ICE DETAINED AN 18-YEAR-OLD HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT WHO SAYS AGENTS IGNORED HIS PROTECTED STATUS

Elder Chavez-Carranza says he tried to show ICE agents his Special Immigrant Juvenile Status paperwork before he was taken into detention.

18-year-old Elder Chavez-Carranza has been detained by ICE since December after a traffic stop.

Elder Chavez-Carranza was a high school student in Alabama when a traffic stop became the beginning of months in ICE detention.

According to AL.com, Chavez-Carranza was a junior at Asbury High School in Albertville when he was stopped last December. He said he was driving 52 miles per hour in a 45-mile-per-hour zone when an officer pulled him over, asked for identification, and asked where he was from. What could have ended as a traffic matter became an immigration detention case that has kept him away from his family, classmates, teachers, and community.

Chavez-Carranza told AL.com that he tried to show ICE agents documentation that he had been granted Special Immigrant Juvenile Status. That status is an immigration classification created by Congress to protect children who were abused, neglected, or abandoned by a parent. Chavez-Carranza said his parents abandoned him as a baby in Honduras, and he came to the United States in 2022 to live with his sister in Alabama.

According to Chavez-Carranza, ICE ignored the documentation and detained him anyway.

DHS defended the detention in a statement to AL.com, saying Chavez-Carranza entered the United States through the southern border in 2022. That agency statement does not answer the central question raised by his case: how does a teenager who says he had child-protection status end up held for months after a traffic stop?

The mechanism is clear enough to demand public scrutiny. A high school student was stopped for speeding, questioned about where he was from, and taken into immigration detention despite saying he had paperwork showing protected juvenile status. The harm is not abstract immigration procedure. It is the interruption of a young person’s life.

Before detention, Chavez-Carranza was building a life in Albertville. He was in school, taking welding and carpentry, living with his sister, and moving through the ordinary parts of adolescence with classmates and teachers who knew him as a student. Since being detained, he has missed prom, the birth of his nephew, and months of school.

His English teacher, Carmen Bahena, described him to AL.com as sweet and hardworking. After a recent video call, she said she could still see the student she remembered, even while he remained inside detention. Her account matters because ICE cases are often flattened into paperwork, status labels, and agency statements. The people who know Chavez-Carranza describe a teenager with a school, a family, and a community before ICE took him out of all three.

Chavez-Carranza is being held at Winn Correctional Center, where he complained about poor food and limited medical attention, according to AL.com. In June, the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General released a report from an unannounced inspection of Winn. The report found the facility noncompliant in nine detention standards, including environmental health and safety, food service, use of force, medical care, classification, legal access and materials, staff-detainee communication, and outdoor recreation in the Special Management Unit.

Two detainees have died at Winn since April, including one shortly after the inspector general report was released.

His detention is even more urgent because Winn is not just any facility; it is a detention center federal inspectors recently found noncompliant with multiple standards, including medical care and food service. When a teenager says he had protected status and still ends up inside that system for months, the public record has to hold both facts together.

Chavez-Carranza told AL.com he feels betrayed because he says he was given protected status under the Trump administration, only to be detained by ICE months later. A child-protection status is supposed to recognize that a young person has already survived abandonment, neglect, or abuse and should not be treated as disposable by the immigration system.

Detention has removed him from the life he was building. His classmates moved through the school year. His family welcomed a new baby. Prom happened without him. His carpentry and welding classes continued without the student who wanted to return to them. Detention does not only hold a person in place; it takes them out of the daily moments that make up a young life.

His community has responded by organizing. Family members, teachers, friends, former detainees, and supporters have worked to bring attention to his case and call for his release. Carlos Della Valle, a former ICE detainee who became close with Chavez-Carranza inside Winn, told AL.com that the teenager reminded him of his own son. After Della Valle was released, he and his wife helped organize letter-writing efforts, support for the family, and a prayer vigil.

About 45 people gathered at Mosaic Family, a church in nearby Gadsden, to pray for Chavez-Carranza’s release. His sister, Mayuri Chavez, fought back tears as she thanked the people supporting her brother. The vigil matters because the community understood that a teenager had been taken from the life he was trying to build, not because prayer softens what ICE detention has done.

“Bring Elder Home” coloring pages feature a chair Chavez-Carranza built in carpentry class.

The chair has become one of the clearest symbols of what ICE interrupted. Chavez-Carranza built it in carpentry class at Asbury High. Supporters have used the image in coloring pages that say “Bring Elder Home,” turning a school project into a public call for release. The chair is evidence of a student who was learning, making, and planning before detention stopped his life midstream.

Chavez-Carranza has said that, if released, he wants to continue school and return to his carpentry and welding classes. If deported, he would have an aunt in Honduras, but he does not want to go back. He wants to return to his family and friends in Albertville.

DHS gave AL.com a statement about how Chavez-Carranza entered the country, but ICE’s framing leaves out the rest of the public record: he was a high school student, he says he had Special Immigrant Juvenile Status, he says ICE ignored the paperwork, and months of his life have been taken inside a detention system with documented failures.

A traffic stop should not become months of detention for an 18-year-old student who says he had protected juvenile status. An agency statement should not become the whole story when a teenager’s teachers, family, former detention peers, and community are saying his life has been suspended.

Chavez-Carranza left Honduras as a child after abandonment and came to live with his sister. He built a life in Alabama, found his way into school, and started learning trades that could shape his future. ICE detention has put that future on hold while the people who know him fight to bring him home.

For Chavez-Carranza, the answer is not theoretical. It is the difference between returning to school and remaining inside Winn. It is the difference between being known as a student with a future and being reduced to a custody file.

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A traffic stop should not become months of ICE detention for a teenager who says he had protected juvenile status.

Americans Against ICE documents detention abuse, family separation, protected youth detention, deportation machinery, and the systems that disappear people from their schools, families, and communities.

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