What began as a routine annual immigration check-in ended with the detention of Victor Peralta Perez, a Venezuelan asylum seeker, husband and father of twin U.S.-citizen children. Detained after reporting to a scheduled appointment in Dallas on Dec. 4, Peralta spent more than 100 days in ICE custody, was transferred through multiple facilities across Texas, Arizona and Florida, before he ultimately accepted voluntary departure. His wife, Madison Crider, says neither she nor Victor were ever given a clear explanation for why he was detained in the first place.

On December 4, 2025, Madison took Victor to his appointment at Dallas Immigration Enforcement Office at approximately 6:30 a.m. Per protocol, he turned off his phone, and then entered the building. Madison waited.

Noticing bullet-holes in the walls on either side of her — remnants of the shooting four months prior — Crider felt uneasy. Looking around, she noticed a parking lot full of vehicles with big, orange impound notices on them. The cars were waiting for their owners — owners she knew would never arrive.

The sight made her more uneasy about the fact that this appointment was taking significantly longer than those prior. In 2024, Perez entered the building, answered questions, discussed his asylum case, his work and family, and returned to his wife within the hour.

But after waiting for three hours that December morning, she was approached by three men; two in suits and one armed guard wearing rubber gloves. They asked for Perez’s identification. Nervously, Crider walked the men to her car and pulled out her husband’s wallet, and asked if they’d need his work visa as well.

“I was just trying to be compliant and trying to be kind because they had him back [in the building],” Crider told The Ravenna Report. “And I’d seen awful things all over the media and the news, and I didn’t want them to be unkind to him.”

But compliance or not, the outcome would be the same. The men told her it’d be best if she provided the entire wallet, because “it’ll be going with him.”

In that moment, she realized her husband wasn’t going home with her that day.

“I wish I had not given them anything,” Crider said. “I wish I’d said more.”

Perez first fled Venezuela in 2021 after participating in anti-Maduro protests. He was 21 years old and left everything behind to enter the U.S. near San Luis, Arizona. A year later, he applied for asylum claiming he’d been arrested and abused by Venezuelan security forces as a teenager for his role in the demonstrations.

And his case wasn’t denied. In fact, by December 2025 it was still pending. He wasn’t worried about his immigration status since his next hearing wasn’t scheduled until August 2028.

In the meantime, he attended his immigration hearing without incident, met Madion Crider, got married, had twins — Nathan and Natalia — and he worked hard to support his family as an electrician. Unable to afford child care, Crider decided it best to focus on raising her children.

So they followed the law and did as instructed. And that worked for a while, until the appointment she left without Perez.

“It was terrible,” she said. “I cried the whole way [home]. We were praying over this situation for a long time because we were really scared.”

They hadn’t been scared because Perez was on the run. Stories of loved ones going missing after appointments or court hearings are a dime-a-dozen during President Trump’s second term, so in taking any precaution Crider saw possible, she stuck an Apple AirTag in Perez’s pocket prior to his appointment.

And thanks to thinking ahead, she saw his every move — including many she wouldn’t have been alerted of otherwise. According to the AirTag documentation reviewed by The Ravenna Report, the day after his Dallas detention, Perez was moved to Bluebonnet Detention Facility, where he was held for three days until abruptly being transferred in the middle of the night to Eden Detention Center, where he spent the majority of his detention before another seven transfers — each occurring between midnight and three in the morning.

Crider had been apart from Perez for six days when she checked the EOIR system and noticed something strange: “There are no future hearings for this case.” According to documentation verified by The Ravenna Report, Perez’s Asylum hearing, which had been scheduled and left unchanged for years, had suddenly vanished. And then it was reassigned to Judge Scott Greenbaum in a new court and scheduled for two months from then — significantly shortened from the original 2028 hearing.

Questions linger regarding the reason for this as ICE hasn’t commented at the time of reporting.

During his time at Eden Detention Center, Perez reported mold in the showers, bathrooms that were never cleaned, moldy food, often less than three meals in a day, freezing temperatures during winter months, no medical assistance, and persistent illness.

On December 28, Perez messaged Crider:

He complained about a cough, and what he believed to be a flu, but to no avail. Not to mention, in his first two weeks, Perez lost 10 pounds — something he knows because he and other detainees were weighed weekly, though conditions remained.

“I didn’t sleep the entire time he was in detention,” Crider said. “I worried every day if he was dead or alive. And it was mentally exhausting for him, staying scared most of the time and trying to keep his head down.”

Kept awake at night with fear and discomfort, Perez spent most of his days asleep, hoping he’d be reunited with his family. But after speaking to other detainees, some with more hopeful immigration statuses than his own — including green cards and legal residencies — that had been denied by the same judge he’d been newly reassigned to, the hope withered.

And then came the bond denial.

Judge Greenbaum sealed Perez’s fate the same way he had others Perez got to know while in Eden. Despite no criminal history, prior compliance, a stable residence, work visa, not posing a flight risk or a danger to the community while serving as the sole provider to a U.S.-citizen spouse and their two-year-old twin children, Judge Greenbaum denied Perez’s bond.

“I don’t understand why someone that hadn’t done anything wrong would have to pay bond,” Crider said. “An attorney couldn’t even really explain that to me. They wouldn’t give a reason why he was detained. Nothing at all. They just said, ‘We’re not letting you go.’”

After over one hundred days in detention, still without a release date or bond option, Perez rapidly approached an emotional breaking point.

“I think that’s really the goal with these detention stays with no end in sight, and for no reason, and denied bond, denied bail” Crider said. “They’re trying to get you to lose everything. They’re trying to get you to give up the life that you have here.”

And even though Perez was the one in detention, Crider had become imprisoned in her own sense. After he was detained, Crider lost their income and had to give up their apartment, moving the twins and herself back home to Oklahoma to live in a family member’s living room — a home without much room for them, much less their pets.

“Ten years of adulthood building a home,” Crider said. “You know, just trying to salvage everything… We had furniture that we had to pretty much just give away and donate because we didn’t have time to sell it. And I had to give away half of my children’s toys because we just don’t have the room for it. They don’t have a bedroom anymore.”

Before Perez’s detention, the family had two tabby cats for nine years and a dog Crider had known as long as she’s known her husband. Amid the chaos of moving, communicating with lawyers, caring for her children and checking on Perez, she attempted to thoughtfully rehome the pets. Their dog is with a nice who owns lots of land and sends occasional photos. The cats were rehomed with a girl who took them to a shelter. They’ve since been separated.

“It’s been really hard because [the kids] are definitely confused why we moved out of our home that they’ve been in since they could walk and why [their father] is not around,” Crider said.

After being detained for months, with no end in sight, his health and spirit deteriorating, the bond denied and his family financially struggling whilst paying legal fees, Perez chose departure.

“These long stays are just completely unjust,” Crider said. “They’re just trying to get people to leave because they don’t have the grounds to deport them.”

According to Perez’s route as documented by Crider’s AirTag, he spent days being transferred from Eden Detention Center to Prarieland Detention Facility, to Dallas Love Field, a city-owned airport being used for ICE Air deportations where Perez alleges being shackled to other detainees overnight.

“It was like a five-day process,” Crider said. “They moved him to military bases, and they had him sleeping on the floor in a locked room, he wasn’t given a shower. They were barely given any food. They were not in places where they could sleep. He was exhausted by the time he got to Venezuela and told me ‘I have not showered in five days.’”

Then he was sent to El Paso Airport and Florence Military Reservation, to await a Miami flight before being taken to Pheonix-Mesa Gateway Air Tanker Base, arriving at the Coast Guard Air Station, where he departed for Caracas and arrived in Venezuela.

“He was in shackles until the moment he got on the plane,” Crider said. “He was still detained. They had his legs and his wrists bound until they quite literally put him on a plane to Venezuela in Miami.”

In a moment of relief, Perez reunited with family he hadn’t seen in five years. But he couldn’t stay in Venezuela for long.

It took Perez about three weeks to find work, when according to Crider, a friend invited him to work with him selling fish.

“On their second trip selling fish, they were stopped by authorities fairly quickly,” she said. “We believe they had been watching what they were doing and knew they were carrying money from their sales. They threatened them with imprisonment in order to take their earnings.”

Fearing for his life once again, Crider helped Perez acquire a new passport, since he’d been without one ever since he first handed it to the U.S. government when first filing for asylum, he hopped on a plane and relocated to Argentina, where he says both Americans and Venezuelans are generally welcome.

Today, Perez lives in Argentina, awaiting his wife and children. Crider, sleeping on a couch across from two cribs in Oklahoma, is trying to save enough money to join him.

“We’re trying to replace the home that we lost,” Crider said. “We just- we want to replace our home. We want to be back together as a family.

Lingering over this family is a single question: why has a man with a valid work permit, a pending asylum case and no criminal history spent more than 100 days in detention for following the rules?

Madison Crider’s GoFundMe