The top tier of Lauren Ashe Cuautle and Bryan Cuautle Romero’s wedding cake is still in the freezer, in a plastic container, tucked behind other food.
The Memphis couple celebrated their one-year wedding anniversary April 9, but they weren’t able to be together for it: Bryan has been detained at the West Tennessee Detention Facility in Mason since Nov. 21, 2025, charged with entering the United States without admission or inspection.
Bryan, 29, has lived in the United States since he was 3. In addition to being married to Lauren, a U.S. citizen, he also has two U.S. citizen children from a previous relationship.
Photo by Andrea Morales / MLK50
In the past, in a bond hearing, the government would have considered those family connections, Bryan’s employment and that he has no criminal record. If granted, bond would have allowed him to stay with his family while pursuing a path to gaining immigration status.
But last summer, Immigration and Customs Enforcement issued a memorandum saying every person present in the United States without being admitted was subject to mandatory detention. In September, the Board of Immigration Appeals affirmed that, saying immigration judges could no longer hold bond hearings for anyone who entered the country “without inspection.”
Earlier this month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, which includes Tennessee, ruled against the policy of mandatory detention, saying noncitizens like the petitioners in the case — who had resided in the United States without lawful status for years — were not “seeking admission” to the country and thus not subject to mandatory detention. Holding them without a bond hearing, the court ruled, “violated their Fifth Amendment due process rights.”
In Memphis, that means that immigration judges are holding bond hearings again.
But for Bryan, the ruling likely came too late. He’s among an unknown number of immigrants whose cases fell during the months many judges in the Sixth Circuit followed the policy of not granting bond hearings.
After months in detention and without the prospect of bond, Bryan accepted “voluntary deportation” to Mexico. He’ll be separated from his wife and children, who are 9 and 10 years old. He hasn’t received details of his flight, but has a “final removal date” of June 6. Lauren plans to work to bring him back to the United States, but has no idea how long that will take.
“When you’re a little girl, you have this dream of how you want everything, and they destroyed that for me,” Lauren said. “You finally meet the right guy, and you’re happy, then all of this. I didn’t dream of all of this.”
‘Family separation with a different name’
Attorneys filed a petition for writ of habeas corpus, which asks for release or a timely bond hearing, for Bryan in December.
But the judge assigned the petition never ruled on it, appearing to support ICE’s policy of mandatory detention, said Lauren and Michael Holley, senior litigation counsel at Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition, who handled Bryan’s habeas corpus petition.
Advocates for immigrant rights say there is a very deliberate goal to the policy of mandatory detention: to make the circumstances for a detained immigrant so horrifying and indefinite that they give up their immigration claims — such as pursuing status through a U.S. citizen spouse — and accept deportation.
“This administration is just locking people up indefinitely, and the goal is really to break people’s spirits, to lock them up and make them so desperate that they agree to leave their loved ones behind,” said Miriam Aukerman, director of strategic litigation with American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan. “This policy is family separation with a different name. The cruelty of it is not an accident. The cruelty of it is precisely the point.”
Aukerman was one of the attorneys on the case that was argued before the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in March. She spoke to MLK50: Justice Through Journalism shortly before the court’s ruling, saying that the policy of mandatory detention would, “if left unchecked … affect millions of people.”
In Bryan’s case, ICE’s policy worked. Now, Lauren is planning to visit him as soon as he’s sent to Mexico. She’d like to move there while they work on pursuing an I-130 petition that could establish a pathway to bring a relative to the United States permanently. But she also has a 13-year-old son, doesn’t speak any Spanish and has a U.S.-based job, so she doesn’t know whether it will even be possible to move.
“(Bryan has) been here since 3 years old,” Lauren said. “Why he’s here is not even his fault. To him this is home. He has no idea what he’s going into in Mexico. We’re both scared.”
Lauren knows how important it can be for a detained immigrant to receive bond: Bryan was detained once before, while on a job site installing windows in February 2025. That time, he received a bond of $2,500, for which Lauren took out a loan that she paid back in installments. The couple married the next month, in Arkansas, and celebrated with an evening cruise on the Mississippi River. It wasn’t a big wedding, but it was “perfect,” Lauren said.
While out on bond, the couple planned to pursue a pathway to lawful residency through their marriage. But in November 2025, while doing a check-in at the ICE office in Memphis, Bryan was detained again. When Lauren asked why, she was told he had not “followed the rules.”
That didn’t make sense to her, she said. They’d spent thousands of dollars on trying to “follow the rules.” When she pushed back an employee said he didn’t answer a question about their marriage license.
In a written statement, the Department of Homeland Security told MLK50 that Bryan “violated the terms of his release … including by tampering with his GPS tracker and missing several check-ins.”
Lauren told MLK50 they went to every check-in, but may have missed one phone call when it came from a new number. Bryan’s GPS tracker malfunctioned twice, Lauren said, but they went in to get a new one as soon as they were told to do so. He never tampered with it, she said.
‘Taking my husband away from me’
Lauren and Bryan met when she was least expecting it. At the time in June 2024, she lived down the street from her childhood home, but was packing to move back in with her mother. Lauren was putting unwanted items on the curb when Bryan drove by and asked if he could take a shovel. The two started talking, then dating and he moved into her childhood home — which is shared by Lauren, her mother, her two brothers and her son — in November 2024. They began discussing marriage.
This second detention has derailed their first year of marriage, Lauren said. They missed Thanksgiving, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, his birthday and their first anniversary. She hasn’t been able to visit him in detention: The one time visitation was approved, he was sick.
They used to sit under the large magnolia tree in front of the house, doing crossword puzzles together. The last picture they took together before his detention was in a hammock under that tree.
Lauren said Bryan has told her that they “barely feed them” and that he lost 20 pounds in detention. At first, she couldn’t figure out how to send him money for additional food, but, in January, got help from Holley to do so. Since then, she’s sent him about $268 for food, and he’s gained back about 10 pounds. She has also spent about $500 on phone calls. He doesn’t want her to spend money on his commissary, but she sends it anyway, Lauren said.
A CorreCivic representative told MLK50 in a written statement that, “Any claim that those in our care aren’t being provided with proper nutrition is patently false” and that, “Menus are reviewed and approved on a regular basis by a registered dietitian to ensure appropriate nutrition is provided.” CoreCivic operates the ICE-contracted detention facility in Mason.
The cost of commissary and phone calls piles on top of the money the couple has already paid to try to keep Bryan here, including thousands for attorneys, $2,500 for a cancellation of removal and almost $900 for a lawyer to handle and about $700 just to file an I-130. A friend and her mother helped front some of the money while Lauren pays them back. Bryan’s family has also contributed thousands. Now, Lauren has also started a GoFundMe to raise money for the ongoing effort to reunite Bryan with his family.
Lauren has been diagnosed with anxiety and panic attacks due to the situation. The couple wants to have a baby, but she doesn’t want to do so while living in a different country than her husband. At 37, she’s afraid a prolonged effort to bring him back to the United States may mean they don’t have the chance to have a child.
“I want him to watch my belly grow, I want him to be there when the baby is born. … I don’t want to be alone and pregnant without my husband to, you know, to care for me,” Lauren said. “They’re not just getting the criminals. They’re taking my husband away from me.”
Bond hearings resume, but Bryan awaits flight to Mexico
The day before Lauren sat down for an interview with MLK50, she had a dream that her husband was home. In the dream, Bryan told her that they’d just let him go. That morning, she woke to news of the Sixth Circuit Court’s ruling against mandatory detention and wondered if it was possible to bring him home. She spoke with Holley, who told her it was too late for Bryan to get out on bond.
While bond hearings have resumed in Tennessee and other parts of the Sixth Circuit, different courts have ruled differently across the country, and it likely will take about a year to get a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on mandatory detention, Holley said. In the case of Memphis immigrants who are transferred to an immigration detention facility in Louisiana, they’ll fall under the Fifth Circuit Court’s ruling in favor of mandatory detention, he said.
In the meantime, Lauren is waiting for her husband to actually be sent to Mexico so she can begin bringing him back. She also plans to visit him. Her mother has offered them timeshare points so they can have the honeymoon they never got, and so Lauren can help Bryan search for a job in a tourist-friendly area.
But Lauren is also worried: Even though her husband agreed to deportation April 6, he hasn’t been put on a flight. She fears that if he stays in the United States past his June 6 “final removal date,” he’ll face a 10-year ban on returning to the country, even though he physically can’t leave without ICE taking action.
In its statement, the Department of Homeland Security said, “ICE is working to send (Bryan) home as soon as possible.” They did not answer a question about the delay.
Even if all goes well, the process of returning Bryan to the United States through an I-130 could take years. She’s heard the process could take up to six years, but had one friend who completed it in two. Lauren holds onto that.
“I’m hoping that we’ll have luck like that. Six years sounds traumatic,” Lauren said. “We had such bad luck on this whole thing. I’m just trying to be like, well, I know God has a plan, but this is not the plan that I wanted. Hopefully we’ll still have our happy ending eventually.”
Katherine Burgess is the government accountability reporter for MLK50: Justice Through Journalism. Contact her at katherine.burgess@mlk50.com
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