The Man ICE Took Was Already in a Museum

Criselda Vasquez's father posed for one of the most celebrated immigrant portraits in American art. Federal agents detained him on a California street.

WASHINGTON — He is a man who went to work every day, raised four American children, and grew old in a country that never officially said he could stay. His daughter painted him into history anyway.

In 2017, Criselda Vasquez, a Chicana painter working out of California, reimagined Grant Wood’s American Gothic — the one on the refrigerator magnets, the one every American schoolchild knows — and put her parents in it. Her mother and father, both immigrants from Mexico, standing together, holding cleaning supplies and a hoe, a red truck behind them. Not in front of a Midwestern farmhouse. In front of their life.

She called it The New American Gothic.

The Lucas Museum for Narrative Art in Los Angeles bought it in 2021. It hangs there now, or in storage, or somewhere in the permanent collection of American cultural memory. Her parents are in it. They are dignified. They are permanent.

Her father is not permanent. On the morning of Tuesday, March 31, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents stopped him on a neighborhood street in California — right outside a neighbor’s home — and took him into federal custody. One of his workers was detained alongside him.

He had been in this country for more than 40 years.

“My father and one of his workers were detained by ICE while simply on their way to work,” Vasquez wrote in a public Instagram post on April 3. Her family was “heartbroken,” she wrote. Her mother was “completely devastated.”

In a subsequent message to the art publication Hyperallergic, Vasquez said her father had been “racially profiled on his way home from work” before agents pulled him over and made the arrest.

He is the hardest-working man she knows. She has said so publicly. A devoted husband. A grandfather. “The hardest-working, most selfless person” she knows, she wrote. A role model. A man whose face, when he sat for her paintings, showed what Vasquez has described as raw, vulnerable expressions — the accumulated weight of decades of rejection and suspicion and fear, of a life spent trying to exist without being seen.

Her work, she has said, aims to reveal families who “strive to be invisible every day.”

ICE found him anyway.

The family does not know much. They have not released his name. They know which detention facility holds him, having tracked him down after the arrest — a search that is its own indignity, the family working phones and channels to locate a man who had done nothing that morning except go to his job. His precise immigration status, any prior proceedings, any legal history — none of it has been made public. ICE has released no statement explaining its version of the stop, the legal grounds for the detention, or what comes next.

What comes next, in cases like this, is rarely good.

The Deportation Data Project, cited in Hyperallergic’s coverage, reports that ICE street arrests — the kind that happen in neighborhoods, outside houses, during ordinary mornings — increased more than elevenfold in the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term. And getting out, once you are in, has become substantially harder. Bond hearings are longer shots. Parole is rare. The machinery moves one direction.

The family has launched a GoFundMe campaign to cover legal fees and the wages lost while he remains locked up. He was the primary breadwinner. The fundraiser raised nearly $68,000 toward an $80,000 goal in its first ten days.

The painting still hangs somewhere in Los Angeles. In it, her father is standing. He is present. He is not going anywhere.

Outside the frame, the story is different.

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