Shortly after federal immigration agents arrested Higinio Mendez-Salazar I tried tracking his whereabouts. I quickly lost the man millions of Americans want to disappear.
Nobody will help me locate him, not his former federal public defender, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, Pike County jailers where ICE holds many undocumented immigrants or the U.S. Marshals Service.
I hope Mendez-Salazar’s family knows his location. I won’t knock on the Pittston Avenue door of his former residence in South Scranton and ask because I don’t want to further upset, scare or cause anybody to mistake me for a big, white plainclothes cop with a gun.
Maybe ICE gave him a phone call. Maybe they put him on a plane to Mexico. Maybe he’s in detention in Pike County Prison, but immigration officials there don’t answer the phone and don’t return my messages. Maybe ICE sent him to another state. Maybe they sent him to another country.
I lost track of Mendez-Salazar after authorities released him from Lackawanna County Prison. Mendez-Salazar just seemed to fade away, sucked into the darkness of an increasingly cruel immigration stranglehold that defies the public right to know how our heralded nation of law functions. To millions of American citizens living in a nation born of and dependent upon immigrant energy, he’s just another “illegal,” a vicious slur against millions of good people living and working in America as undocumented immigrants.
A June 6th federal government press release announced, “The United States Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Pennsylvania announced Higinio Mendez-Salazar, age 52, Citizen of Mexico residing in Scranton, Pennsylvania, was charged yesterday by Criminal Information with Illegal Reentry.”
Federal prosecutors charged him with no other crime: no rape, murder, gang membership, child sex trafficking or heading up a drug cartel. Mendez-Salazar is only charged with returning to the United States “after previously having been removed from the United States.”
“The case was investigated by U.S. Immigration and Customs and Enforcement and Removal Operations and the Pennsylvania State Police. Acting United States Attorney John C. Gurganus is prosecuting the case,” the press release said.
Pennsylvania State Police (PSP) refuses to say what exact role they played in the capture of this man who did nothing illegal other than make his way into America’s Promised Land where, instead of feeling protected, he is persecuted and prosecuted.
On June 11 two Lackawanna County Prison officials told me Mendez-Salazar was an inmate at their facility “booked” there on June 4. Yet U.S. Department of Homeland Security Immigration and Customs and Enforcement (ICE) detainee locator listed him on the same day as being imprisoned at the Pike County Correctional Facility. Pike County Prison officials failed to respond to my telephone message about whether Mendez-Salazar was an inmate there.
“Mr. Mendez-Salazar was released to the custody of the US Marshals Service on 7/4/25,” Lackawanna County Warden Tim Betti said in an email. Betti said the county jail has no contract with ICE and that authorities locked up Mendez-Salazar in the county jail because of a previous county warrant.
“He was committed here on 6/5/25 on a bench warrant from Judge Thomas Munley and he has a detainer from the US Marshals Service,” Betti wrote. “I believe the Judge Munley bench warrant is for unpaid court costs and fines. I have no idea what the USMS detainer pertains to.”
On July 14 I called the U.S. Marshals Service in Scranton and left a message, asking for Mendez-Salazar’s location. An agent later said they don’t have him. Try ICE, he said.
A federal judge in Wilkes-Barre eventually sentenced Mendez-Salazar to time served on the federal charge. A staffer in the judge’s office said he has no idea where Mendez-Salazar went when sentencing concluded. Sometimes ICE is waiting in the hallway to pick up an undocumented person, he said, although another Wilkes-Barre judicial staffer later said she never saw that happen in the Wilkes-Barre federal courthouse.
Mendez-Salazar’s federal public defender no longer represents him because, according to a source, “his criminal case has concluded.” ICE no longer lists Mendez-Salazar in the ICE Online Detainee Locator System.
As America’s ICE-cold grip tightens on freedom, Mendez-Salazar is just another Mexican eaten up by our system of so-called liberty and justice for all. American government at the highest levels has declared war on immigrants, targeting them as the main “enemy of the people” in our new Mexican-American War. Immigrants from numerous other countries find themselves in the crosshairs, but Mexicans seem particularly vulnerable. Dehumanizing immigrants and their families is now part of a national political strategy to lose them whether by accident or by design.
In our alleged land of the free an increasingly powerful police state continues to openly hunt humans.
Although Mendez-Salazar and I once shared life in the same city, he now exists as an invisible man, vanishing like he never existed in Scranton in the first place. To Trump, ICE and countless Americans, “making America great again” means making millions of undocumented immigrants simply disappear.
