In the United States of 2025, being in the wrong place at the wrong time is enough to be stripped of your rights. For Jose Hermosillo, it meant ten days of lost freedom, ten days of invisibility, ten days in the cold embrace of a machine that claims to protect America—yet devours its own citizens.
Jose Hermosillo is 19 years old, a U.S. citizen living in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He is a young father, struggles with learning disabilities, speaks slowly but clearly. There is no ideology in his words, only a need to be understood. On April 8, he was arrested in Tucson, Arizona. Not for a crime, but because he had suffered a seizure and sought help, without an ID, without orientation, with nothing but the hope of human decency.
Instead, he encountered a Border Patrol agent. And this agent, trained in the logic of exclusion, did not see a young man in need, but a suspect. “You’re not from here. Where are your papers?” - a question that echoes from darker chapters of history. When Hermosillo answered that he was from New Mexico, the agent did not believe him. According to Hermosillo, the agent said: “Don’t make me out to be stupid. I know you’re from Mexico.” The verdict was rendered before a single piece of evidence.
What followed was an entry into a shadow world. Hermosillo was taken to Florence Correctional Center, a facility outsourced by the government—privately run, profit-driven, dehumanizing. He shared a cell with 15 other men, was given only cold food, and got sick. Medical treatment? None. Communication? Only through a lawyer - one he didn’t have. His attempts to tell officials he was a U.S. citizen were ignored. “Tell that to your lawyer,” was the cold reply from a system that answers only to itself.
The Department of Homeland Security later released a transcript of an alleged conversation between Hermosillo and a border agent. In it, Hermosillo supposedly admits to entering the country illegally - as a Mexican national without documents. The document was signed - “JOSE.” But Hermosillo cannot read. His girlfriend Grace Hernandez explained that he can barely write his own name. Why did he sign it? “Because they told me to sign everything.” A signature as a ritual of submission - nothing more.
This incident is not unique. It is emblematic. The machine that swallowed Hermosillo is blind to context, to origin, to humanity. A system built on command and compliance, on pre-set assumptions and institutional inertia. The lie becomes protocol, the error becomes bureaucracy.
Only after his family presented his birth certificate in court was Hermosillo released. Ten days of uncertainty. Ten days of isolation. Ten days a system cannot explain—and will not explain. John Mennell, a spokesperson for the Border Patrol, called it an “unintentional error.” So simple. So revealing.
Since his release, Hermosillo lives with the trauma. “When I dream, I dream I’m still in there,” he says. It is the sentence of a young man not forgotten by the state, but betrayed by it. A man who didn’t stand on the margins of society but right in the middle of it - and still fell.
In a time when borders divide not only countries but realities, this case shows how fragile the safety of belonging has become. It is enough not to have read. Not to be heard. Not to fit into the grid of an order twisted by fear.
Jose Hermosillo survived. But the system that consumed him lives on. And it is looking at you.
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