'Massive deception': Trump voters 'feel betrayed' after ICE detains son
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
North Carolina U.S. citizens Martin Verdi and Debora Rey say their adult son, Agustin Gentile, is being detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and could be deported back to a country he has not seen since he was a toddler.
“This is craziness,” Rey told the Atlanta-Journal Constitution. “We feel betrayed, tricked. … [President Donald Trump] 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. He said he was going to go after all the criminals who came illegally.”
Verdi and Rey voted for Donald Trump last November, saying they supported his "pledge to bring order to the southern border and crack down on immigrants without legal status." But Gentile was a child born in Argentina when his family moved to the U.S. in the mid-90s. He is now a green card holder with two U.S. citizen children of his own, ages 6 and 8.
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Immigration officials targeted Gentile because of a 2020 misdemeanor that got him two days in the Los Angeles County jail before authorities closed the case in 2023. Three months ago, Gentile returned to the U.S. from a trip abroad to discover Department of Homeland Security officials confiscating his green card and Argentine passport.
They ordered him to report to a Raleigh, N.C., Customs and Border Protection office on April 14, where he was detained and sent to a local county jail. Two days later Gentile was transferred to Stewart Detention Center in South Georgia.
Green cards allow residents to live and work legally in the U.S. as permanent residents, but the federal government may initiate removal if card holders are accused and convicted of certain crimes. Rey and Verdi told reporters they recalled Trump speaking about people like Jose Ibarra, a Venezuelan man with no lawful status in the country who was convicted of the murder of nursing student Laken Riley on the University of Georgia campus.
“That has nothing to with cases like [Gentile],” said Verdi, who added that “of course” she would not have voted for Trump had she realized the scale of his crackdown.
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“This was a massive deception what he did,” she said.
Read the full Atlanta Journal-Constitution here.
