In one of the earliest scenes in the 2019 Netflix docuseries, “Living Undocumented,” produced by actress and singer Selena Gomez, the camera focuses on a young immigrant, Luis Diaz Inestroza, in the country illegally from Honduras and carrying out a wrenching and precarious task.

In the scene, he is driving Noah, the 3-year-old son of his long-time girlfriend, Kenia Mayorga, from Texas to Kansas City, Kansas, to be placed in the hands of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers so that the child could be deported back to Honduras alongside his pregnant mother, who was also in the country illegally.

“I have to take my boy over there,” Diaz Inestroza says in Spanish before embarking on an 11-hour drive. “It is a very difficult situation. To be honest, I’m a little afraid I’ll be stopped by the police, that I’ll be arrested and that they’ll take my kid away from me. That’s my fear.”

Hopeless and furious

On Monday, the drama of Diaz Inestroza, Mayorga, Noah, now 10, and their 6-year-old U.S.-born daughter, Janery, entered a new chapter, when Diaz Inestroza, now detained in Chase County, Kansas, appeared before Judge Justin Howard in U.S. Immigration Court in Kansas City.

Twenty supporters packed the small courtroom at 2345 Grand Blvd. on Monday at 1 p.m., hoping for Diaz Inestroza’s release.

Last month, ICE officers, while searching for another individual, stopped and detained Diaz Inestroza as he was driving to work in Kansas City, Kansas, where he owns a home, has a work permit and runs a small construction business.

Diaz Inestroza, who entered in the United States in 2012, has not officially been served with a deportation order. Other than entering the U.S. illegally, he has not committed any other offenses.

On Monday, the hope of his supporters and his attorney, Megan Galicia of Martinez Immigration Law, was that Diaz Inestroza would be released on bond to allow him to be with his family while they plead his case.

The judge, at approximately 1:30 p.m., ruled that he did not believe he had jurisdiction to give Diaz Inestroza bond, leaving him in jail for the forseeable future pending appeals and request for relief.

Outside the courtroom, a family friend, Anna White, broke into tears prior to gathering herself and expressing her feelings.

“A combination of hopeless and furious,” she said. “Knowing the arbitrariness of this. Under a different administration, it would have been a different outcome. It is just playing with people’s lives.”

Galicia, the attorney, called the decision “devastating,” and going against 30 years of precedent in which judges regularly offered bond in cases like Diaz Inestroza’s.

“I mean, the real reason they’re doing this,” she said of ICE, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, “is that they want to detain everybody. They want to detain as many people as possible. This means that people have to fight their immigration cases from jail.”

Diaz Inestroza’s detention comes at a sensitive time.

Mayorga, to whom he is engaged, is early in another pregnancy and living in KCK. As of Monday afternoon, a GoFundMe page set up to help support her and her children while Diaz Inestroza is in jail has so far raised $3,555 of a $4,000 goal. Besides his step-son, Noah, and daughter, Janery, Diaz Inestroza also has an older son who is a U.S. citizen from a previous relationship.

The GoFundMe page notes, “His partner Kenia stays home with the kids and relies on Luis’ income to support the family.”

Trump promise of mass deportations

Diaz Inestroza’s detention also comes eight months into President Donald Trump’s promise, made during his campaign, to oversee the largest mass deportion effort in U.S. history. It is a move that theoretically targets more than 11 million people in the country illegally.

On Jan. 20, in his second inaugural address, Trump said, “All illegal entry will immediately be halted, and we will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came.”

On his first day in office, the president signed an executive order affirming that the federal government would “faithfully execute the immigration laws against all inadmissable and removal aliens, particularly those aliens who threaten the saftey or security of the American people”

He also signed a second executive order that focused not on illegal immigration, but on refugees. The president suspended the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, stating “The United States lacks the ability to absorb large numbers of migrants, and in particular, refugees, into its communities in a manner that does not compromise the availablity of resources for Americans, that projects their safety and security, and that ensures the appropriate assimilation of refugees.”

In May, the admission of 60 white Afrikaners as refugees into the U.S. made international news. Otherwise, refugee relocation in the U.S. has effectively ceased. Data kept by ICE indicates that from January to the end of June, some 144,000 immigrants deemed to be in the country illegally had been deported. Many more thousands have been detained.

On July 30, 11 workers at two El Toro Loco Mexican Bar and Grill in the Kansas City area — one in Lenexa and another in Kansas City, Kansas — were swept up and detained by federal agents with Homeland Security Investigations, a unit of ICE. At least three detainees were released the following day. It reamains unclear if any were formally charged

Immigrant advocates maintain that despite the president’s promise to go after “criminal aliens,” the Department of Homeleand Security has gone far beyond that, and instead has been detaining law-abiding individuals like Diaz Inestroza who were looking for a better life, or seeking asylum, fleeing violence or persecution in their home countries.

In June, the CATO Institute published numbers showing the 65% of people being detained had no criminal convictions of any kind. More than 93% of ICE “book-ins” were never convicted of any violenct offenses.

Netflix series tied to KC

The 2019 Netflix series chronicles the stories of eight families living without proper documentation and under the threat of deportation during the first Trump administration.

In Diaz Inestroza’s case, the story follows him, Noah and Kenia, then about six months pregnant with the couple’s daughter. It explains how Diaz Inestroza came to the U.S. from Honduras at age 15 in 2012. Kenia Bautista Mayorga entered in 2016 with her infant son from an earlier marriage.

She and Diaz Inestroza had grown up near each other and had known one another since childhood. They had settled in Texas.

The Netflix series joins the family in 2018 at a time when Kenia, having already received an order of deportation, is detained by ICE and transferred to a detention center in Kansas City for subsequent deportation.

Diaz Inestroza is tasked with bringing Noah to the ICE facility to be deported with his mother, but also fears being taken into custody himself as he does so. The couple’s attorneys, Megan Galicia and Andrea Martinez, are told that Diaz Inestroza will be allowed to deliver Noah without incident. But when he arrived to hand over Noah and to see Kenia, he is taken into custody.

Kenia and Noah are subequently deported back to Honduras. Diaz Inestroza was held in detention for 50 days before being released on bond.

In June 2018, just prior to giving birth, Kenia and Noah make their way back to the U.S. and apply for asylum. They are allowed to enter the country, where Kenia gives birth to Janery.

What happened after Netflix

The docuseries leaves the couple with an uncertain future. But in the intervening years, the family created a life in Kansas City. Diaz Inestroza filed for asylum and was given a court date scheduled several years away.

Diaz Inestroza was not served with a order to deport. Although he was not given legal status, he was allowed to stay in the U.S. He received a social security number and a work permit.

Diaz Inestroza began a repair and remodeling business under the Diaz name. He was driving his truck with the name Diaz on it when ICE pulled him over, his attorney said.

“ICE was looking for someone else,” Galicia said. “They looked up his plates, figured out who he was, and then issued a warrant for his arrest.”

Galicia said that her client, in Chase County jail, currently is suffering a terrible toothache that they believe could be infected, but has yet to receive antibiotics or dental care.

“They gave him Tylenol and put him on the waiting list for a dentist,” Galicia said.

How long he will remain in jail is unclear. Kansas City’s immigration court docket has a backlog of more than 50,000 cases, according to the Transactional Records Clearninghouse.

Galicia said that it could take months to appeal the judge’s decision regarding bond. It can also take months before a judge may decide whether to grant Diaz Inestroza relief and allow him to stay in the country or not. An initial relief hearing is scheduled for Aug. 11.

In Kansas City, as of June 2025, roughly 71% of asylum requests have been denied.

Prior to the court hearing, Raiza Guevara, a program coordinator in the Office of Life and Justice for the Catholic Diocese of Kansas City — St. Joseph, said a prayer on on Diaz Inestroza’s behalf and for the judge to make a sound decision.

After the hearing, she hugged friends and supporters of the family as they filtered out of the courtroom.

“The fight continues,” she said.

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