An undocumented immigrant faces deportation after he was reported to US immigration authorities and detained while delivering pizza to a military base in Brooklyn last week, in another episode demonstrating the increasingly hostile climate for immigrants under the Trump administration.

Pablo Villavicencio, a father of two from Ecuador, remains in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) custody, and authorities plan to remove him from the country, an Ice spokesperson said.

Villavicencio was delivering pizza to the Fort Hamilton military base on 1 June when, according to a statement from the base, he was subjected to a background check in order to obtain a pass into the facility.

The Guardian understands that Villavicencio had made multiple deliveries to the base before and had not been subjected to background checks in the past.

In order to gain access to the base, he had presented a New York City identification card – which is available to all residents of the city regardless of immigration status.

Villavicencio had used the card for several previous deliveries, according to the New York City councilman Justin Brannan.

But on his last visit, he was held by authorities at the base for two hours before Ice officers arrived to arrest him.

Cathy SantoPietro, chief public affairs officer for Fort Hamilton, did not respond to specific questions relating to the authority under which Villavicencio was held, but the base’s statement said that “installation commanders” at the facility “are authorized to take reasonably necessary and lawful measures to maintain law and order and protect installation personnel and property”.

Villavicencio, who arrived in the US in 2008, was given a deportation order in 2010 but remained in US. His wife and two children are American citizens and he had applied for permanent residency recently.

“It’s cruel that they’re going to separate my daughters from him. He was supporting the family. Now I’m going to be by myself with two kids. I heard that he’s going to be deported next week,” said Sandra Chica, Villavicencio’s wife, at a press conference outside the base on Wednesday.

She continued in Spanish: “We talk deportation in terms of numbers and numbers without caring about the impact on families – especially the children. I can’t explain to them why Daddy never came back from work – they keep asking me why it’s been so many days and nights and my daddy doesn’t come home. It’s cruel.”



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In a statement, Brannan, the city councilman, said: “We have torn apart a family. For what? These immigrant families embody the American dream. If our country provided them with any sort of real pathway to legal residency, I know they would jump through a million hoops to get there. But we don’t. Our immigration system is completely broken, and instead of fixing it, Donald Trump has decided to invest in deporting women, children, and asylum seekers with no criminal record back to countries where their lives are at risk – in turn tearing apart their families.”

Annual immigration arrests have soared since Trump took office in January 2017, from 110,568 in 2016 to 143,470 last year, although they still remain below the height of arrests under the Obama administration.

The Trump administration has also vastly expanded the powers of Ice officers to target any undocumented migrant, irrespective of whether they have a criminal record or not. The number of non-criminals arrested by Ice has tripled in the first year of the Trump administration, compared with the last year of Obama’s presidency.