On a Friday night in May, Mario Carlos Amaya Ortega was working late. He and his construction crew were trying to wrap up their projects before the start of the weekend.

As he and three other men, all Hispanic, were loading a trailer around 9 p.m., a Broomfield police officer approached them and asked for their IDs.

The men were doing nothing wrong, but they gave over their information, anyway.

After running a check on the IDs, the officer informed Amaya Ortega, an undocumented immigrant from El Salvador, that he had to take him into custody because of an immigration violation. Amaya Ortega was handcuffed and taken to jail in Broomfield.

When Amaya Ortega texted his wife, Veronica Delgado, to let her know that he was being arrested, she sent her kids to bail him out. But when they got to the jail, they were told that because he was being held on immigration charges, he wasn’t eligible for bail.

After three days, Amaya Ortega was transferred to the immigrant detention center in Aurora, then to a detention center in Arizona. Fearing his imminent deportation, Delgado hired a lawyer.

Delgado feared not only for her husband’s life — he had been targeted by the MS-13 gang in El Salvador before fleeing to the U.S. — but for her own. Battling a serious liver condition, she needed her husband here, not only for emotional and financial support, but because he was a potential donor in case she needed a transplant.

Attorney Catherine Chan fought to stay Amaya Ortega’s deportation. Courtesy of Christine Chan

Citing Delgado’s health issues, Amaya Ortega’s lawyer, Catherine Chan, requested that Immigration and Customs Enforcement use humanitarian discretion to issue a stay of deportation so that her client could be here while she worked on his case. ICE denied her request, arguing that the terms of Amaya Ortega’s deportation order were non-negotiable and had to be carried out. On June 15, Amaya Ortega was deported to his native El Salvador.

Amaya Ortega didn’t commit a crime that night in May, and he doesn’t have a criminal history. So why did the police officer arrest him? Broomfield Police Department spokesman Sergeant Mark Goodell explains that construction theft is common in the area in which Amaya Ortega and his crew were working, so stops and ID checks are routine.

In order to abide by the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unlawful search and seizure, most arrest warrants must be reviewed by a magistrate. But unbeknownst to the officer, the warrant used in Amaya Ortega’s case — which ICE calls an administrative warrant for removal (or arrest) and which showed up in the National Crime Information Center, or NCIC, database — had never crossed a judge’s desk.

Immigration lawyers argue that the ICE warrant didn’t give police the right to arrest Amaya Ortega, and even the Broomfield Police Department now admits that the arrest should have never been made.

“The arrest was a mistake,” Goodell says. “If it happened again today, we wouldn’t have arrested on it.”

It’s possible that hundreds of thousands of these kinds of warrants are out for non-criminal undocumented immigrants in the U.S. — many of whom are completely unaware of the targets on their backs. As a result, immigration experts say, thousands of illegal arrests happen every year in the U.S., but because the apprehended undocumented immigrants are quickly deported, neither they nor their lawyers get the chance to fight in court.

Mario Carlos Amaya Ortega was deported in June, leaving his wife, Veronica, to battle a serious liver disease alone. Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition

After arriving in the U.S. from El Salvador in 2010, Amaya Ortega applied for asylum. The first step in his case should have been a hearing in which a judge could have decided whether his fears of returning home were credible. But Chan says that Amaya Ortega was never given such a hearing. Instead, he was informed that he was to voluntarily leave the U.S. within three months.

Like the vast majority of undocumented immigrants going through court proceedings in the U.S., Amaya Ortega didn’t have a lawyer at the time. He also spoke almost no English. Without proper representation and the necessary language, he might not have fully comprehended that he had a deadline to leave the U.S.

“People will say, ‘He could have asked,’ but nobody knows to do that, or what the heck is going on, or to ask a question,” Chan says. For many non-English-speaking immigrants who are unfamiliar with the court system, “unless you hear the word ‘deported,’ you’re not registering that you have to go.”

Once the three-month deadline passed, the original order turned into a final order of deportation, and ICE issued an administrative warrant for Amaya Ortega’s arrest. Likely unaware of the warrant’s existence, Amaya Ortega continued living his life in the U.S. He met Delgado in 2013, and they soon moved in together.

In an interview in June, Delgado said she didn’t know much about her new husband’s undocumented status. When she’d ask, he’d say he didn’t want to talk about it. Fast-forward five years to that night in May, when Amaya Ortega was stopped and questioned and wound up on an unstoppable track out of the country.

Lena Graber, an attorney with the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, a national organization that advises immigration lawyers and community organizations, says that ICE’s administrative warrants are “bureaucratic in nature. There’s no process for a neutral magistrate to be involved whatsoever.”