Last summer, Karin was at a Latin Club in Wilmington, North Carolina when a handsome stranger asked her to dance. She wasn’t in the mood, but the man was very attractive. “If anyone else had asked, I would have said no, but Yapa is very real,” she said using his pseudonym to ensure his privacy. At the end of the night they swapped numbers. Over the next few months, they dated and formed deep friendships. They did not believe that what began with the dance would end in a desperate battle for Yapa’s freedom.
Yapa is an asylum seeker who escaped violence in Venezuela in 2022. He attended regular court hearings and received legal work permits. He wanted to drive for delivery services and obtain a commercial trucking license. He was building his life here. That’s what Kaelyn has become a part of.
They spent Thanksgiving together. Yapa played pool with Kaelin’s dad. Yapa’s sisters began calling her “Reina” the night Yapa met. In their spare time, they watched fast and ferocious films, mentored each other through language barriers, relying on translation apps and Kaelyn’s university Spanish. Every morning, Yapa will definitely text her to ask about her day.
Before she met Yapa, Kaelin rarely thought about immigration policy. She was originally from Connecticut and moved to Wilmington to work for Film Location Scouts. But after President Trump was elected and began cracking down on asylum seekers, she began to worry.
“People will tell me, oh, you’re overreacting,” she says. “This isn’t Germany in the 1930s, and yeah, it’s starting to feel that way. Look back now.
On February 22, 2025, Ice appeared in the early morning hours without warning while Yapa headed to work. The ice officer handcuffed him and did not provide an explanation. One agent reached into his pocket to obtain his ID and work permit. A document that has not been seen since. They didn’t tell him where he was going, but only that he had been deported.
Kaelyn was Gobsmacked when her sister called to tell Yapa that her ice was “adducted.” He stayed with Kaelin until the evening before he moved in with his friend. Kaelin didn’t want him to leave. As a US citizen, she felt it would be better to help her get pushed back into the ice and ensure that his rights were protected. “I couldn’t explain it, but I was very emotional,” Kaelin said of his final night together. “And he told me, ‘There’s no reason for them to take me with me.'” Her worst fear occurred. They didn’t know where he was, but they knew they had to act fast to save him.
By then, Ice had already transported Yapa from the state to the Stewart Detention Center in Georgia. Two months later, it was not that at his hearing that ICE first claimed that Japa was part of Venezuelan gangster Tren de Aragua (TDA). “Shock isn’t even a word,” says Kaelin. “I was shaking.”
In a recent court filing, ICE admitted there was no evidence to link Yapa to the gang. But the ruling from the Trump administration will be more challenging for immigrants like Yapa who recently entered the country to assert release from detention. Now Yapa is facing up to a year behind the bar while the fight for exile continues, and has little control over where he will be deported if he loses.
That’s why Kaelin’s response to the TDA allegations was so physical. She knew the Trump administration would accus the country of being able to land Yapa at Secott, a brutal Salvadoran prison that accused many Venezuelan asylum seekers of gang affiliation. “I thought I had to live the rest of my life knowing he was there, and there’s nothing we can do to get him out of there,” she says. She says the reality that he and many other innocent men can be trapped in what many call modern concentration camps.
All of this is a terrible sacrifice to Kaelin. She employs several Yapa lawyers and is in debt over legal fees. Meanwhile, Yapa is detained nine hours away from Wilmington and has limited access to phones. In April, lawyers for the U.S. Immigration Council and lawyers for the ACLU were part of the pro bono in Yapa’s case. In May, they secured a decision from a judge who said the Trump administration could not take Yapa to CECOT or anywhere based on the actions of the alien enemy, without a fair chance to challenge the Trump administration’s TDA membership allegations against him. That’s a relief, but Kaelin has little awareness of her life these days.
Every time she talks to her sister, they mainly discuss the latest information on Yapa incidents and the latest immigration news. “We can’t be happy when we have a family member literally taken by us,” she says. “I will never let this go. The administration thinks they are whisking their fears, but they are creating activists. You can’t destroy someone’s life and expect us to spend quietly.”
