"He had to wait for his son for so long, and someone just took him away," she said.

CBS LA / Via losangeles.cbslocal.com

A 36-year-old man driving his pregnant wife to a Southern California hospital for a scheduled cesarean section was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers on Wednesday when the pair stopped for gas. Maria del Carmen Venegas told Telemundo that her husband, Joel Arrona Lara, was driving her to the hospital for the birth of their fifth child, when multiple SUVs driven by ICE officers surrounded their vehicle as they pulled into a gas station near their San Bernardino, California, home.

The officers asked the two for identification, and she provided hers. Her husband, she said, had lost his. Arrona Lara is an undocumented immigrant from Mexico who came to the US 12 years ago. "I told him we had copies at home, and that they could come with us. We were only three blocks away. They didn't accept that, and asked Joel to get out of the car," Venegas told Telemundo.

CBS LA

Her husband got out of the car and they checked him for weapons. "At first, we were calm and we thought there was a mistake. My husband does not have a bad record and does not drink. There was no reason to detain him," she said. But officers detained him and gave his wife a card, which had an ICE logo and a phone number on it, saying she could call for further information, before driving away with Arrona Lara. "I realized that immigration had taken my husband," said Venegas, who had preeclampsia, a potentially life-threatening pregnancy condition. Security footage, aired on KCBS-TV, shows Arrona Lara getting out of his car and being detained by ICE officers. Venegas is then seen crying while using a phone shortly after they drive her husband away. She said she was "destroyed, very upset. I could not stop crying."

CBS LA / Via losangeles.cbslocal.com