Roland Gramajo organized a community town hall in Sharpstown last month to allay residents' fears after a tense few weeks this summer when President Donald Trump's promises of widespread raids alarmed immigrants and their families across the nation.

The 40-year-old father of five American children has long been a devoted community activist, advocating particularly on behalf of his Guatemalan countrymen. In 2018, Mayor Sylvester Turner declared Gramajo's birthday of May 17 as the advocate's official day in the city for being a "true leader with an exceptional drive to improve the quality of life" in Houston.

Gramajo invited representatives with Immigration and Customs Enforcement to attend the Aug. 18 community event, which also featured U.S. Rep. Sylvia Garcia, a Houston Democrat.

The agency declined.

At the event, Garcia and others noticed three white men who acted suspiciously, taking videos and photographs of the mostly Hispanic crowd.

Three weeks later, on Sept. 5, Gramajo was driving to work when immigration agents stopped him and took him into custody. The agency said in a statement that Gramajo had been deported to Guatemala in 2004 and had returned, which is a felony. It reinstated his old deportation order.

Activists and community leaders who know Gramajo said they find it odd how he suddenly landed on the agency's radar after 15 years of living here illegally following that deportation. They said his arrest is the latest instance of the Trump administration deporting longtime immigrants with deep American roots, rather than focusing on serious criminals and violent offenders.

Shortly after taking office, Trump declared everyone here illegally at risk of deportation, undoing the more selective enforcement approach of President Barack Obama's second term. The government at its peak in 2012 only had the capacity to deport 400,000 immigrants a year, and half of those were apprehended by the border, making them easier to quickly send home.

Under Trump, those priorities changed. While supporters praised the president for unshackling immigration agents, critics said they increasingly picked up "low-hanging fruit" such as Jose Escobar, a Houston father who for years checked in annually with immigration officials until they deported him in March 2017. The government allowed him to return to his family in Houston this summer.

"ICE is going after community leaders, people helping people, instead of human traffickers, drug dealers, really serious criminals," said Gramajo's lawyer, Raed Gonzalez.

Gramajo first came to Houston with his mother from Nuevo San Carlos, a small municipality near Guatemala's Pacific coast in 1994. He attended Houston ISD's Lee High School — now renamed Margaret Long Wisdom High School —where he met Magaly Quicano, a legal permanent resident originally from Peru. They had history class together and soon began dating.

One day, she said Gramajo and his friends decided to play a practical joke on a friend. During lunch, they took his car for a ride. Fearing it had been stolen, the teenager reported it to Houston Independent School District police.

When the boys returned, and explained the incident, the friend wanted to drop the charges. But school district police charged Gramajo with burglary of a vehicle — a class A misdemeanor — and he was sentenced to 60 days in jail, although he only served a few weeks in detention.

The infraction flagged him for immigration officials, and, in 1999, an immigration judge ordered him deported. In March 2001 the Justice Department's Board of Immigration Appeals denied his appeal. Federal agents did not remove him until 2004, after Quicano said he was stopped for a minor traffic violation. He has no other criminal record.

By then, the couple had two young children.

"He couldn't leave us here alone," she said.

For months after he was gone, his 3-year-old daughter Katherine ran to the door whenever someone knocked, hoping it was her father.

"My mom said I was always crying," the now 18-year-old college student recalled. "She said it hit me pretty hard."

A few months later, Gramajo returned. Border Patrol agents did not apprehend him when he crossed the border illegally, and, unnoticed, he quietly settled back into life in Houston. He opened a business on Bissonnet Street, where he worked as a notary, paralegal, and all-round community advocate.

He plastered his office with Spanish-language newspaper profiles of him and awards from community groups. A Guatemalan flag hangs close to a Houston Dynamo jersey on the wall.

His wife said he often worked for Houston lawyer Alex Udorah and was at the downtown courthouse helping him this week. Udorah did not return a message left at his office.

Gramajo is beloved in his community, from running an annual bicycle give-away at Killough Middle School in Alief, where he lived, to being active in Sharpstown, where his office is located and where he established close ties with the Guatemalan community.

He headed the Guatemalan Organizational Center, an advocacy group, and every year helped organize the Fiestas Patrias parade downtown commemorating the Sept. 16 Mexican Independence Day.

"He's always the first to help anyone with anything," said Veronica Medellin, 65, one of many supporters who packed a press conference at Gramajo's office Friday announcing his deportation.

Last May, District F Council Member Steve Le asked the mayor to name May 17 in honor of Gramajo. The proclamation praised him for being an "extremely positive role model," including working with the city to improve the Alief and Sharpstown areas.

"He spends countless hours working on community projects motivating the community through scholarships," it said. "His selfless volunteer efforts inspire the community to become future humble, honest and protective leaders of this great city."

Nelvin Adriatico, a Filipino immigrant running for term-limited Councilman Mike Laster's District J seat, said he enlisted Gramajo to help him on Latino outreach for his campaign.

He said they worked together on fundraisers for victims of Hurricane Harvey and last December, after a deadly blaze left 60 families homeless on South Gessner Road, Gramajo was the first Adriatico called. He asked him to pick up furniture for displaced families.

"Roland was the first person that came with his truck," Adriatico said. "He did that with no complaints, no questions asked. That's the type of person Roland is."

Adriatico asked Gramajo to organize the community forum to calm immigrant families terrified after this summer's highly publicized raids.

Gramajo personally emailed immigration officials to invite them, but they declined.

During the town hall last month, Garcia, the congresswoman, told Cesar Espinosa, executive director of the advocacy group FIEL Houston, about the three suspicious-looking men. She asked a staffer to inquire into the situation.

The men said they were looking at the architecture of the room and eventually left, Garcia's spokesman Robert Julien said.

"We can't speculate as to who they were or what they were doing," he said.

ICE officials said none of its agents attended in any official capacity.

Gramajo's wife said her husband recently told her someone had threatened to call immigration officials about his status, although she did not know details.

"We believe in this case, particularly, that he was targeted by immigration and he was being followed," Espinosa told reporters at the Friday press conference.

Gramajo is now in a federal detention facility in Conroe and faces not only immediate deportation, but a 20-year bar from returning to the United States. He will only be able to petition the U.S. government to waive that bar after spending 10 years outside of the country.

His lawyer, Gonzalez, is asking the government to grant Gramajo a stay of deportation for humanitarian reasons or to release him on a status known as parole.

"He's not a risk to anybody," the lawyer said. "This guy only has a very minor offense from when he was a kid. Exceptions have to be made, especially when so many U.S. citizens are involved. We're talking about five kids."

Gramajo's wife does not know how the family will survive. He was the breadwinner, and for now the family has launched a GoFundMe account.

"I'm in shock," she said. "What am I going to do?"

lomi.kriel@chron.com

This story has been updated to reflect the press conference was Friday Sept. 6 2019, not Thursday, Sept. 5, 2019.