Christina Lee, Senior Photographer

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained a New Haven man driving on Dixwell Avenue, three blocks away from Yale’s Payne Whitney Gymnasium, Sunday morning. 

Five unmarked cars surrounded the man as he was driving to visit a potential contracting site for his job as a tile installer, according to two of the man’s family members. He was a few blocks away from his home when agents apprehended him on Dixwell Avenue near its intersection with Webster Street, a video posted to social media indicates.

The agents brought him to ICE’s Hartford base before he was transferred to the Plymouth County Correctional Facility in Massachusetts, according to ICE’s online detainee locator system. In July, ICE detained Esdrás Zabaleta-Ramirez — an 18-year-old student at Wilbur Cross High School — at the same location.

The man’s wife, Claudia, who asked for her last name to be omitted because of her immigration status, said agents were waiting for her husband as he left his home and followed him on his way to work. Claudia said the person who posted the video on social media witnessed the entire encounter.

When it appeared the man would not open the door to his car, an agent broke his car window, according to Claudia. Another video from the scene shows the car’s passenger-side window almost entirely shattered. 

Claudia said her husband told her ICE agents forced him out of the car and handcuffed him. 

“He doesn’t understand why they were investigating him, because in that same encounter, they told him that he didn’t have a record,” Claudia said in Spanish.

The man’s cousin, who also requested anonymity due to her immigration status, wrote to the News that the man came to the U.S. to secure financial stability for his family in Guatemala. He first attempted to enter the United States in 2011 but was caught and deported. He returned in 2015 and has lived in New Haven since, the cousin wrote. 

Currently, the man’s family live in New Haven’s Dixwell neighborhood. He has no criminal record, Claudia and his cousin said.

ICE’s Hartford and Boston offices, as well as the agency’s media inquiry email, did not respond to the News’ requests for comment on Monday about why the man was detained.

Claudia told the News that her husband is the household’s breadwinner and that she was not sure how their family would be able to afford rent without his income. The couple has two daughters, ages 1 and 3, and receives financial support from extended family, she said.

Unidad Latina en Acción, a local organization that advocates for immigrants’ rights, is working to raise money for the family and to help them secure a lawyer, the group’s community organizing director, John Jairo Lugo, told the News. 

Lugo noted how close the arrest was to Yale’s campus and said ULA is working to recruit Yale students to support their rapid response line for future cases.

ULA was founded in 2002.