As soon as Oscar’s deportation flight landed at the La Lima airport in Honduras, he put on his baseball cap. On the airport shuttle toward the terminal, he pulled his cap even lower – trying to obscure his face at various police checkpoints.

His parents picked him up in a car, and drove him to a lodging they had arranged for him – miles away from his family home. He has hardly stepped outside since. “Because I can’t trust anyone – not the authorities, not the government, not a police officer,” he said. He has visited his mother a handful of times since the US deported him three weeks ago, and only under the cover of night. “They will kill anyone here. There is death everywhere.”

Oscar had fled Honduras in 2023, along with his wife Ana and their two young children. The Guardian is not using their real names, in order to protect Oscar – who remains in hiding.

The family had spent their last days in Honduras afraid, as well. Now, at least, Ana and their two kids were safe in the US. But Oscar was back, alone and fearing for his life.

“Now I’m left at the mercy of – of who?” said Oscar, speaking to the Guardian on the phone, from his hiding place. “I’m at the mercy of God and his will.”

Oscar’s case shows the extreme lengths the US government is willing to go to deport some asylum seekers.

US immigration officials detained Oscar just 11 days before his family’s scheduled asylum hearing, and swiftly moved him from Maryland – where the family lived – to a detention center in Louisiana. Then, the government moved to sever his asylum case from his family’s – arguing that because his mailing address was at the detention center in Louisiana, he should no longer be considered a member of Ana’s household. When Oscar tried to apply for asylum on his own, the Department of Homeland Security petitioned to scrap his application and send him to Guatemala instead. And then, for reasons not even his immigration attorney understands, the government sent him to Honduras anyway.

Oscar doesn’t know when he’ll be able to hug Ana and his kids again. “Once a person is out of the United States, it’s often extraordinarily difficult to secure permission from the US government, especially under this administration, to have them brought back to the United States,” said Elora Mukherjee, the director of Columbia Law School’s Immigrants’ Rights Clinic.

In an immigration system that is now increasingly testing the bounds of established policy and practice, “it’s a really scary time for so many people”, she said.

The DHS told the Guardian it could not respond to various questions about the family’s case unless it was provided with their identifying information. The Guardian chose not to reveal that information, considering the grave risks that Oscar faces in Honduras and fears the couple have of retaliation from immigration officials deciding on their cases.

In comments sent to the Guardian after publication, DHS deputy assistant secretary Lauren Bis denied that the agency was separating families.

This is the first time Ana, 27, and Oscar, 32, have been apart for any significant amount of time since they first got together, when they were students at the Universidad José Cecilio del Valle. From the beginning, they felt like they understood each other perfectly.

They’d stay up till late at night, discussing their lives, their studies and their activism. Oscar, along with his parents, was involved in the local patronato – a community governance board. Ana had involved herself in environmental and human rights organizing from when she was a teenager.

In 2017, Ana said, the water in the stream that ran through her community in Namasigüe turned brown. Construction crews started clear-cutting the trees across the region.

A massive solar energy project involving Honduran officials and international energy and investment companies had begun to install itself in Ana and Oscar’s town. It was one of dozens of controversial, large-scale energy projects approved by the country’s national congress. Some of these projects, research groups, reporters and human rights groups later reported, were awarded to companies and public figures linked to crime and corruption, and many failed to benefit local communities, resulting instead in deforestation and environmental destruction.

Ana began participating in daily sit-ins to protest against the development, and later coordinated with other activists in neighbouring communities. Some of the more established organizers suggested she had an aptitude for the work, and trained her up as a leader.

At that point, Ana and Oscar’s youngest daughter was a baby; sometimes Ana would leave her with Oscar or her in-laws, but other times, she’d bring her baby along with her to protests. Oscar, meanwhile, was working at a shrimp farm, but would join the sit-ins at night, along with other men in the community.

“I was always, always proud of her,” Oscar said of his wife. “She has always been my support, I have been hers. And we are both people of the countryside. We love nature. We take care of the environment.” They had no choice, he said, but to fight for their lands.

“To be honest, at that point, I didn’t know and had no idea what I was facing,” Ana said.

Ana became more and more involved in the movement. She investigated some of the organizations involved in the projects, and contacted media outlets to raise alarm about the scope of the environmental destruction these projects were causing.

The companies involved in the project filed lawsuits against the protesters for obstructing construction, Ana said, and later, she and other activists faced charges of trespassing and damage to private property. Crowds of strange men on motorcycles frequently came by the town, Ana said, and pointed their pistols at the protesters. “They didn’t say words, they just showed their pistols,” she said. Ana said she doesn’t know who exactly these men were – but she and other activists believed they were mercenaries hired by corrupt officials pushing for the development.

Things devolved from there. A local official tried to bribe Ana to drop her resistance, she said. A judge ordered the eviction of the encampment at the construction site that Ana had joined, sending hundreds of police, military and other security forces to break it up. Ana was seven months pregnant at the time.

The Guardian has reviewed local news coverage of the movement against the solar development, and signed testimony from a human rights lawyer and fellow environmental advocates corroborating much of Ana’s account of the threats that she and her family faced.

After Oscar’s mother, who had been president of the patronato, was arrested, she stepped down – and the community voted to elect Oscar as the next president. And the couple’s resistance against the solar project started to draw even more attention, Ana said. The whole family had a target on their back.

In April 2019, Ana was detained for nearly 24 hours along with her then 11-month-old son – while Oscar was at work. Human rights lawyers helped secure her release. Much of this was covered in local media, and Ana, increasingly, was becoming well known for her activism.

“People called me Bertita,” she said – “little Berta” – after Berta Cáceres, the indigenous environmental activist who was killed in 2016 for her opposition to an internationally financed dam in Honduras.

Ana was flattered by the comparison. She wanted to fight like Cáceres – but she didn’t want to die like her.

After she returned home, the stalking and death threats commenced again, she said. At school, administrators told her daughter her mother was going to die. Cars and motorcycles would surround the family’s home each night, or trail them on the way to birthday parties and the doctor’s office.

Ana began pursuing a law degree; Oscar was terrified she would be killed on her way to and from class, he said.

In November 2023, another activist told Oscar that someone had put a bounty on Ana’s head, the couple said. They grabbed the kids and hid that night in a neighbor’s house. The next night, the family left Honduras.

When they arrived at the southern US border, the family turned themselves in to immigration officers, and applied for asylum.

They settled in Maryland, were granted work permits, and both found work in restaurants.

Oscar was ordered to check in regularly with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and used an app that allowed the government to monitor his movements. (Ana wasn’t).

He only ever missed a check-in one time, when he had to rush their son to a dental appointment – but the family’s lawyer had helped them file paperwork informing ICE that there had been a medical emergency. “It seemed like we’d cleared it up,” said Jennifer Vargas, the attorney.

Neither the couple nor Vargas are sure of what exactly went wrong after that. Eleven days before the family was set to appear before an immigration judge who would decide their asylum case, Oscar was notified that he needed to check in at the ICE offices in Baltimore.

Vargas was supposed to meet him at the ICE offices, but by the time she got there, Oscar was gone. ICE had arrested him and within hours moved him to the Winn correctional center in Louisiana. “I never, never thought in my head that I was going to end up there,” Oscar said. “I thought I had done everything right.”

Oscar was detained in a scheme that echoes the “zero tolerance” policy of the first Trump administration, when the government systemically separated thousands of families without any contingency for reunification. Those separations largely took place at the US-Mexico border. Now, however, families are separated throughout the US, a previous Guardian investigation found, with one or both parents separated from their children and families at check-in appointments or inside detention centers.

“The fifth amendment includes the right to family integrity,” Mukherjee said. “The executive branch is acting as if those constitutional protections are completely irrelevant to non-citizens.”

Kelly Albinak Kribs of the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights, said: “Families have always been separated through immigration enforcement, but the speed, the scale, the recklessness of this administration’s immigration enforcement has caused family separations at a more egregious level than we’ve ever seen before.”

The drinking water at the detention center looked brown or gray, Oscar said. The food, he said, “was not fit for human consumption” – he recalled dinners that looked like a scoop of cat food placed atop a small tortilla.

The DHS denied allegations of “subprime conditions” at the Winn correctional center. “All detainees are provided with three meals a day, clean water, clothing, bedding, showers, soap, and toiletries. Certified dieticians evaluate meals,” said Bis, the deputy assistant secretary.

The family had filed their asylum case in Ana’s name, with Oscar and the kids as dependents – to ensure that the family’s immigration cases would all be considered together.

Vargas said she was flabbergasted when the government severed Oscar’s case from the rest of his family – all based on the fact that his mailing address was now at the Winn correctional center. “They were the ones who moved him to Louisiana. I mean, there are detention centers up here, near us,” Vargas said.

Because Vargas wasn’t barred in Louisiana, she couldn’t even file a habeas corpus petition to get Oscar released – instead, she sent Ana a list of attorneys in that state who could help.

Ana couldn’t stop crying, and she couldn’t think of what to tell the kids – now aged nine and seven – about what was happening. “I feel my children are strong, because whenever they saw me crying, they would hug me.”

And then, on 22 October, Ana and the children were granted asylum.

Vargas pivoted to filing an I-730 – a petition that asylees and refugees typically file so spouses and children left behind in their home countries can come join them in the US. In the case, Vargas filed the petition in hopes that it would allow Oscar to leave detention, and reunite with Ana and the kids back in Maryland.

Meanwhile, Vargas was scrambling to schedule a hearing so Oscar could make his own case for asylum. After all, Oscar had also faced persecution and threats due to his environmental advocacy – he had a good chance of securing asylum for himself, Vargas thought.

The DHS, however, asked the judge to “pretermit”, or dismiss the case without a hearing, arguing that Oscar should be sent to Guatemala, and seek asylum there. The DHS has increasingly been filing such motions, arguing that asylum seekers like Oscar who fear persecution in their home countries can instead be deported to one of several “safe third countries” that the Trump administration has persuaded to accept deportees.

The judge granted the DHS’s motion to pretermit within a day of it being filed. Vargas didn’t have any opportunity to respond or contest the move. “I filed a motion to reopen – because you’re supposed to give me time to respond,” Vargas said.

Meanwhile, Oscar, still in detention, tried to come to terms with the reality that he’d be sent to Guatemala. The family had passed through the country in 2023 – on their way from Honduras to the US – and had been robbed. But at least, he thought, Guatemala wouldn’t be as dangerous as Honduras. And at least he would be freed from the detention center, where he could barely sleep or eat, and had to pay to schedule 30 minutes to speak to his kids each week.

“We are working to get illegal aliens out of our country as quickly as possible while ensuring they receive all available legal process, including a hearing before an immigration judge,” Bis said, noting that the DHS was “partnering with our great allies across the globe to accept asylum seekers”.

Months passed. Oscar remained detained in Louisiana.

Vargas couldn’t get any answers as to what was going on. “I really don’t even know what to say,” she said. “The legal system is really just not for immigrants right now. There’s obstacles on all ends.”

On the night of 11 February, an officer told Oscar he was being deported. “But they didn’t tell me where to,” he said. “I knew nothing.”

The next day, he landed in Honduras. Later, he believed, not even the Honduran embassy knew he would be arriving in the country. “It’s like they deported me in secret,” he said.

Oscar said he still hasn’t come to terms with the reality that he may have to live in hiding, away from his family, for months or even longer.

It could be years before the I-730 petition – which would allow Oscar to rejoin his family in the US – is processed. The International Refugee Assistance Project, an advocacy group, found “dramatic delays” in the processing these petitions to reunite refugee and asylee families.

In the meantime, Oscar has tried to keep a low profile. He almost never leaves the house; his parents stop by occasionally to drop off groceries and necessities. He doesn’t work – it could be dangerous to be out and about too much – but even if he wanted to, he can’t. When he was deported, Oscar said, immigration officers took his ID card. “I am without documents here,” he said.

He does try to go out for some fresh air every day and takes precautions so that no one can recognize his face. He speaks to his kids every day at around 5 or 6pm. But sometimes they seem sad, or lonely, or bored. They don’t know what to talk about. He worries, he said, that “they can’t feel my fatherly love from here”.

He then calls Ana once she’s back from work.

He still hasn’t told any of his friends or extended family that he is back in Honduras. Before he and Ana escaped Honduras, more than one of their comrades in the fight against the solar project had informed them that some men were bribing activists for information on the couple’s whereabouts. In the end, a friend said he had been offered money to kill them himself.

“Now I cannot trust anyone but myself,” Oscar said.