A UC Berkeley student missed the first day of spring classes on Tuesday because he is in a San Diego immigration detention facility.

Border Patrol arrested Luis Mora on Dec. 30 after his girlfriend missed a turn on the way home around 10 p.m. from a party in Jamul, and they ended up at an immigration checkpoint. Mora was visiting his girlfriend, who lives in Chula Vista, for the holidays.

“Luis Mora was found in violation of his visa condition,” said Tekae Michael, a spokeswoman for Border Patrol in the San Diego sector.

Mora is scheduled to see an immigration judge on Wednesday morning to determine if he will be detained until his case is heard or if he will be released while he waits.


Prerna Lal, an attorney who represents unauthorized immigrant students at UC Berkeley, hoped to be able to get the judge to agree to a bond amount based on “the strength of our legal arguments and on the solid support we have from the community at large.”

A YouCaring fundraiser set up on Mora’s behalf raised close to $14,000 by Tuesday morning to help pay his bond if released.

After Mora’s arrest, he spent several days in Border Patrol custody before transferring to a long-term detention facility run by ICE. Processing between temporary facilities in the San Diego area and ICE detention have been slowed by a backlog from rising numbers of asylum seekers at the border.

“There’s someone right now in Border Patrol custody that needs to be here, and they’re wasting it on someone like me,” Mora said.


The conditions during the four days he spent in Border Patrol’s temporary holding cell were “horrifying,” he said.

“Whether you have a criminal record or not, they treat you like you’re a terrorist,” Mora said.

Agents called him “f---face” and “exotic,” he said, and detainees weren’t given hygiene products like shampoo or toothpaste. Detainees shared two toilets and one working shower, he said, for about 60 people.

“They refer to us as bodies — ‘How many bodies do you got?’ — as if we were deceased,” Mora said. “You can be alive. You can be a human being, and they will call you a body. It’s shameful.”


To stay warm in the notoriously frigid cell, often called a “hielera” or icebox by immigrants, detainees had emergency blankets. Mora said detainees had to cover even their heads with the blankets for them to be effective.

He recalled looking around while everyone was sleeping.

“It looked like a pile of dead bodies,” he said.

“We take these allegations seriously,” a spokesman for the San Diego sector of Border Patrol said. “Our detention records indicate that Mr. Mora was temporarily held in U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) custody while awaiting transfer to a long-term holding facility. While in CBP custody, our records also indicate that Mr. Mora’s detention met the standards of CBP detention policy. CBP remains committed to meeting the care and safety needs of those persons in its custody.”


Mora, 20, came to the U.S. from Ecuador on a tourist visa in 2011 with his mother. He stayed after the visa expired, becoming an unauthorized immigrant.

Since he came after 2007, he wasn’t eligible for former President Barack Obama’s program for those brought to the U.S. as children.

His mother told him they were coming to visit a family friend who was sick and that they would be back in time for school to start, Mora recalled. After they got to San Diego, she enrolled him in school, and they stayed.

His mother, Laura Villota, had breast cancer at the time. She didn’t tell her son about it and brought him to the U.S. in what she thought might be one of her final acts of motherhood.


“I thought my time was short to fulfill the dreams of my child,” Villota explained in Spanish.

When Mora was in high school, his mother sat down with him to explain to him what his immigration status would mean and what he would not be allowed to do as an unauthorized immigrant, he said.

They went to several attorneys to try to find a way to renew his visa or get another kind of visa, but nothing worked.

Mora weighed his options. If he went back to Ecuador, he said, he would lose the years of education he’d received in the U.S. as he believed the credits wouldn’t transfer. He feared discrimination and lack of opportunity because he’d been gone so long.


He resolved to study hard in the U.S., hoping that through education he might be able to change his immigration status.

Before he graduated high school, he found out about his mother’s cancer. By that time, doctors in the U.S. had helped her beat it, and she was now cancer-free.

Mora said if he’s able to become a permanent resident, he would like to join the military to “pay back” the U.S. for his mother’s health. He said she wouldn’t have been able to receive the same treatment in Ecuador.

“I love this country despite everything, the discrimination, the labeling,” Mora said, noting that some consider him a criminal because of his immigration status. “I’m grateful to this country for all of the opportunities given to me.”


He respects the public’s right to have different views on the topic of immigration, he said, because he loves the U.S.’s freedom of speech. Still, he disagreed with being labeled as a criminal.

“You have one negative and all these positives,” he said, listing volunteer work and other ways he’s helped the community. “We didn’t want to be like this. We didn’t choose to be like this. We were put in this situation because of immigration laws.”

After Mora’s arrest, his girlfriend, Jaleen Udarbe, a 21-year-old student at Southwestern College, rallied friends, students and other community members to help Mora.

“I’m kind of speechless. She’s incredible,” Mora said. “She’s the one that keeps me going.”


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UPDATES:

5:15 p.m.: This article was updated to include a response from U.S. Border Patrol.