Like thousands of immigrants caught up in the federal government’s Operation Midway Blitz last fall, Jose Enrique Ojeda Duarte spent seven months in detention centers before U.S. officials deported him to Caracas, Venezuela, in April. But his story took a different turn when the feds recently made a rare admission of error, leading to a staggering return to the United States last month for the 31-year-old Venezuelan asylum-seeker. The government said a clerical mistake led to Ojeda Duarte being wrongfully deported at a time when Ojeda Duarte had several pending legal cases that hadn’t been decided. Though he said he’s “so happy to be back,” Ojeda Duarte has struggled to adjust after having his life upended and enduring harsh conditions in detention. He’s losing sleep. He’s so afraid of immigration agents arresting him again that he’s reluctant to play outside with his kids. His family says he has retreated from loved ones. “I feel constantly nervous that I will be detained again,” Ojeda Duarte said in Spanish back in his Chicago home, reunited with his partner and two kids. “Sometimes I want to cry, or I get super sad.” The government’s turnaround came after intervention from his attorneys and a determined partner, Leydimar Castillo, 41, who tied together multiple legal battles that ultimately secured his return and release. Castillo stopped working and started living off mutual aid to stay on top of every development on all legal fronts since his arrest. “To do what happened here, you have to put real effort into it,” Castillo said in Spanish. A bureaucratic battle Ojeda Duarte was on his way to work on a September morning when he said he was violently arrested by armed federal agents who “grabbed me, pulled me out of the car, ripped my T-shirt, threw me on the floor.” He was zigzagged across multiple detention centers, spending most of the time in “inhumane” conditions in Camp East Montana in El Paso, Texas, he said. The food was often frozen or expired; he didn’t have access to medicine when he got sick with COVID, and he barely saw daylight. “The mattresses: broken,” he said. “They treated us like dogs. Everything was bad, even the water. They were killing us little by little.” Ojeda Duarte had legally entered the United States under former President Joe Biden’s administration in 2024. He had applied for asylum and didn’t have a criminal record. Yet he was among those unlawfully arrested by federal agents last fall in violation of the Castañon Nava settlement, which prohibits immigration arrests without a warrant or probable cause. While his attorneys challenged the legality of Ojeda Duarte’s detention, an immigration judge also denied him asylum under what’s known as the Asylum Cooperative Agreement, which allows the government to remove asylum-seeking migrants if they can’t prove a fear of returning to their home country. One of Ojeda Duarte’s attorneys, Afshan J. Khan, says the asylum denial was challenged by his other immigration attorney two weeks ahead of a government deadline, which legally should have paused Ojeda Duarte’s deportation. “He shouldn’t have been removed in general at all … because he had the pending appeal, a timely filed appeal,” Khan said. In a rare legal concession, government attorneys admitted in court documents that a data systems error within the Department of Homeland Security’s Enforcement and Removal Operations system led to the wrongful deportation. But Ojeda Duarte was already deported. “Unfortunately, Petitioner’s removal was an inadvertent error due to a data quality issue within DHS-ERO’s case information system,” the government wrote in the filing. “Upon information and belief, ERO is currently working diligently to initiate the process to return Petitioner to the United States.” In response to questions about the case, a spokesperson with the Department of Homeland Security shifted blame to a Biden administration parole program. “Ojeda Duarte illegally entered the United States via the southern border in October 2024, and under the Biden Administration’s disastrous parole program, was released into the country completely unvetted and with no legal status to be here,” read the statement. Claire Trickler-McNulty, who worked with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for more than a decade prior to Trump’s second term, said in an interview that she used to see one or two cases a year where the agency mistakenly deported someone and had to bring them back. To even get these sorts of cases flagged requires resources and a highly attentive lawyer, she said. “You need a pretty squeaky wheel saying ‘no, no, this is wrong,” Trickler-McNulty said. “It can be hard, particularly for people that are out of the country or have been removed, to even know how to raise these kinds of issues.” A struggle to leave the house Ojeda Duarte spent more than a month in Venezuela after his deportation. His sudden departure stripped his family of their primary income. Throughout his detention, the family was left largely in the dark as government officials routinely stalled on updates regarding his case. “My world collapsed,” Ojeda Duarte said. When he was brought back to the United States, he was detained in a processing center in El Paso, Texas, for about two weeks until a federal judge ordered him released. But his legal saga isn’t over: He’s now going through the asylum appeal process, which generally takes months or years. Since returning to Chicago, Ojeda Duarte has found it difficult to get back into his old routine. Every morning, he gets ready to go to work in Indiana doing general building maintenance. But leaving the house requires immense mental effort. “Sometimes, I get a terrible feeling, like a fear of going out,” Ojeda Duarte said. “That another mistake will happen, God forbid. I have all these feelings from this constant overthinking and memories.” Castillo didn’t believe her partner was truly back until she held him. But after the initial tears of their reunion faded, a painful new reality set in at their South Side home: Ojeda Duarte is a changed man. “When he gets back, he takes a shower, eats and goes straight to bed.” Castillo said. “The communication we used to have just isn't there anymore, where we'd ask, 'What did you do? How did it go?' Before, we used to sit outside and talk, but now we don't.” Castillo said this journey has been draining on her too, mentally and financially. She’s seeking therapy to cope with the trauma — a healing process she hopes her partner will eventually join. Contributing: Sophie Sherry