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Every morning used to start the same way for Rosa Colaj. At 3:25 a.m., her alarm would ring. She’d take five minutes to shake off sleep, then 15 to make coffee and pack lunch for her husband, Andres Colaj Olmos, while he got dressed for work.
By 3:45, they would sit at the kitchen table, eating breakfast, sipping coffee, and talking — often about their savings and their dream of building a small house in the mountains of El Quiché, Guatemala, where they were both from. Then Colaj, 39, would watch Olmos, 43, leave for work and slip back into bed for a few more hours, until it was time to wake their daughter, Quanita, for school. Married seven years earlier at New Bedford City Hall, together for 25, Colaj and Olmos had learned how to stretch scraps of time into something that felt whole.
The Families Left Behind
A special reporting project
On the morning of April 23, though, Olmos wanted to talk about something else: buying Quanita a bracelet for her 12th birthday that Saturday, one engraved with her name. She’d been asking for it nonstop, insisting she was the only girl in her class without one. Colaj and Olmos had laughed softly, careful not to wake her, amused by the urgency of a nearly-teenager’s wants. They had been looking forward to the party.
Then, less than 10 minutes after Olmos left, Colaj’s phone rang.
“Me agarraron, me agarraron!” she remembers him shouting. They got me, they got me!
Colaj froze. In that instant, she knew their family’s future had shifted completely.
That day, Olmos became the 17th known immigrant arrested in New Bedford since January 20, part of the Trump administration’s intensified push to detain and deport immigrants. He was stopped on Coggeshall Street, on his way to work, along with his coworker, Jose DeLeon Ventura.
“He told me, ‘I don’t think they’ll let me go. You know what to do,’” Colaj said. And then the line went quiet.
A sudden turn and hard decisions
Colaj and Olmos had gone over this scenario before. They started planning as soon as the first arrests swept through New Bedford this year. “If anything happens to me, call my brother for money to cover the rent and bills,” Colaj remembers Olmos telling her. His worry was always the same, she said: that she’d be left without enough money for food or rent.
But both knew that borrowing money was only a temporary patch. Without a job, Colaj couldn’t survive long in the United States.
The hardest part wasn’t the money, Colaj said. It was telling her older son, José, 18 — referred to here by his second name due to security concerns. José lives with relatives and earns about $300 a week — barely enough to cover his own needs, let alone the rent and expenses his father used to handle. For two days, Colaj kept to herself, wiping her face, thinking through the conversations no mother wants to have. In the end, the decision shaped itself: she and Quanita would return to Guatemala, while José would stay behind in New Bedford.
Every day, after his arrest, Olmos called from the Plymouth County Correctional Facility. He didn’t share much about his own conditions; he used the short calls to comfort the kids.
“How’s my baby girl?” he asks Colaj, wanting to hear about Quanita.
“Don’t you worry, son, I’m here,” he told José. “I can buy you tickets to come back whenever you want. Behave, and don’t ever drink.”
“He worries a lot,” Colaj says quietly.
A search of court records by The Light turned up no criminal charges against Olmos. But Colaj said he had re-entered the country twice and received a removal order. Under federal law, re-entry — entering or attempting to enter the United States after deportation or denial of admission — is a felony offense. According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection statistics, illegal entry and re-entry have been the leading types of criminal convictions in immigration arrests every year since 2017.
Olmos and his family reached out to lawyers, hoping for help. But as they were told, because he had a removal order from 2002 for a prior re-entry, the case would be nearly impossible to fight — and trying would cost the family more than they could afford. A single consultation with a detention attorney would run more than $1,000.
At the end of April, less than a week after his arrest, Olmos signed a voluntary departure form under pressure from immigration authorities, according to Colaj. Olmos told her that week that he was being forced to leave Massachusetts that Saturday, would be transferred to a detention facility in the South, and was scheduled to arrive in Guatemala by that Monday.
Packing up and facing the future
Soon after, in mid-May, Colaj and her daughter left the United States, traveling by plane from Boston to Guatemala City, according to Corinn Williams, director of the Community Economic Development Center.
She had found a shipping company that could send their belongings to Guatemala at a fair price.
To leave the U.S. with her daughter, Colaj needed Olmos’ signed approval — a requirement that proved difficult to obtain while Olmos was in detention. Williams had been helping with the paperwork.
Eventually, the Guatemalan consulate stepped in, arranging to meet Olmos at an airport before his deportation, collect his signature, and send the papers back so Colaj could purchase the plane tickets.
Olmos, Colaj, and Quanita are now reunited in Guatemala, according to Williams.
Speaking to The Light before she left, Colaj said she knew the first few weeks back in Guatemala would be hard. She had heard prices had climbed sharply back home, and the five-hour trip from Guatemala City to San Andrés Sajcabajá, Olmos’ hometown, weighed on her mind.
As Colaj described her feelings, her Spanish slowed, slipping into K’iche’, her native language, when the words tangled and her Spanish vocabulary couldn’t hold all the layers of meaning. Beside her at the CEDC, Lucía Mateo translated, carrying Colaj’s K’iche’ into Spanish, ensuring every part of her story crossed the language divide.
Mateo has been working with the immigrant community in New Bedford for a couple of years. “It’s very important that the media tell the stories of the Latino community,” she said. “Many people have already decided to leave because of the division, the racism, the tension. People are scared.”
Colaj knew that fear. It was what finally pushed her to leave. “I thought this was a safer country for our kids,” she said. “But not anymore, because they don’t want us here.”
She and Olmos had come chasing a dream, she said — to give their children an education they couldn’t get back home. “I just wasn’t expecting to leave this way.”
Even Quanita has changed her mind. For years, Colaj said, Quanita told her she wanted to stay and live in the United States. “Now,” Colaj said, “she says, ‘I just want to leave and see Dad. I want to stay with my daddy.’”
“I try to see the positive,” Colaj said. “At least my husband is alive.”
Email Eleonora Bianchi at ebianchi@newbedfordlight.org.
