PORT CHESTER, New York (WABC) — A family is fighting to get a husband and father back after ICE agents swooped into a neighborhood in Westchester County and detained him as he left the house for work.
Tears rolled down Rosa Zhagui’s face. Since she was 15 years old in Ecuador, she and her husband were inseparable. That was until ICE agents detained him last week as he left his house in Port Chester headed to work.
With his hands cuffed behind his back, 43-year-old Milton Guamarriga can be seen yelling his wife’s name, but Rosa never heard his cries. She had no idea at the time what was happening. Guamarriga works as a marble stone installer and is a volunteer firefighter in Portchester.
The father of three volunteers because he is undocumented, so he can’t be paid, but his family says he serves his community because he wants to be more.
He was recently trying to go back to college to get a degree in IT.
“My younger sister who’s eight, she asks for my father every single night and we lied to her and told her that he’s on vacation or like a work trip and for that reason he’s not able to come home,” said Guamarriga’s daughter Joselyn Guamarriga.
She admits that her father crossed the border illegally when he was 15 years old, but she says in the almost 30 years since, he has never gotten into any sort of trouble. She says he is not a violent criminal.
Eyewitness News reached out to the Department of Homeland Security but have not heard back.
Milton Guamarriga’s family says he’s being held at Calhoun County Correctional Center in Michigan.
They say he was in the process of applying for his citizenship and they hope he will be allowed, instead, to complete that process and be released.
“Honestly it’s hard not to break down because my mom’s struggling a lot,” Joselyn Guamarriga said. “And she has my two younger siblings who are both still in school, and we are just honestly trying to figure out how to make everything work until my dad comes out and hopefully comes home.”
