When Todd Lyons, the acting director of United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) commented back in April that he hoped to make the agency function “like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings,” it was a ghoulish hint at just how dehumanizingly repugnant the immigration situation we were entering would turn out to be. Beyond the fact that the Amazon comparison was fitting on a purely political level, given billionaire owner Jeff Bezos’ immediate bootlicking of Donald Trump once it became clear that kowtowing to Trump would be important for Amazon’s bottom line, the simile would turn out to be prophetic on a more logistical level as well. Just as mishandling or outright losing packages is inherent to Amazon’s nature thanks to its incalculably vast scale and lack of general fucks given, it turns out that misplacing human beings may be inherent to the operations of this swollen, casually cruel expansion of ICE. But where placing a replacement order might be an acceptable fallback for a kitchen gadget that gets lost in an endless “fulfillment center” (a perfectly dystopian term), families are understandably a bit less forgiving when their loved ones disappear for months, with no end in sight. Such is the case for Vicente Ventura Aguilar, a 44-year-old, Mexico-born undocumented immigrant who has lived and worked in California for the last 17 years, picking grapes in the Central Valley, working on sanitation crews in Los Angeles, and by all accounts generally keeping a low profile. On the morning of Oct. 7, Ventura Aguilar was walking down the street in L.A., reportedly on his way to catch a bus to apply for another sanitation job, when, according to eyewitnesses, he and several others were detained by ICE. The next day, according to a friend who was detained alongside him and ultimately deported to Mexico, Ventura Aguilar suffered some kind of medical emergency while in ICE custody at a checkpoint near the U.S.-Mexico border, falling down, spasming and bleeding from the mouth. While the other detainees were moved out of the area, an ambulance was called. It was the last time in the past seven weeks that anyone has reported seeing Vicente Ventura Aguilar. His family has no idea where he is, and have not been able to locate him despite scouring government databases, friends and relatives, hospitals and even morgues. ICE, meanwhile, says they have no record of Ventura Aguilar having ever entered their system, despite multiple eyewitness reports that he was there when he suffered a medical episode. No one can say for certain where Ventura Aguilar now is, or even if he’s alive or dead. The two primary possibilities seem to point to either irresponsible incompetence, or outright malfeasance, with a man’s life on the line. His family and his U.S. representative are both desperately searching for the truth. I just sent a letter to Kristi Noem, Todd Lyons, and Rodney Scott demanding answers about the wellbeing and whereabouts of my constituent, Vicente Ventura Aguilar, who has been missing for six weeks following his detainment by CBP. Vicente’s family deserves answers. [image or embed] — Congresswoman Sydney Kamlager-Dove (@kamlager-dove.house.gov) Nov 22, 2025 at 2:59 PM The Bottomless Pit of ICE Ventura Aguilar was born in Chiapas, in the south of Mexico, and came to the U.S. looking for work when he was in his late 20s. He was a regular at the very strip mall where he was seemingly detained, but no concrete video evidence exists of that precise moment. According an investigation from MS Now, Ventura Aguilar can be seen on surveillance footage at the strip mall at roughly 8:40 a.m. on Oct. 7, where he encountered a friend and the pair briefly danced together on the sidewalk. Only five minutes later, Ventura Aguilar would be detained by ICE agents in masks and unmarked cars, along with several other Spanish-speaking locals according to eyewitnesses at the scene, just off camera. It’s the last video evidence of the man’s existence. From within ICE custody, we have another eyewitness account in the form of MS Now’s interviewing of Nicolas Ramos, a friend of Ventura Aguilar and another immigrant from Mexico who was also detained and ultimately deported. Ramos told the publication that he spent the 24 hours after arrest with Ventura Aguilar, first at the basement immigration facility of the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building in downtown L.A. known as B-18, and then on a van that was loaded with immigrants and driven to the U.S.-Mexico border for deportation. While sitting on a bench inside the immigration checkpoint, however, that’s when Ventura suddenly lost consciousness and pitched forward, his arms and legs shaking and bleeding from the mouth, according to Ramos. After initially asking if Ventura Aguilar was faking the episode, ICE agents eventually ushered the other detainees out and called for an ambulance, according to the L.A. Times‘ reporting on the story. Ramos would not see Ventura Aguilar again: He was dropped across the border in Tijuana, forced to leave his friend behind. As for what happened to Ventura Aguilar during his medical episode, brother Felipe Aguilar told the L.A. Times that “while his brother is generally healthy, he saw a cardiologist a couple years ago about chest pain. He was on prescribed medication and his condition had improved.” One can’t help but wonder at the implications here, and the distinct possibility that Ventura Aguilar was without medication that he desperately needed. According to the Department of Homeland Security, however, the department that contains ICE, the story apparently begins and ends with the curt dismissal that Ventura Aguilar simply isn’t in their system, and never was. Tricia McLaughlin, the chief spokesperson for DHS, flatly denied to MS Now that Ventura Aguilar had been detained by ICE in the first place in a statement: “There were 73 people from Mexico arrested in the Los Angeles area,” on Oct. 7-8, McLaughlin said. “None of them were Ventura Aguilar. For the record, illegal aliens in detention have access to phones to contact family members and attorneys. Additionally, family members, lawyers, and members of the media can easily locate individuals by using ICE’s Online Detainee Locator System.” The Online Detainee Locator System that McLaughlin mentions is meant to serve as a way for families or relatives to be able to locate and track the movements of detainees through the system, but perhaps unsurprisingly, the more people are processed and shoved into detainment by ICE (more than 65,000 currently, as of last week), the more opportunities there are for systemic oversights. Ventura Aguilar has never shown up in said system, which ICE seems to view as absolving them of any sense of culpability whatsoever. It’s possible that he’s been impossible to locate digitally because he may have given a false or different name to the immigration authorities when he was first detained, but that’s little consolation to his family at this point, seven weeks later. Nor has he apparently “had access to phones to contact family members and attorneys,” as McLaughlin stated. Does it seem likely that a man who has been in the U.S. for 17 years would suddenly just cease all contact with his family, both in L.A. and in Mexico? Or does it seem more likely that he’s incapacitated or worse? There are other possibilities. Ventura Aguilar could still be in a hospital somewhere, either without a name or under an alias, still in ICE custody. Or … he could be a casualty of American immigration cruelty, whose death is being suppressed in an attempt to stifle public blowback and media coverage. Among those trying to elevate the prominence of the story is Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (CA-37), who represents the district of L.A. in which Ventura Aguilar resided. On Friday of last week, she sent a letter to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, demanding “answers regarding the wellbeing and whereabouts” of Ventura Aguilar. Kamlager-Dove’s casework team has been involved in the legwork of searching for Ventura Aguilar, contacting ICE, CBP, the Los Angeles Police Department, hospitals, and the Los Angeles and San Diego County Medical Examiners, all without any luck to date. “No family should ever have to wonder whether their loved one has been lost—or worse—while in the custody of CBP or ICE,” said Rep. Kamlager-Dove in a statement. “Yet since October 7th, this has been the reality for the Ventura Aguilar family, who are desperately seeking information about the welfare and whereabouts of their loved one and my constituent, Vicente. They deserve answers, and yet immigration enforcement officials have done little to provide them to a family in crisis. We will not stop searching for Vicente or demanding accountability for this negligence until he is found.” There can be little doubt that if American democracy does in fact survive the coming years, and every attempt to dismantle it entirely, then we will no doubt look back on this era in hushed tones thanks to incidents exactly like this one. It doesn’t matter that Vicente Ventura Aguilar did not have a legal right to residence within the United States, even though he had been living and working here for 17 years. What matters is that he was reportedly put into the custody and supposed care of a branch of the federal government, and then vanished without a trace, leaving his family preemptively mourning and expecting the worst. Imagine, for a moment, how you might feel if you were told by eyewitnesses that your own loved one had been arrested, and then the arresting law enforcement agency told you that they had no record of that person, and to simply forget about him. Would you comply? Perhaps the story of of Ventura Aguilar will still have some kind of “positive” conclusion, where the man is found having merely been detained for close to two months in a long-term U.S. detention facility, or lingering in a hospital as a result of his medical episode. That these possibilities would stand out as “positive,” however, underscores the deadly seriousness of the potential alternative. Keep scrolling for more great stories.