Grant Rodgers, and MacKenzie Elmer

Des Moines Register

Andres Tadeo Alvarez texted just 20 minutes after leaving home.

He'd met up with his boss and a co-worker and they were driving to a job site, he said. It was just another day as a Des Moines-area homebuilder — rise before the sun, get to work early.

But five minutes later, around 6:40 a.m., Alvarez called with a troubling update. "They stopped us, they stopped us," he told the woman he considers his wife, Marielda Moreno.

Moreno heard what she believed was someone telling her husband to hang up the phone. "Don't worry," she told him. "Everything is fine."

A short time later Alvarez's boss called: The workers had been stopped by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents after leaving the QuikTrip convenience store at East 15th Street and Grand Avenue.

Alvarez, who entered the United States illegally from Mexico more than a decade ago, was taken to Marshalltown, an hour away, where the county has a contract with the federal government to hold people suspected of being undocumented immigrants.

The 32-year-old father has remained there since the March 2 arrest while Moreno tries to raise money to pay expected legal bills. ICE confirmed Thursday that Alvarez is in custody "pending removal proceedings."

"He said that it's very hard to be locked up in there and more difficult when he can hear his daughters crying and when they're asking when he can come home," Moreno said.

Advocates say there's been a wave of intensified enforcement activity by ICE in recent weeks, following a set of January directives from President Donald Trump's administration that gave agents broader permission to arrest undocumented immigrants.

While the federal agency's priority remains finding undocumented immigrants with criminal records or those who pose a danger — a hallmark of President Barack Obama's immigration policy — agents will arrest other people they encounter who are suspected of being in the U.S. illegally. Arrests will be made on a "case-by-case" basis, ICE public affairs officer Shawn Neudauer told the Register this week.

Despite the change in direction, Neudauer said that ICE agents' tactics have remained largely the same as they did during the previous administration.

The agency confirmed Thursday that officers arrested one other person who was with Alvarez and that he was not the intended target of the vehicle stop. Neudauer said he could not immediately provide specific numbers of immigration-related arrests in Iowa.

Trump, a Republican, campaigned heavily on the need to crack down on illegal immigration. In his speech accepting the GOP nomination, Trump highlighted the death of Sarah Root. The 21-year-old Council Bluffs woman was killed Jan. 31, 2016, in Omaha by a drunken driver who was in the country illegally.

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Local immigration advocates say talk of stepping up deportations is sowing fear in Iowa immigrant communities that has led to uncertainty, rumors and more wariness of law enforcement. In a news release seeking donations to pay detainees' bonds and legal fees, the League of United Latin American Citizens of Iowa on Tuesday warned immigrants to watch out for "racial profiling."

"We've been saying let's plan for the worst and hope for the best," said Erica Johnson, program director at the American Friends Service Committee. "The people who are being targeted by ICE in Iowa aren't the criminals and the drug dealers and the rapists. They're people who have lived and worked in Iowa for a long time."

ICE on Thursday confirmed that Alvarez has "little criminal history," without offering more details. Moreno told reporters that her husband had no criminal convictions to her knowledge, except for a traffic ticket that Iowa court records show he was given in September for not having a valid driver's license.

The first immigration raids under Trump have put more focus on undocumented immigrants without criminal records than those during Obama's presidency, a USA TODAY review found. Ninety percent of the immigrants detained in 2016 during Obama's final year had convictions on their records, while only 74 percent of the immigrants swept up during raids in 12 states in February had records, USA TODAY found.

Marshall County Sheriff Steve Hoffman said the numbers of ICE detainees in the jail appear to be steady. On Tuesday, the Marshall County Jail was holding 52 detainees on behalf of the federal agency, compared with daily averages of 50 and 48 in January and February, respectively, he said.

But Ta Yu Yang, a semi-retired immigration attorney in Des Moines, said the number of appointment requests received by his office has tripled in the last six weeks.

"More than half of appointments are people who are scared and want to know if they get picked up, what can they do," Yang said.

He received word from the Omaha Immigration Court, which covers Iowa, that all hearings for non-detained immigrants have been postponed. Yang said that indicated the immigration system is prioritizing or speeding up the deportation process for immigrants who are in custody.

Moreno, who is also 32, told her husband's story to a pair of reporters as the couple's two daughters — Nicole, 4, and Stephanie, 2 — bounced around their home near Grand View University. Moreno also has two elementary-school-age boys from a different relationship who consider Alvarez their father, she said.

Though Moreno said she is a U.S. citizen who was born in California, she was raised in Mexico and speaks limited English. A reporter translated the conversation.

Moreno also said that she and Alvarez are not officially married but have lived together for eight years since meeting through friends in California.

Moreno said Alvarez came to the U.S. from his home state of Michoacan, Mexico, when he was 22 to escape danger and violence. The couple moved to Iowa four years ago because they heard that there was more work, rent was cheaper and it would be a better place to raise a family.

But Moreno, a mother of four who sells cosmetics and clothes at a weekly market, admits that she worries about her family's future in her new home under a new administration that has taken a harder approach to illegal immigration.

"I want to believe that something good will come of this. I don’t want to believe that things will get worse," Moreno said. "I want to believe that we are going to be OK and that we won’t have to go back to a country that my children don't know."

She's hired an attorney. Now she waits to find out when Alvarez's deportation hearing will take place.