Orbin Mauricio Henriquez Serrano survived a violent arrest in St. Paul. It still haunts him.

“I’m counting on you to come in,” Henriquez Serrano’s manager had texted. So he put on his work clothes — dark jeans, a black tee shirt and a faux leather jacket with grey lining — and drove to the gas station closest to his home, the Speedway at the intersection of Snelling and Portland Avenues in St. Paul. 

He pumped gas, bought a Red Bull inside, then got back in the car as a dozen armed, masked Border Patrol agents poured out of their vehicles and into the small parking lot, a handful of protesters and journalists close behind. 

The agents approached Henriquez Serrano’s car and asked him to roll down the window and show them his citizenship documents. 

“We’ve got a Honduran here, we’re trying to get status,” an agent said to someone outside the frame of a video recorded by Status Coup.

Henriquez Serrano refused to roll down the window or open the door.

“I was scared mostly because of the incident with the woman that they killed,” Henriquez Serrano said in Spanish in an interview with the Reformer. “I remember telling them not to kill me like they did to her.”

His words were inaudible behind the glass of the drivers-side window.

“I’m gonna break it, open the door. Open it! Last warning,” an agent shouted, smashing a glass-breaking tool into the bottom right corner of the window.

Henriquez Serrano panicked as the agents reached through the broken window and opened his car door, scrambling over the console into the passenger seat. Officers circled the car, opening the passenger door and attempting to pull him out. Others grabbed at his legs, still on the drivers’ side, yanking him in the opposite direction. The man who broke the window hit him repeatedly with the glass breaker, Henriquez Serrano said. He felt a sharp pain in his knee, which he’d had surgically repaired in 2022 after a car accident.

One of the agents wrapped his arm around Henriquez Serrano’s neck and pulled him to the ground at the base of the gas pump. Four officers kneeled on Henriquez Serrano’s back as they handcuffed him, groaning, his cheek pressed to the frozen concrete. His shirt and coat gathered above his chest, exposing his torso covered in cuts and grease.

A helmeted Gregory Bovino, then-Commander of the Border Patrol, watched his men swarm around Henriquez Serrano, while others pushed back protestors and reporters. Around this time, Bovino was leading the media on enforcement tours, stopping at gas stations across the Twin Cities to face off with protestors. 

“We’re going to pacify this place, we’re going to roll ‘em up,” Bovino told prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney’s Office shortly after Good’s killing, according to a recent CNN report. (The U.S. Border Patrol did not respond to the Reformer‘s emailed questions for this story.)

The last sensation Henriquez Serrano remembers is the officers’ knees pressing into his back. He couldn’t breathe. The sounds of shouts, horns and whistles disappeared, and his vision faded to black. 

From Honduras to the United States

Henriquez Serrano is from the department of El Paraíso in Honduras, along the border with Nicaragua, where U.S.-backed Contra rebels staged their operations during their three-decades-long guerilla war against the Sandinistas.

The war ended eight years before Henriquez Serrano was born in 1998, but the conflict’s shadow lingered over his country — nearly two-thirds of Hondurans live below the poverty line, and crime is so prevalent, the U.S. State Department warns Americans not to travel to some parts of the country. Henriquez Serrano stayed in school until the age of 16, when his family needed him to start earning money. 

Then, gang members began recruiting him. He did his best to avoid them, he said — he wasn’t interested in their lifestyle. He saw a better future for himself in the Honduran army, but his mother wouldn’t let him join. 

Eventually the hunger, the insecurity and the fear became intolerable. He left Honduras in 2019 with $500, some important documents and the clothes on his back, planning to make the journey on his own — without a coyote, a person who smuggles immigrants across borders for a fee. 

Just half an hour after he arrived at the central bus terminal of the Mexican border city of Nuevo Laredo, two men approached him with machetes, asking questions about who he was and where his family lived, Henriquez Serrano said. They forced him into a van, then ordered him to call his relatives in the United States so they could demand a ransom. Henriquez Serrano complied: “If you don’t, they kill you,” he said. 

The family members paid up, and the kidnappers dumped him on the American bank of the Rio Grande, his phone broken and documents soaked in river water, he said. Immigration agents found him there, and he requested asylum.

He was given a court date and told he would have to wait in Mexico, he said, over his pleas to stay in the U.S. for fear of being kidnapped again. 

The authorities returned him to Nuevo Laredo.

While he was in a store buying a new phone, armed men again approached him, kidnapping him a second time. His family paid another ransom, and this time when the men took him across the river, he fled north as fast as he could. His papers were ruined, and he didn’t want to stick around for the court date.

“That’s why I couldn’t show my documents” to the agents in St. Paul, Henriquez Serrano said. “I didn’t know if I had an order out for my arrest or deportation — I didn’t know anything about that.”

He made it to San Antonio, and eventually Austin, where his sister was living. He found work in the construction industry in the booming metro area, but after four years there, he was ready for a change. 

His relatives in Minneapolis told him there were better job opportunities up north, and he had some friends in Minnesota who wanted him to live nearby. In September 2024, he moved to St. Paul and took a job at a restaurant. His life was simple, he said, mostly commuting between work and home, where he played video games in his spare time. Some weekends he would join friends for a carne asada — a cookout. But he never let his guard down. 

“In the United States, we can never relax,” he said. 

When ICE came to town in December, he figured he’d be alright — he’d only been stopped by the police once, in Texas, for speeding, he said. And he’d paid the ticket. He thought since he only left the house for work, he wasn’t a likely target.

Missing

When the agents finished handcuffing Henriquez Serrano and stood up, Henriquez Serrano lay motionless, face down on the ground. When an officer grabbed his shoulder to roll him onto his back, his head lolled. Agents dragged Henriquez Serrano’s limp body to a van, his left shoe gone, the toe of his sock trailing behind him. None of them checked for a pulse.

Henriquez Serrano woke up in the back of the van, sandwiched between two agents, with two others in the front seat. He asked for an attorney, for medical attention, and for the agents to loosen his handcuffs. The agents said he could talk to an attorney and see a doctor when they arrived at the Whipple Building, Henriquez Serrano said, but that never happened.

He spent the night on a concrete bench in a holding cell in the headquarters of ICE in Minnesota. In the morning, they loaded him onto a plane, chains wrapped around his hands, feet and stomach. 

Video of his violent arrest quickly spread on social media, with commenters wondering who Henriquez Serrano was; whether his family knew what happened; and whether he was alive. 

A St. Paul car detailer looked up the registration information for the abandoned Jeep and posted Henriquez Serrano’s name and birthdate on Facebook, searching for his family.

“Everyone wants to know if he is alive he did not look alive at the end of the video,” the top comment on the post read. 

Reddit threads and TikTok videos about the violent arrest garnered hundreds of comments and tens of thousands of views, with many commenters assuming Henriquez Serrano was dead. Some noted that Henriquez Serrano’s breath — visible in the below-freezing air — appeared to stop while he was unconscious. 

The day after the arrest, the car detailer connected with some of Henriquez Serrano’s family members — but none of them knew where Henriquez Serrano was or what condition he was in.

By then, Henriquez Serrano was in Camp East Montana, the now-infamous, disease-ridden tent detention center in El Paso, where Japanese Americans were once incarcerated during World War II. ICE shipped more than 2,300 people arrested in Minnesota there during Operation Metro Surge. 

His body was sore and his knee throbbed. His repeated requests for medical care were denied for several days, he said. (In an unrelated case of a detainee being denied medical care, the Department of Homeland Security boasted, “This is the best health care that many individuals have received in their lives,” read a statement, a claim belied by the government’s own assessments.)

He had none of his personal belongings, and didn’t have any of his family members’ phone numbers memorized. So he asked an acquaintance to ask their family member on the outside to Google the restaurant where his sister worked. The acquaintance copied it down for Henriquez Serrano, and through the restaurant he finally reached his sister, two days after the arrest.

Shortly after, Minnesota news organizations began reporting that Henriquez Serrano was alive. 

A friend of Henriquez Serrano’s sister set up a GoFundMe to help the family hire an attorney, quickly raising tens of thousands of dollars from the crowd of people who had been waiting for an update. 

But the day before Henriquez Serrano was set to meet with the attorney, a guard knocked on the door of his cell. It was time for him to go. 

Aftermath

Henriquez Serrano touched down in the Honduran city of San Pedro Sula with nothing but the filthy clothes he’d been arrested in and a little cash provided by the Honduran government to cover a bus ticket. 

He was scared; having been in the United States made him a target for robbery, he said. 

“I tried to get out of there as fast as I could,” Henriquez Serrano said of his time in the city. He hid out in a relative’s house in the country for a couple of days, until he could find a way to his father, who was living with a group of construction workers in another part of the country. 

After hiring an immigration attorney — who couldn’t help much after Henriquez Serrano was deported — the family still had tens of thousands of dollars from the GoFundMe. Henriquez bought a car and a small plot of land in the mountains, where he planted coffee, which he expects will begin producing in a few years. He sent a chunk to his pregnant sister, and some to his friends in Minnesota. Another chunk he set aside to cover a potential surgery on his knee. 

He retained an attorney in Minnesota to sue the federal government under the Federal Tort Claims Act, which provides for the compensation of people harmed by federal workers. 

Then, he made his way to his father and the tin-roofed building where he and the other construction workers live. 

Someday he wants to come back to the United States, where he didn’t live in so much fear of murder, robbery and kidnapping.

But in his nightmares, he sees the agents of the American government lunging towards him, over and over. This time, they kill him.