When Border Patrol agents looked inside the back of the van, they discovered Pedro Gomez lying on a pile of tools.
Gomez, 26, of Guatemala, reacted calmly under the gaze of the agents – as though he had been through this kind of encounter before.
Indeed, he had.
On May 5, the federal agents caught Gomez illegally in the United States for the fourth time.
With his arrest, Gomez joined an increasing number of migrants from Central and South America who have appeared this year in U.S. District Court in Buffalo facing felony charges, rather than simply being processed for deportation.
Since the Jan. 20 start of the second Trump administration, 26 migrants have been charged in Buffalo with reentering the United States after having been previously deported, according to a Buffalo News review of court cases. In the last six months of the Biden administration, prosecutors brought nine such cases. Seven other migrants have been charged with forged documents or illegal entry in recent months, compared with four cases in the last six months of 2024.
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Gomez caught a break in March 2023, when agents from the Buffalo Border Patrol Station apprehended him for illegally reentering the United States. He was released because Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) declined to accept custody of him.
But under the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, he wasn’t so lucky in May, when agents assigned to the Border Patrol’s Targeting Unit spotted him and four other migrants in Buffalo in a work van with roofing materials.
Gomez “freely admitted to having crossed illegally into the United States,” and he was charged with a felony, according to a court filing.
Not all such encounters have been as drama-free.
Court documents show:
- On April 1, an Honduran man shouted “run” when federal agents saw him and another migrant at 8:15 p.m. leaving the Marriott hotel near the University at Buffalo’s North Campus. He ran across six lanes of traffic on Millersport Highway before agents cut off their chase for safety reasons. The migrant, who had been previously deported three times, returned to the hotel by 1:30 a.m. and locked himself in his room until surrendering the next day.
- On March 19, Border Patrol agents in plain clothes approached a truck registered to an El Salvadoran man who had twice been deported. The truck pulled into a hotel parking lot, but the driver abruptly put it in reverse and pulled out of the lot, followed by the agents in their unmarked government vehicle. When agents in marked vehicles eventually pulled over the truck, the three men locked their doors, and the driver would not stop moving around so agents could not take his photo and run it through facial recognition software on their phones. Only when Depew police arrived did the occupants get out of the truck.
- On Feb. 11, during a plain-clothes surveillance operation in Cheektowaga, Border Patrol agents kept watch on a vehicle they learned was registered to a man from El Salvador who had twice before been deported. An agent identified himself to a man who walked toward the vehicle and activated the key fob. The man quickly entered the vehicle and slammed the door shut. He refused to get out of the vehicle until Cheektowaga police and uniformed federal agents arrived.
Seventeen of this year’s 33 federal immigration cases have been resolved, and all but two resulted in a sentence of time served.
On average, migrants charged with illegally reentering the United States spent 68 days in custody from the time of their arrest to their day in court before a district judge, during which almost all of them waive indictment, plead guilty and get sentenced during the same proceeding. An interpreter sits next to them in court to translate what the judge, prosecutor and public defender say during the hearings. Afterward, they head to the Buffalo Federal Detention Facility in Batavia to await ICE to deport them.
‘They’re from ICE’
Last week, defense attorney Paul Dell appeared in federal court with Lorenzo Loja-Castro, 23, of Ecuador, who was arrested in March after Homeland Security Investigations acted on a tip and conducted surveillance of construction workers at townhomes in Hamburg.
U.S. District Judge Lawrence Vilardo sentenced the previously deported Loja-Castro to time served on his conviction of reentry after deportation.
“He’s not a criminal,” Dell said. “He’s no danger to anybody. In fact, he’s very much of use in this country, because he was probably a good worker doing a job that nobody else wants.”
None of those charged with illegal reentry this year were caught because they were committing another crime, although in a few cases a traffic stop for a driving violation led to their immigration charges.
In court, Loja-Castro “was all red-faced and crying,” Dell said. Two ICE agents sat behind him in the courtroom during the legal proceeding.
“When I realized who the two agents were, just to prepare my client, I said, ‘Turn around. You see those two guys?’ I said, ‘They’re from ICE, and they’re going to take you immediately’ after the hearing. He just started crying,” Dell said.
“No one feels good in the courtroom,” Dell said after the proceeding. “It was so sad.”
While ICE has received most of the national attention and has been targeted by protesters for its immigration sweeps, agents from Border Patrol and Customs and Border Protection have brought the most cases since January to federal court in Buffalo, about two-thirds of them.
A Buffalo News review of the cases revealed one noticeable difference between those arrested in the last half of 2024 versus those so far in 2025. Plain-clothes surveillance led to at least a dozen arrests this year. Surveillance wasn’t mentioned in court documents for any of the 2024 cases. About half of the illegal reentry cases in the last six months of 2024 resulted from defendants inadvertently entering the Lewiston-Queenston, Whirlpool, Rainbow and Peace bridges without permission to be in the United States.
Federal agents have made arrests in Buffalo, as well as the suburban towns of Amherst, Cheektowaga and Hamburg in Erie County; Dunkirk in Chautauqua County; and the Niagara County communities of Lockport, Niagara Falls and North Tonawanda.
Most of the defendants come from Mexico, Honduras or Guatemala, with a smaller number coming from El Salvador and Ecuador.
Federal agents have arrested mainly construction workers and roofers – not farmhands.
‘He wanted to provide for his family’
Wilmer Canelas-Najera is the Honduran who shouted “run” and headed across Millersport Highway to avoid arrest, according to a prosecution filing.
At Canelas-Najera’s sentencing last month, Assistant Federal Public Defender Jeffrey T. Bagley said there was no dispute that he broke the law by coming back to this country after he had been kicked out three times before – in Texas and Virginia – and told he had to stay out.
“He broke the law to be there for his children as they grew up,” Bagley told the judge. “And he broke the law because he wanted a better life for him and his family.”
But his arrest did not go smoothly, so Bagley had to deal with more troubling circumstances in his bid for a time-served sentence.
Canelas-Najera threw a bag of food at the agent chasing him the evening of April 1.
Hours later, when agents spotted him on the fifth floor of the Marriott looking out a window toward the parking lot, an agent headed to the fifth floor and approached him in a hallway. The agent told him “we know that you are Wilmer.”
But Canelas-Najera said he did not want to answer any questions and yelled back that the agent had no right to be in the hallway, according to an FBI affidavit that accompanied the criminal complaint. Canelas-Najera approached the agent and pushed the agent’s hands two times, causing the agent to step back. The Honduran man then maneuvered around the agent and ran into a hotel room and locked the door.
The next day, a maintenance worker unlocked Room 526 for federal agents, who opened the door to find Canelas-Najera sitting on the bed. He surrendered.
No one was hurt in the slightest in the hallway encounter, Bagley said. Video of the encounter showed the agent did not have “handcuffs in his hands” as he confronted Canelas-Najera, Bagley said.
“The agent has a cellphone in one hand and the other hand in his pocket the entire time,” Bagley said. “The reality is that Mr. Canales-Najera simply tries to get by as he is being blocked.”
The “innocuous interaction” did not call for more prison time, he said.
Vilardo sentenced him to time served.
“Tragically, defendants like Mr. Canelas-Najera are some of the least culpable and most sympathetic defendants before this court,” Bagley said. “Born with nothing in some of the poorest places in the world, they seek only a better life for themselves and their family.”
‘Going to get tougher’
The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Buffalo declined to answer The News’ questions about the reentry cases.
Prosecutors generally do not file written sentence recommendations. And at the sentencing hearings, the prosecutors do not say much beyond asking for a guideline sentence.
U.S. District Judge John L. Sinatra Jr. has sentenced two of this year’s illegal reentry defendants to jail time beyond time served, including Gomez, the Guatemalan man found on the pile of tools.
Sinatra sentenced him to three months.
His reentry “shows a disregard for the fact you’re not supposed to be here,” Sinatra said at his sentencing.
Vilardo has sentenced all seven illegal reentry defendants who have come before him this year to time served.
But he delivers a warning.
“If you come back, it’s just going to get tougher,” Vilardo told Loja-Castro, who was represented by Dell.
Next time, it will be a longer spell in jail, Vilardo warned him, before wishing him “all the luck in the world.”
Some punishment is needed for defendants who illegally reenter the United States, Vilardo said at Loja-Castro’s sentencing.
But most who come before him have already spent a couple of months in jail, which is enough, he said, given that the advisory sentencing guidelines call for zero to six months in prison for the offense. The maximum possible sentence is two years in prison.
On Thursday, Vilardo sentenced two Mexican brothers to time served at a joint proceeding. Both are married, one with three children between the ages of 5 and 13, and the other with an 8-year-old daughter.
Border Patrol agents on plain-clothes surveillance on April 27 spotted an out-of-state work truck loaded with construction equipment in Tonawanda and followed it to a residence. A few of the nearby duplexes had new roofs, and the agents saw the two brothers throwing bundles of shingles and garbage into a dumpster. A records check revealed the truck had an expired registration, so the agents contacted Tonawanda police and told them the direction the truck was traveling. After police pulled over the truck, the federal agents took into custody the two brothers, both of whom had been previously caught in Texas and deported.
“All immigration offenses are serious,” Vilardo told the two brothers. “It creates an anti-immigrant feeling in this country and makes it harder for people who want to come here legally.”
Reentering the United States illegally to make money to send back home is not a good enough reason to break the law, Vilardo told them.
“Stay with your family,” the judge told one brother. “Stay with your daughter in Mexico.”
Patrick Lakamp can be reached at plakamp@buffnews.com
