Catherine Cool knew Eddie Reyes-Ochoa was special the moment she saw him, profile framed by the tight nook of the prep station at Los Tres Amigos restaurant of Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. He was all of 5’3” tall, skinny as a board, elbows deep in hot water. As she changed out of her school uniform and into work clothes, she called a friend to tell her about the cute new dishwasher at work.
Not long before that, Eddie had been out in the borderlands, traveling north on a hot September in 2006. The oldest of four brothers, Eddie was taken by his uncle on a course for the opportunities of America. They passed through Mexico up and across the border—not long after, out in the desert, Eddie turned 15. They stopped in D’Iberville, finally reaching Bay St. Louis on the Gulf Coast. A week passed, and out of the blue Eddie’s uncle apologized, said he had to leave, and slipped back across the border to Mexico. Eddie was alone. He wandered until he found the restaurant, a job, and a sympathetic Honduran family who gave him a place to stay.
Catherine approached him not long after her shift started. She was one year his senior and twice as outgoing. He called himself Eri, short for Heriberto, a name he’d never liked in the first place. “Oh,” she said, mishearing him. “Eddie, OK.” The name stuck with him. So did the girl.
Two decades later, on Friday, Aug. 21, 2026, Eddie had a wreck on the way to his job at a marine construction company. No one was injured, but the state trooper who arrived on the scene cited him for following too closely and driving without a license—undocumented immigrants cannot get one in Mississippi. They picked him up, and took him to the Hancock County Jail on an immigration hold.
Four years after Catherine and Eddie met, and they were together. Another four and they were married. After being left alone, Eddie had planned to stay in the U.S. for a year, two at the most, far from his home in Minatitlán, Veracruz, to support his family and then try to navigate a return to Mexico. Instead, he fell in love and started a family here.
Together, Catherine and Eddie began the long process of addressing his immigration status. They filed petitions to allow Eddie to return to Mexico and re-enter the U.S. through legal means, to obtain a green card and eventually his citizenship. They were nearing the final stages this year.
Much can happen in the span of 12 months. In 2026, Catherine finished law school, a process through which Eddie was her sole provider. She now works in immigration law. The year before, her father died, and again, Eddie was her rock through the tragedy. And then, wonder of wonders, in May, after years of struggles to conceive, Catherine found out she was pregnant a week after she graduated. For both of them, a new season of life was materializing. And that was when ICE found him.
‘He Took Care of Me’
Heriberto “Eddie” Reyes-Ochoa, 34, is one of the hundreds of thousands of immigrants taken by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in 2026, as the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown and mass deportations have ramped up over the summer. New figures from the Deportation Data Project, a joint academic analysis of immigration enforcement data, show ICE arrests soaring over the summer, spiking from 32,545 in May, to 43,021 in June, to 49,571 in July, the highest on record by far.
The data also shows an increase in arrests made through the 287(g) program, which deputizes local law enforcement to act as proxies for ICE, detaining suspected immigration violators and transferring them to ICE custody. The Mississippi Department of Public Safety, which oversees Highway Patrol, the agency that picked Eddie up, and Hancock County Sheriff’s Office, where he was booked, both participate.
Nationally, 287(g) detentions ballooned from a minuscule fraction of a percent in 2025 to over 13% of all ICE arrests in July. In Mississippi, such agreements account for just under 16%.
In an Aug. 27 interview, Catherine said the response to the routine fender-bender that preceded Eddie’s detention surprised her.
“(The trooper) looked at me, gave me the crash report, and then looked at Eddie and told him he had a warrant, and we were shocked,” she said. “I said, ‘What kind of warrant?’ And he said, ‘An immigration warrant.’ And I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
In an Aug. 27 interview, one of Eddie’s attorneys, Brandon Riches, told the Mississippi Free Press that “there is just essentially a single-track mind right now with immigration officials. ‘How can we deport you? How can we detain you?’ Let’s detain them and let somebody else figure out whether they should be detained later.”
Catherine last saw Eddie at the Hancock County Jail. He wore the orange of an MDOC convict, she said, and his feet were shackled. He cried as they said goodbye, for now, still caught in the blur of sudden disruption. There at the jail, Catherine maintained her composure. She could not on the phone, as she described it. “He took care of me,” she said.
Seeking a Legal Path
Eddie came into the country as a 14-year-old kid, left to fend for himself almost immediately. He didn’t enter the country with plans to become a citizen, but after marrying Catherine he wanted to find a legal path to remain in the U.S. They started the process in 2018, clearly identifying Eddie’s place in the country and his immigration status to United States Citizenship and Immigration Services.
First, they filed a form I-130 petition, officially called the Petition for Alien Relative. The approval of this form confirmed that Catherine, a U.S. citizen, constitutes a qualifying family relationship for Eddie. Then, they filed form I-601A, an application for a Provisional Unlawful Presence Waiver. An immigrant who enters the United States without inspection, stays for over a year as an adult, and leaves is banned from re-entering the country for ten years. A waiver that sidesteps that ban is available in cases of extreme hardship—like a spouse who cannot leave. Eddie’s waiver was approved after three years of waiting.
And finally, they submitted Form DS-260, an Immigrant Visa and Alien Registration Application used to apply for a green card. This was the last form between Eddie and a brief departure from the U.S., to the consulate in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. Pending an end to a pause on applications and interviews, if they had been successful, Eddie would have been eligible for a visa for permanent residency in the U.S. His green card would have arrived at their home in Kiln shortly thereafter.
Catherine submitted that form the day he was arrested. And now those plans are deeply complicated. What is left for them is a legal battle to secure Eddie’s release from ICE custody and some return to the slow track of legalization he had been on for years.
As of Aug. 27, ICE transferred Eddie to the Adams County Correctional Center, a Natchez prison that is the site of one of the United States’ largest immigration detention centers.
The Mississippi Free Press reached out to ICE to request information on Eddie’s detainment, and the “immigration warrant” ICE claims preceded his arrest. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson initially provided a factually inaccurate statement falsely claiming Eddie was detained after being charged with a hit and run.
“On August 25, ICE arrested Heriberto Reyes-Ochoa, a criminal illegal alien from Mexico, following his release from the Hancock County, Mississippi, jail,” the spokesperson wrote in part. “Four days earlier, he was arrested by the Mississippi Highway Patrol and charged with felony hit and run, no driver’s license, and following too close.”
ICE’s initial response had one tremendous problem: Eddie was never charged with “felony hit and run” at all. The Hancock County Sheriff’s Department told the Mississippi Free Press in an Aug. 28 interview that Eddie was charged only with following too closely and no driver’s license, both misdemeanors, not felony hit and run.
Both Catherine and her lawyer were shocked at the unfounded allegation of a serious felony. Catherine said she was present at the scene of the collision, where the state trooper arrived, cited Eddie, and informed him of the supposed warrant for his detention. She questioned how he could have fled from the scene of the accident where he was taken in.
When the Mississippi Free Press explained to ICE that Hancock County disputed the allegation of a hit and run, the spokesperson promised a response. Nearly five hours later, ICE responded with a “revised” statement—the same letter they had sent initially, with the charge of “felony hit and run” excised from the text.
“Reyes-Ochoa entered the country at an unknown date and location. He will remain in ICE custody pending the outcome of his removal proceedings,” both ICE statements continued. “To be clear: a pending application does NOT confer legal status in the United States. Under President Trump and Secretary Mullin, ICE is targeting the worst of the worst. Nearly 70% of ICE arrests are of illegal aliens charged or convicted of a crime in the U.S.”
In truth, the Cato Institute found that, of individuals booked into ICE custody last year between October and midway through November, three in four had no criminal conviction whatsoever. Half had no convictions or even pending charges. And only 5% had violent criminal convictions—a far cry from administration assertions about “the worst of the worst.”
With a baby on the way, the immediate issue for Eddie and his family is his freedom. Before his status is determined, his attorney Brandon Riches intends to file a habeas corpus petition, or a formal request to prove his detention unlawful, in an attempt to place Eddie in front of a judge who could grant him bond in light of his unwillingness to flee, his years of lawful, contributive life in the U.S., his many attempts to seek a legal path to residency and the extreme need of his pregnant wife.
But a steep challenge lies ahead. In September of 2025, the matter of Yajure Hurtado at the Board of Immigration Appeals determined that anyone who entered the United States without inspection is an “applicant for admission.”
The American Immigration Council explained the decision as far more wide reaching than “a mere break from past practice.”
“The grandmother down the street who crossed the border 30 years ago? Her detention is now, for the first time, ‘mandatory,’” the council wrote. “The asylum seeker who, desperate for safety, braved the desert, and later sent his information to the government in an asylum application? Mandatory detention. The countless undocumented mothers and fathers who work tirelessly to care for their children? Them too.”
“This is a decision that essentially turned most—probably 90% of detentions—into mandatory detentions, meaning no eligibility for bond. There’s no way to have your custody reviewed,” Riches said. “In the last 10 months, we’ve filed hundreds of habeas petitions with the Southern District of Mississippi.”
The district court, he said, has issued rulings on roughly 10.
Some hope lies ahead, both for Eddie and for the thousands of other immigrants waiting for their day in court. On July 2, in the case of Sosnava Rodriguez v. Ortega, a Fifth Circuit panel held that anyone held under mandatory detention in cases like Eddie’s does in fact have due process rights, and is entitled to bond hearings no later than 90 days after their detention.
One week later, the full court vacated that order, and now plans to meet as a whole to further adjudicate it. It may ultimately require a Supreme Court decision to determine.
Torn Apart
It feels, however momentarily, like Catherine Cool’s life is on hold. But time marches on. Her baby is due in January. Outside, the life she and Eddie built together calls for more effort than one person can give.
They had assumed after years without conception that children were not in the cards for them. So they assembled a menagerie instead. Three dogs, three cats, two bearded dragons, and a parrot, a little zoo, as Catherine calls it, in their home in Kiln. Their doberman Sultan seems as unsettled by Eddie’s disappearance as Catherine at times.
“He’s still … he keeps going outside and looking for Eddie,” she said.
Outside, their garden is in full bloom. At home, Eddie was constantly in motion, never quite feeling settled without a task at hand. “He’s the green thumb,” Catherine said. “I am trying really hard not to kill his plants right now.”
A papaya tree. Succulents and cacti and agave. Peppers. A “huge spinach thing.” And a collection of milkweed, to draw in monarch butterflies. That day, she said, the leaves were heavy with their chrysalises.
Family is there to help. Friends are pitching in. The community is reacting much the same as Catherine herself did, with shock and outrage that Eddie is sitting in a detention center instead of home with his wife preparing for the birth of their child. After Catherine’s sister Savannah Corbitt wrote a heartfelt appeal on Facebook, they are planning a march for Eddie at the Bay St. Louis Bridge on Sunday, August 30 at 4 p.m.
Nothing but Eddie’s return will fill the gap.
Catherine vacillates between anger and sorrow. “It’s always been an uphill battle, I think, but it’s like every time we turn around, we’re getting slapped down,” she said. “We’ve done what the government told us to do. And it just sucks that we’ve come to this point.”
To Riches, Eddie’s case is emblematic of the capriciousness of the new detention and deportation regime. “(Eddie) wasn’t hiding, right? This wasn’t somebody who was hiding out in the woods in McComb trying to avoid immigration authorities … Why detain somebody who has gone through the process that you’ve prescribed just so that you can hold him and deport him before he can finish that process?”
“This is not just Eddie who’s being affected,” he said. “This is an entire family of people who are being torn apart.”
Follow the Mississippi Free Press’ coverage of immigration and read past stories here.
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