberto’s and leaving these families in legal limbo while lower court challenges proceeded. Fearful of the actions this administration was taking against immigrants and with their temporary legal status suddenly gone, the family was already planning to self-deport to Nicaragua in August, but they now faced a larger challenge.
When Roberto wasn’t seeing well the previous nights in Nogales, head coach and former Queen Anne Little League commissioner Tommy Kim thought it would be a good idea to have his pitcher’s eyes checked out. “We made an appointment to get glasses,” Roberto said. “I needed them.”
The following morning, Roberto and Kim were driving to Tucson for an eye appointment when they were stopped at a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) checkpoint.
“I’d expected we’d get pulled over. It didn’t surprise me. Initially, I was not concerned at all, but then the process seemed to drag on for a really long time, and that’s when I started to get concerned,” Kim said.
Roberto recounted being surprised: “It was a mix of emotions,” he said. “I never thought that was gonna happen to me.”
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But why were Roberto and Kim stopped even when heading 20 miles in the opposite direction of the border? Scattered within a 100-mile radius of the border, checkpoints like the ones they were stopped at exist primarily to “find and identify people being smuggled into the United States,” said John Mennell, a Public Affairs Specialist at CBP. “They are not drug checkpoints, with their purpose being immigration. Anybody who’s classified as an immigration officer has the right to board and search a vehicle, vessel, or aircraft to determine if they are smuggling aliens into the country.” Immigration officers include Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, Homeland Security personnel, and CBP agents. They are very much legal and date back to the 1976 Supreme Court case United States v. Martinez-Fuerte, in which the court ruled that CBP can set up permanent checkpoints along any public highway leading to the border.
Coach Kim idled his rental car and pulled over.
“When a vehicle approaches the border patrol checkpoint, there is a brief interaction between the people in the vehicle and the agents conducting the inspection,” Mennell said. “He [the officer] is inspecting to see if there are any aliens being brought into the United States.”
“Is everyone in the car a U.S citizen?” Kim remembers the immigration agent inquired.
This interaction with the agent can go very quickly; all that is required is for the agent to believe that there are no “aliens” in the vehicle. Mennell explained that “if he [the officer] does have some suspicion, he can start a brief interaction with the person. That usually looks like the immigration officer asking: ‘Hey, do you have anybody who is an alien of the United States in the vehicle?’”
Kim told the agent that Roberto was not a citizen.
“I was thinking that I’d be detained for a long time,” Roberto recounted, looking back at the tense moment.
“If there is any reason the agent develops suspicion, they will secondary that vehicle to a more thorough inspection where they will go through documents and run record checks,” Mennell said.
That’s exactly what happened to Tommy Kim and Roberto. Kim handed a copy of Roberto’s passport to the immigration agent to run the numbers and check information. He was then questioned further on the side of the road.
“Up to that point, everything I’d expected to happen had happened,” Kim said.
But then it took a turn. Kim was stunned as Roberto was taken from him, placed into an ICE car, and brought back to Nogales, where he was detained. ICE contacted Roberto’s parents in Seattle and informed them about what was unfolding.
Kim turned the car around and headed south, back to Nogales, to brief the team at the hotel. He gathered the players in a conference room and explained the situation. As one player recalled, “I was just shocked. We trained again that afternoon, but nobody could stop thinking about [Roberto].”
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Roberto was held in federal custody for one night at the ICE detention facility, which he recalled being “all white, pretty cold, and so bright.” Even during the night, he said, they didn’t fully turn the lights off. The following afternoon, he was transferred to the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) in Benson, Arizona, 70 miles away. The ORR is an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) responsible for “unaccompanied alien children,” according to Mennell. It is for kids who are undocumented and don’t have any family in the U.S.
“It’s simply the agency that is responsible for taking care of somebody who is arrested by any of the immigration officers,” said Mennell. HHS will place young adults like Roberto in an environment that’s not a jail cell, even though Roberto did spend his first night with adults inside a cell.
“I think they didn’t know I had parents,” Roberto said. His mom and dad were in Seattle at the time, with most of the other baseball families. For distant regional tournaments like this, Little League will only cover travel for the players and three coaches.
A 13-year-old, who just wanted to play in one final tournament with his friends before leaving, was now stuck between America’s pastime and the policies of the Trump administration.
The following day turned out to be Queen Anne’s final game in the tournament. It was played without Roberto, who was locked in a former Days Inn, surrounded by barbed wire. As the team walked off the field for the final time, they held posters written in Spanish and English that read, “Con Vos Roberto” and “We carry you with us Roberto.” His teammates also held a larger poster that contained the jersey number Roberto once proudly wore.
While the remaining coaches and players headed back to Seattle, Kim stayed to deal with the ongoing situation. Kim went to the ORR and explained how the two of them had traveled with the rest of the team for the tournament. Meanwhile, the agents interrogated Roberto about his presence in the United States. How did he get here? Why was he here? Did he cross the border legally?
Kim submitted several records, including the Alaska Airlines flight plans, travel arrangements, and tournament details. He also showed the team roster with his and Roberto’s names on it. But Roberto was not yet free to go.
Even though he was in the country with his parents, CBP viewed him as an unaccompanied minor because his parents weren’t with him at the time he was detained.
Roberto had acquired full permission to travel to Nogales from his parents. Still, CBP never obtained any permission before relocating Roberto from the CBP office in Nogales (where he spent one night) to the ORR refugee center in Benson. At the Homeland Security detention facility, he had been able to call his parents. At the ORR facility, he couldn’t. Visitors are currently not allowed at the refugee center. He was entirely on his own with nobody to talk to.
When asked about what specifically happened to Roberto, Mennell said that CBP is unable to comment directly on individual cases due to “privacy reasons.”
As news of Roberto’s plight made its way back to Queen Anne in the hours after his detention, a Little League community more accustomed to organizing practices and games sprang into action. To league parents and their kids, Roberto was one of their own.
Rob Gillette, Queen Anne 12U All Stars coach and Seattle lawyer, remembered that he had attended Sunday school with Arizona Senator Mark Kelly’s Chief of Staff, Carmen Gallus Frias.
After contacting her, Frias informed Gillette that Kelly’s office was aware of Roberto’s detainment in Benson. Gillette, who didn’t know which agency was holding Roberto or where he was being held, recalls being “really impressed” by the work Kelly’s office had already put into the matter.
“She had already put all this together and was pretty far ahead of where I was…she had already done all the research to figure out that the agency holding him, ORR, rolled up to Health and Human Services.”
The question that loomed was whether Queen Anne should mount a legal challenge against the detention. However, instead of going to court, as this was still unfolding, Kelly’s office recommended proceeding directly to the decision-maker.
Suddenly, the small Queen Anne community was faced with a new challenge: they had to get in touch with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
With the information from Kelly’s office, Gillette went back to the Queen Anne Little League community. Would anyone have a contact for the HHS secretary?
One mom informed Gillette that she had contact information for one of Kennedy’s aides.
“I was really happy that we had someone who had a contact. I was just operating on a 24-hour schedule, because if we couldn’t get him released today, it would probably be weeks before we got him released,” Gillette said.
The contact information was provided, and a call was made. Kennedy’s office immediately ordered the release of Roberto.
After spending two days in the ORR facility in Benson, Roberto was met with good news: “I was in the movie room with all the kids, and my case manager called me over and said we had to talk.” The case manager took Roberto to his office and said that he was finally going home.
The news was relayed from Seattle down to Tucson, where Tommy Kim was staying. Within moments, he was on his way to pick up Roberto.
A day later, Roberto was back in Seattle. Having Roberto freed was better than any win on the field, several teammates said.
A week after his return to Seattle, Roberto and his parents self-deported back to Nicaragua. The night before they left, they attended a goodbye party hosted by his teammates and their parents. Through tears and laughter, the Queen Anne families celebrated Roberto’s contributions on the field and the friendships they had forged.
Even though he is no longer in the United States, Roberto’s dream of playing baseball remains alive. He is happy to be back home with his family, currently playing in an amateur prospects league. He was expecting to be evaluated by scouts from Major League Baseball as of our interview in late September. He had also been invited to the Dominican Republic to play at a state-of-the-art baseball academy next year.
At the goodbye party, Roberto’s mother urged the Queen Anne players and their families to come to Nicaragua for a visit. She extended the sort of invitation that the U.S. government no longer offered her family.
“Our doors are open to you,” she said.