Eyes widening and darting. A stiffened body. Hands clenched on the steering wheel. No smile or wave. Plain clothing.
These are the observations Border Patrol Agent Brandon Parent made to justify pulling over a gray Ford Transit van on Route 105 in Richford on June 14. In an affidavit written by Parent’s colleague, Parent would later state that behind the driver and passenger, he believed he saw more people in the back seats through the van’s tinted windows. Those people would turn out not to exist.
The driver of the van, 29-year-old Jose Ignacio “Nacho” De La Cruz, was returning from delivering groceries at a farm near the border with Canada that Saturday morning, according to a declaration De La Cruz filed on July 6 in support of his bail proceedings. His stepdaughter, 18-year-old Heidi Perez, was in the passenger seat.
Both are from Mexico, but De La Cruz moved to Vermont in 2016 to establish his life as a dairy worker. Perez followed in 2023 and became a student at Milton High School, where she graduated a week earlier, according to court documents.
For more than three weeks since the traffic stop, both have been detained in Vermont jails by Immigration and Customs Enforcement awaiting deportation proceedings. In declarations filed this week, De La Cruz and Perez allege they were physically injured by Border Patrol agents, and that the agents threatened further harm if they did not cooperate.
Both are arguing to be released on bail, but their proceedings have been delayed.
As De La Cruz’s and Perez’s cases continue to unfold, their experience, illustrated largely through court documents, shows some of the tactics U.S. Customs and Border Protection uses on non-citizens amid ballooning deportation quotas mandated for the Department of Homeland Security by the Trump administration.
De La Cruz and Perez are part of a record of ICE detentions that reached more than 56,000 in mid-June, according to data collected by TRAC Reports, a nonpartisan group that gathers and analyzes immigration data. More than half of those people were booked into ICE detention centers in May, according to the data clearinghouse. Less than 30% have a criminal record, and those that do often have minor offenses like traffic violations, according to TRAC.
On Monday, during Perez’s bail hearing, Vermont District Court Judge Christina Reiss delayed Perez’s potential release, requesting more information from her attorneys and the federal government, who argued her bail should be denied.
On Tuesday, De La Cruz’s bail hearing was postponed in response to a request by Brett Stokes, an attorney at the Center for Justice Reform at Vermont Law and Graduate School who represents De La Cruz and Perez.
Criminal accusations sometimes surface after apprehensions, like in the high-profile case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was deported to El Salvador after a routine traffic stop and now faces charges of human smuggling connected to a 2022 traffic stop.
De La Cruz faces a similar accusation. After his apprehension, Border Patrol agents began a criminal investigation into his possible connection to an individual who illegally crossed the U.S.-Canada border into Vermont in April. He has not been charged.
“There’s somewhat of a trend nationally that in these high-profile cases, the charges and allegations come after the fact,” Stokes said. “It’s not uncommon to see subsequent charges like this.”
While most immigrants in ICE detainment are transferred to bigger facilities outside Vermont in states like Louisiana and Texas, which together hold more than a third of ICE detainees, De La Cruz and Perez remain in the state’s detention system largely because their own immigration advocacy work meant they knew their legal rights and an attorney was quickly contacted on their behalf. Their attorney helped them file petitions alleging their arrest was unlawful and each received a temporary restraining order to remain in Vermont instead of being transferred out of state.
Those transfers, common during the second Trump administration, can limit an immigrant’s access to both legal representation and the moral support of their communities, and can serve as a quicker route to deportation, according to advocates and legal experts.
Though De La Cruz’s encounter with Border Patrol agents appeared to be by chance, the situation soon escalated. After De La Cruz was taken to the Richford Border Patrol Station, a Border Patrol investigator noted similarities between De La Cruz’s name, location, and phone number with an individual who allegedly helped a Mexican citizen enter Vermont from Canada in April.
The government filed a search warrant for his cellphone, and his black Samsung has been in federal possession since, but no criminal charges have been filed.
“Border Patrol’s recent allegations do not change the essential fact that Nacho and Heidi were detained without cause while delivering food to farmworkers,” Will Lambek, a spokesperson for Migrant Justice, a Vermont-based advocacy organization for immigrant workers, said in a statement on the search warrant.
“Border Patrol claims that Nacho had previously made a plan to give a ride to a woman who was planning on immigrating to the United States without authorization. If true, this incident is wholly unrelated to the actual circumstances of their violent detainment,” Lambek said.
The legal obligation of U.S. Customs and Border Protection to protect a porous border with Canada overlaps with the escalating demands on ICE. While both agencies are under the Department of Homeland Security, ICE recently became the country’s largest federally-funded law enforcement program after the passage of President Donald Trump’s omnibus budget bill last week.
While ICE operations have expanded under the Trump administration, U.S. Customs and Border Protection said the operations of Border Patrol have remained the same. In both De La Cruz’s search warrant and Garcia’s case, ICE is not a party in the investigation or legal case, though the agency holds the detainees while their deportation proceedings play out.
In response to a detailed list of questions from VTDigger, U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesperson Michael Niezgoda wrote in an emailed statement that because the matters “all relate to an ongoing criminal prosecution, court proceeding, or immigration hearing currently being litigated in the District of Vermont District Court or Immigration Court,” it is his agency’s policy not to comment.
Stokes said neither De La Cruz nor Perez are being criminally prosecuted.
The traffic stop
Border Agent Brandon Parent was parked on Drew Road, a rural lane in Franklin County that dead ends at a dairy farm split in half by the international border with Canada.
Agents like Parent monitor the border with Canada in uniform from marked vehicles under the mission of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, an agency in the Department of Homeland Security established after the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001. The main mission of the agency is to stop terrorists from entering the country, according to Ryan Brissette, a public affairs specialist for the New England region of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which includes Vermont.
Legally, individuals can only enter the U.S. through a port of entry. If they enter by another means, they must report directly to Border Patrol and could be subject to arrest until they do so. Those individuals can then be transferred to ICE jurisdiction if the U.S. government determines they need to go through deportation proceedings.
“The only time we really engage with ICE is when we have someone being removed,” Brissette said in a phone call unrelated to this case. Enforcement and Removal Operations, an agency under ICE, can apprehend the individual if they do not have legal status in the U.S.
But in order to pull over a vehicle in Vermont with Vermont plates, like the one De La Cruz was driving on June 14, an agent must have reasonable suspicion that the driver or passengers in the vehicle have committed an immigration violation or federal crime. If they don’t have probable cause, both the driver and passenger have the right to remain silent and not answer questions about their immigration status, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, a nonprofit civil rights organization with a chapter in Vermont.
In an affidavit filed by Border Patrol after the encounter, Parent said he observed that De La Cruz’s “arms and hands appeared clenched and rigid on the steering wheel.” He declared he hadn’t previously seen the car on Drew Road, where residents were “generally friendly and supportive” of agents like himself, and he was typically acknowledged “with a smile, head nod, or a wave.” De La Cruz and Perez were wearing plain clothing and didn’t appear to be local farm workers, Parent noted. They didn’t make a full stop when exiting Drew Road.
Parent observed that these behaviors were “often seen in subjects engaged in suspicious behavior upon noticing law enforcement.” When he began tailing the vehicle, he said he thought he saw people in the back through the van’s tinted windows.
Stokes determined these observations could amount to racial profiling. He laid out this argument in a writ of habeas corpus, a petition asking the court to review their unlawful detention, filed two days after their apprehension.
Parent contacted Swanton Sector Dispatch and matched the license plate to Jose Ignacio De La Cruz, a 29-year-old who lived in Milton. Parent stated in the affidavit filed by his colleague, David T. Palczewski, that he believed “alien smugglers were possibly using vehicles with Vermont license plates to blend in with the local population.”
He pulled the van over at 12:07 p.m. He quickly saw that there were no additional people in the back, as he had previously believed.
De La Cruz asked why he was stopped, but Parent did not give a reason and requested his driver’s license, according to the Border Patrol affidavit and declarations filed this week by De La Cruz and Perez.
“The officer then said, in broken Spanish, that the fact that I spoke Spanish and did not understand English was enough for the stop,” De La Cruz wrote in his declaration. He said Parent tried to open the driver’s door but it was locked.
Two additional supervisory Border Patrol agents appeared on scene — Thomas Blaser and William Haffley — who ordered De La Cruz to step out of the car.
De La Cruz then called the Migrant Justice emergency hotline, and handed the phone to Perez, according to his declaration. In the Border Patrol affidavit, Parent reported that the two refused to effectively communicate and called others on their cellphones.
Marita Canedo, a Migrant Justice spokesperson, was on the line with Perez. During a rally protesting the detainment of De La Cruz and Perez in June, she said, “Nacho did everything that he knew to defend his rights.”
The American Civil Liberties Union recommends that if police, ICE, or Border Patrol pull over an individual while in transit that they stay calm, open the window part way, and if they don’t have immigration papers, tell the official they want to remain silent.
De La Cruz stated in his declaration that he rolled his window down just enough to hear the officer, and then asked why they were detained and if they were free to go four separate times. After the fourth time, Border Patrol agent Blaser used a duty-issued baton to break the driver side window and remove him. De La Cruz stated that “glass shattered and hit the left side of my face, causing an injury to my head and left ear.”
After agents pulled De La Cruz from the car, Perez left voluntarily from the passenger seat, Perez wrote in her declaration. De La Cruz shook his head at Perez, warning her not to speak, according to the Border Patrol affidavit.
They took the pair to the Richford Border Patrol Station, according to the Border Patrol affidavit. There, De La Cruz and Perez note in their declarations that they asked to make phone calls and were denied. De La Cruz was told to sign documents, according to his declaration, and when he refused, he said one of the officers said in Spanish, “You are going back to fucking Mexico, you don’t have any documents, you don’t have the right to make a phone call.”
When Perez refused to give personal information, an officer “grabbed her arm and twisted it behind her back, causing her visible pain and injuring her nails,” De La Cruz wrote. “He only stopped when another officer told him to.” He was told through an interpreter that he needed to convince his stepdaughter to cooperate and “that if she continued to refuse, they would hurt her until she complied,” De La Cruz declared in court records.
“The interpreter added that they did not want to hurt her again but would do so if it became necessary. He also said that they had children and would not want anyone to harm their own children,” De La Cruz wrote.
The two were separated and placed in different cells. De La Cruz agreed to give fingerprints and DNA when he was told that, if he cooperated, he could be reunited with Perez, he noted in his declaration.
While they were apprehended, David T. Palczewski, the prosecution agent for Richford, received an email noting the apprehension of two subjects during a traffic stop with a vehicle registered to De La Cruz out of Milton.
He thought he recognized the name. In the affidavit he filed a week later, Palczewski wrote that he advised agents that De La Cruz was a possible match to a phone number noted in a deportation case where a woman communicated with someone named “Nacho” for assistance in crossing the U.S.-Canada border. Agents seized De La Cruz’s cellphone and kept it at the Richford station after he was transferred to Northwest State Correctional Facility in St. Albans.
Two days later, Palczewski said he used his government-issued cellphone to call the number associated with that case and De La Cruz’s cellphone rang. A day later, Palczewski wrote that through “open-source reporting” he learned De La Cruz goes by “Nacho.”
“By the agent’s own admission, Border Patrol did not connect the alleged incident to Nacho until after he was stopped and detained without cause,” Lambek said. Lambek noted that the stated reasons for the traffic stop “only strengthen our belief that this was an act of racial profiling, pure and simple, in violation of Heidi and Nacho’s constitutional rights.”
Neither De La Cruz nor Perez have a criminal history, but a criminal investigation into De La Cruz began.
The phone number
A week after the traffic stop, Palczewski filed a search warrant for De La Cruz’s cellphone.
The warrant and attached affidavit alleged that De La Cruz was the same person as an individual called “Nacho” who tried helping Yoselin Gonzalez-Flores, a Mexican citizen, cross the border from Canada into northern Vermont between April 9 and 11. Nacho intended to pick up Gonzalez around midnight on April 11 at a Mobil Gas Station in Saratoga Springs, New York, and bring her to a house in Burlington, according to the affidavit.
But by 3:44 a.m. on April 11, according to the affidavit, Gonzalez texted the number associated with a person named Nacho and said she would not be crossing near Saratoga Springs. Instead, she would travel to Montreal and cross through the woods.
Gonzalez crossed the border on the night of April 18, according to the affidavit. Around 10 p.m., the crossing activated cameras near Berry Road in Franklin County. A few hours later, on April 19, she was apprehended with three others, along with two people in a minivan who intended to pick up the individuals after crossing, according to a criminal complaint that details Gonzalez’s apprehension. None of those people were De La Cruz.
Gonzalez waived her Miranda rights and turned over her cellphone to Border Patrol agents, according to the criminal complaint. Her phone showed WhatsApp messages in Spanish between herself and the person called Nacho, according to the affidavit.
Stokes called the warrant a “fishing expedition” in line with what’s happened in other cases of detainees being retaliated against by the Department of Homeland Security.
“The fact remains that all this is is a warrant to search his phone for evidence of something that may or may not be there,” Stokes said of the search warrant. “I don’t know where the allegations and charges are coming from, but the fact remains that we stand with Nacho, and we believe Nacho.”
But three days later, Gonzalez was deported, along with another individual who crossed, according to the complaint. VTDigger contacted the lawyers associated with the Gonzalez case, but Gonzalez’s location was unknown at the time of publication.
Agents may have focused on the area surrounding Berry Road, near where Gonzalez was apprehended on Richford Road, because, according to the criminal complaint, it has “recently experienced a significant uptick in illicit cross-border activity.”
But northern border crossings overall have plummeted in 2025, according to data collected by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. In May, the agency encountered 5,063 people at the northern border, less than a third of the 18,663 people border officials encountered in May 2024.
While crossings have dropped, border officials still detain people crossing illegally. U.S. Border Patrol’s Swanton Sector apprehended hundreds of people between Feb. 1 and May 31, 2025, according to a social media post made by Robert Garcia, the sector’s chief patrol agent.
“Despite the significant decrease in cross border apprehensions, Swanton Sector has apprehended over 300 individuals from 45 different countries,” Garcia wrote, noting the majority were from India, Mexico, and Ecuador.
Gonzalez was arrested near Pleasant Valley Farms, according to a map depicting the encounter in the criminal complaint.
Two days later, border agents entered that farm, the largest dairy in Vermont, and arrested eight immigrant farm workers who lived and worked on site after a report from concerned citizens of two individuals leaving the woods near the U.S.-Canada border, according to a U.S. Customs and Border Protection statement.
“We’re still catching a lot of questions about targeting migrant workers on dairy farmers,” Brissette said in a phone call unrelated to De La Cruz’s case. “If we come across someone who is here illegally they’ll get arrested. But we’re not targeting those individuals.”
All eight farm workers were from Mexico, according to Migrant Justice, and at least four have since been deported. Two were released on bail and returned to Vermont. At least one, Jesus Mendez Hernandez, remains at the Karnes County Immigration Processing Center in Texas.
The location of the eighth, Adrian Zunun-Joachin, was not available in a locator system provided by ICE. But Stokes, his attorney, said Zunun had told him in previous conversations that he was considering abandoning the fight to stay in the U.S. and instead return to Mexico. Stokes said he was likely deported.
The hearings
On Tuesday, roughly a hundred protesters gathered in front of a federal courthouse in Burlington at a rally hosted by Migrant Justice to support De La Cruz. This was the second rally in two days, after protestors gathered to support the bail hearing for Perez on Monday.
Perez spent roughly three weeks at Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility before her bail was deferred. A new court date was not set by Wednesday morning. Perez has been in Vermont since she crossed into the U.S. in February 2023 when she was 16 years old. De La Cruz, who also has a 3-year-old son — a U.S. citizen born in Vermont — entered the U.S. without crossing a legal port of entry in 2016, and again in 2022 after briefly returning to Mexico.
Wuendy Bernardo, an undocumented farmer and immigrant advocate, attended the rally on Tuesday and reflected on a time when she was detained with her children.
“I was detained too, along with my children, and it’s not easy being locked up in jail,” Bernardo said. “It’s not fair because we come here to work, we contribute here, to this state, to this country, and it’s not fair that they’re locked up.”
De La Cruz and Perez remain in Vermont because they and their attorney alleged that Border Patrol agents lacked reasonable suspicion for the traffic stop, violating their constitutional rights. De La Cruz is being punished “for his Mexican-descent and disfavored speech,” Stokes wrote in court documents.
A judge recently extended a temporary restraining order to keep De La Cruz and Perez in Vermont. It now lasts until July 31.
While De La Cruz’s cellphone remains in the hands of Border Patrol, according to Stokes, the agency hadn’t pressed criminal charges in the weeks since searching the cellphone’s emails, texts, maps, photos, videos, Internet browsing and search history, geolocations, contact lists and financial transactions.
“I don’t know where it’s going to end up,” Stokes said. “But ultimately, it’s directly out of the authoritarian playbook.”
