Maykol Bogoya-Duarte was 17 years old when federal immigration agents pulled him off a Western International High School class field trip on May 20, 2025. No criminal record. No warning. He never got to walk across that graduation stage. By the time thousands of Detroiters had marched, signed petitions, and shown up at rallies demanding his release, it was already over. He’d been deported to Colombia, a country he barely knew.
It didn’t work. None of it worked.
That’s the part Southwest Detroit can’t shake. The community did everything you’re supposed to do, everything organizers tell you to try, and a 17-year-old kid still got sent away. And Maykol’s case wasn’t some outlier that got resolved and forgotten. Detentions are climbing. Parents are getting picked up on the way to work shifts they’ve held for years. Students are missing school because their families won’t risk the walk to the bus stop. Small businesses that line Michigan Avenue have gone quiet, their owners calculating whether the drive in is worth it.
Southwest Detroit holds one of the largest Latino communities in Michigan. What’s settled over that neighborhood now isn’t panic exactly. It’s a low-grade fear that doesn’t show up in any city budget line but touches everything, the way a cracked foundation touches everything.
The scale changed in 2025
Detroit’s always been a border city. Windsor sits right across the river. Immigration enforcement has always had a presence here. But something shifted in 2025, and the American Immigration Lawyers Association has been tracking it closely. The volume of people being swept up is higher. The logic driving enforcement is different.
In September 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a ruling that effectively opened the door to stops and detentions based on appearance and language. That’s racial profiling with a legal green light. License plate readers across Michigan now feed data directly to immigration enforcement. People who’ve owned homes in this city for 20 years, who pay taxes and coach youth sports and shop at the Eastern Market, are being taken without due process and without a lawyer in the room.
School absenteeism is up. That’s not data for a think piece. That’s kids falling weeks behind, that’s teachers standing in front of half-empty classrooms trying to figure out what to do with the seats that are vacant, that’s families making the calculation that the building their child learns in isn’t safe enough to risk.
Detroit’s population has spent decades shrinking and slowly, stubbornly clawing back. The city can’t afford to lose the people who stayed or the people who came and built something here.
What the coalition is demanding
A coalition of community organizations is pressing Detroit’s mayor and City Council to act before the 2026 budget cycle closes, and they’re not asking for symbolic gestures. They want a $1 million legal defense fund to make sure families facing deportation proceedings can actually get a lawyer.
The case for that money isn’t abstract. The American Immigration Lawyers Association has documented it consistently: immigrants with legal counsel are dramatically more likely to win their cases. Without representation, people are navigating a federal system alone, in a language that may not be their first, up against government prosecutors who do this every single day.
“Families shouldn’t have to face a federal court without anyone in their corner,” one coalition organizer told BridgeDetroit. “That’s not a political position. That’s just basic fairness.”
BridgeDetroit has covered the coalition’s demands in detail, including the push for the city to go beyond resolutions. A resolution costs nothing. It changes nothing. A funded legal defense program changes outcomes for real people in real cases.
The coalition is also asking the city to think structurally. No resolution language about Detroit being a welcoming city means anything when a kid on a school field trip can be detained and deported before the school year ends.
Maykol Bogoya-Duarte would’ve graduated in 2026. He won’t be here for it.
