A man who has held protection against removal since 2018 was telephoned by an immigration officer and told to report the next morning, three months before his scheduled appointment. He was detained when he arrived, and the government sought to send him to Equatorial Guinea. A federal judge has stopped it for now.
The video
@abc7la A longtime West Hollywood resident from Brazil was suddenly detained by ICE agents during an immigration check-in and friends fear he could be deported to Guyana. Alex Pereira-Alves, a Brazilian immigrant turned years-long West Hollywood resident who was working as a security guard and personal trainer, is being detained at the Adelanto Detention Center. He’s now staring down the fate of swift deportation.
ABC7 Los Angeles, on its own channel.
What happened
Alex Pereira-Alves, a Brazilian national, has lived in the United States since 2018. That same year an immigration judge granted him withholding of removal, a country-specific protection barring his return to Brazil. ABC7 Los Angeles reported on 14 August 2026 that he had been detained after an officer of Immigration and Customs Enforcement telephoned him and told him to report the following morning to a federal building in downtown Los Angeles. His own scheduled appointment was 18 November. He was taken to the Adelanto detention centre.
His lawyer, Jane Oak, told the broadcaster: “It was done without proper notice. He had a scheduled appointment for Nov. 18, and then all of a sudden calling and telling you to come the next morning only to take you at that time.”
The Department of Homeland Security sought to remove him to Equatorial Guinea. His family did not know that at first. Early accounts from his supporters gave the destination as Guyana, and ABC7 corrected it in its later report. A man was being sent to a country neither he nor the people around him could name with confidence.
A friend, Jeff Markwardt, told the broadcaster what Pereira-Alves had said: “They’re going to kill me.”
The court
Oak filed a petition for habeas corpus, arguing that he had been given no credible fear interview about the country he was to be sent to, and that this denied him due process. A federal judge temporarily blocked the removal. Oak described the effect of the order: “He cannot be removed from the detention center to any country at any time until we are fully finished with these submissions.”
The judge and the court are not named in the reporting and the order itself has not been published. What is established is the fact of a temporary block, not its reasoning.
Why this case matters beyond one man
An Immigration and Customs Enforcement directive of 18 February 2025 contains a section headed “Aliens Granted Withholding of Removal or CAT Protection”. It instructs officers that when a person holding such protection reports on the non-detained docket, they “should review the case to determine the viability of removal to a third country and accordingly whether the alien should be re-detained”. A federal court quoted that language in D.V.D. v. U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
What that directive sets out on paper is what this case looks like in a person’s life: protection granted years earlier, a summons to a check-in, detention on arrival, and a third country.
The third country here is Equatorial Guinea. The Coalition’s country guide records what is known about that arrangement, and what people already transferred there have found on arrival.
What is not established
- Whether Pereira-Alves remains in detention, and where.
- The identity of the judge and the court, and the terms of the order.
- Whether the government has given any reason for selecting Equatorial Guinea. The reporting does not say.
- Whether the initial account of Guyana as the destination came from the government or from a misunderstanding among his supporters.
- The present state of the habeas proceedings.
Sources
- ABC7 Los Angeles, West Hollywood man detained by ICE during immigration check-in, 14 August 2026.
- ABC7 Los Angeles, Federal judge blocks deportation of West Hollywood man detained by ICE during immigration check-in, 15 August 2026.
- ABC7 Los Angeles video report, published on the broadcaster’s own TikTok channel, embedded above.
- Immigration and Customs Enforcement directive of 18 February 2025, quoted in D.V.D. v. U.S. Department of Homeland Security, No. 1:25-cv-10676 (D. Mass.), order of 18 April 2025.