A lifelong Republican and Texas businessman who voted for US President Donald Trump says he now regrets that decision, after his Venezuelan fiancée was seized by immigration agents at Houston’s international airport last month.
John Gannon, 75, told CBS News his plans to marry 45-year-old Yasmin Suarez Reyes were upended when she was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in late July. “I voted for Trump,” Gannon said in the interview, before criticising the agency directly. “They are picking up law-abiding citizens. They’re destroying families, jobs.”
United States Immigration And Customs Enforcement: What Happened At The Airport That Day?
Gannon described the arrest as sudden and forceful, recalling the moment plainclothes agents moved in as the couple made their way through the terminal. “After leaving the United room, eight officers, ICE agents, swarmed Yasmin and detained her. They didn’t tell us why and wrestled her off into a car,” he told CBS News. Suarez Reyes has since been held at the Montgomery Processing Centre in Conroe, Texas, according to ICE’s online detainee tracking system.
United States Immigration And Customs Enforcement: Why Does Gannon Believe The Crackdown Has Gone Too Far?
Speaking about the toll her absence had taken, Gannon said his fiancée’s steadying influence on his life made her detention especially difficult to bear, his voice breaking as he described missing her. Asked what he would say to Trump directly, Gannon drew a sharp distinction between the enforcement he supports and the cases he believes are being swept up unfairly, saying he would ask the president, “What are you doing?” He added, “Go after the criminals. We’re all for that. But leave the mom and pops and the kids alone. Man, he’s destroying families.”
Suarez Reyes’s immigration attorney, Anne Kennedy, herself also a lifelong Republican, described the toll of prolonged detention on someone she said had broken no laws. “For almost two weeks now, she has been in a physical jail cell, when she has done nothing more than follow the laws of the United States and do what our immigration laws allow her to do,” Kennedy said.
United States Immigration And Customs Enforcement: How Does This Case Fit Into A Wider Pattern Of Airport Arrests?
Suarez Reyes is one of many immigrants detained in recent weeks as part of an intensified enforcement push at airports across the country, a tactic that has become the latest front in the administration’s deportation drive. ICE arrests soared to a record monthly high last month, driven in part by the airport operations, with many of those swept up, like Suarez Reyes, occupying a legal grey area, holding valid work permits and pending immigration cases despite technical lapses in their status. CBS News said it had contacted the Department of Homeland Security multiple times seeking comment on Suarez Reyes’s case but had not received a response as of publication.
Gannon’s account echoes a broader pattern of buyer’s remorse reported among some Trump voters whose own relationships or families have been touched by the crackdown, including a separate case involving Wisconsin man Bradley Bartell, whose Peruvian wife spent 49 days in ICE custody after being detained at a Puerto Rico airport before her eventual release on bond. With Suarez Reyes still in custody and no timeline given for her case’s resolution, Gannon said he remained focused on securing her release.
