Border Patrol detains 10-year-old Spokane girl and her dad

January 23, 2026 / 12:34 pm

caption: A Logan Elementary School student and her father have been detained by Border Patrol agents and sent to a facility in Texas. They came to the United States when she was four years old. Her father works as a roofer and has an open asylum case.

Arnoldo Tiul Caal dropped his daughter off for school at Logan Elementary the morning of Jan. 9 with the unnerving sense that they were being followed.

After seeing 10-year-old Karla Tiul Baltazar off to her class, Tiul Caal didn’t make it back to their nearby apartment before he was stopped by federal immigration agents, detained, and taken to a Border Patrol office in North Spokane.

Tiul Caal has been in Spokane for six years, said Olga Lucia Herrera, who has been volunteering to help him through court proceedings and regular check-ins with immigration officials in that time. He does not have a criminal record.

He has an active asylum case and a court date for 2027, a valid work permit, and a Social Security number, Herrera said. He had made nearly every appointment for a regular check-in with immigration officials, except for a recent date around the holidays when he was having phone problems.

“He was afraid this would happen,” Herrera said of Tiul Caal’s detention.

He waited at the Customs and Border Patrol Spokane sector headquarters for three hours, head full of unanswered questions. He worried about Karla, who was born in Guatemala and is otherwise alone in the United States.

“I had told him, ‘If this ever happens, you’re going to cry, scream, and beg them, because you cannot leave your daughter,’” Herrera said. “So he did that. He said, ‘I cannot leave my daughter. I cannot leave.’”

Agents allowed Tiul Caal to pick Karla up from school and told him to come back the next day, Herrera said. He signed papers saying he would leave the country voluntarily. But Herrera said he was coerced.

“He says, ‘They’re going to come and get me and they threatened me, they said they would separate me from my daughter if I didn’t go,’” Herrera said.

The next day, Herrera drove Tiul Caal and his daughter back to the Border Patrol headquarters with two bags of belongings each, all the while still trailed by an off-duty immigration agent, Herrera said. They were again detained and later transported to an immigration processing facility in Dilley, Texas, where they now await a court date in March.

Herrera said 10-year-old Karla is stressed thinking of the school she’s missing.

“She would at least want to finish elementary school,” Herrera said.

Spokane Public Schools board member Nikki Otero Lockwood held a moment of silence at Wednesday’s board meeting after she learned of the young student’s detention.

“The child’s absence is deeply felt by classmates, educators and a school community that is grieving and trying to make sense of this loss,” Lockwood said.

Karla is an “amazing” girl and left everyone with that impression, Herrera said. She came to Spokane at 4 years old and eventually enrolled in school and learned English. She loves books, Herrera said, and was teaching herself to write Japanese characters.

One of the last times they spoke, Herrera said Karla was excited to see her mom and sister who live in Guatemala, but she was mostly scared.

“She said, ‘I’m just afraid that they’re going to make fun of me, because I think I understand English better than Spanish.’”

Herrera said Karla “was saying goodbye to everything she knew with that kind of innocent certainty only a child has.”

Jennyfer Mesa, executive director of Latinos en Spokane, said she has been in contact with the family almost every day since their detainment.

Mesa, who has known the family for years, said the nonprofit has been providing them legal guidance and support in hopes of making their process less anxiety-inducing and stressful.

“She is one of the sweetest girls,” Mesa said of the young student. “I always have this image of her just riding her bike to and from school, rain or shine, even in the snow.”

“We’ve seen her grow up; it’s just absolutely heartbreaking,” she said.

Karla is now one of the 1,700 children in custody since family detention centers reopened in April.

Tiul Caal supported his daughter through work as a roofer in Spokane, but work is slow in the colder months. Herrera is not sure specifically why the pair fled Guatemala to seek asylum in the United States. Many asylum-seekers cite dangerous conditions in their home countries or a lack of work that puts their families at risk of starvation, Herrera said.

Tiul Caal and Karla came to the U.S. from a rural part of Guatemala in the jungle. His native language is Q’eqchi’, an indigenous Mayan language used by some 1 million people in Guatemala, according to the University of Virginia Institute of World Languages.

Tiul Caal will likely remain in detention until his next court hearing slated for March 9 under immigration Judge Veronica Marie Segovia.

Segovia, who was appointed as an immigration judge in November 2023, is known for denying immigrants asylum in the U.S., and more often than other immigration judges across the board.

Segovia denied a Turkish immigrant’s asylum case in 2025, despite the Department of Homeland Security stating the immigrant had met the legal requirements for asylum, according to a report by the Guardian. Segovia suggested the immigrant’s rape, torture and beatings he experienced in Turkey were “not as bad” as the report states.

Segovia saw 193 cases in the first 11 months of 2025. She granted other forms of relief for eight of those cases, but only granted full asylum for one of them, according to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonpartisan research center.

Her asylum denial rates are also significantly higher than her counterparts, data shows. Segovia denied 36% more asylum claims than other immigration judges across the U.S. in that same time period.

The Texas processing center is crowded, Tiul Caal told Mesa, with many detainees falling ill because of poor conditions.

“This case is particularly eye-opening for many of us, because I’ve been hearing rumors about ICE not engaging anymore in family separation, and now it seems like the tactic is to just deport everyone together,” Mesa said.

The facility in question, the South Texas Family Residential Center, is currently the center of a lawsuit from migrants held there alleging they have limited access to clean drinking water, poor medical care and are given food with worms and mold.

Ryan Lancaster, spokesman for Spokane Public Schools, said the district is committed to keeping schools safe and welcoming regardless of a student’s immigration status.

“We’re saddened to learn that circumstances involving immigration enforcement will prevent one of our students from completing the school year with their classmates,” he said. “Our focus remains on supporting students, staff and families by maintaining safe, inclusive spaces where every student can learn and belong.”

Spokane Public Schools has an explicit policy preventing immigration enforcement agents from entering district schools and barring staff from working with them. The policy was last amended in March 2024 to the fanfare of many Latinos in the community after several families complained that a Border Patrol agent gave a career presentation at a school.

Board President Jenny Slagle said she is holding Tiul Caal and Karla in her thoughts. Karla leaves behind more than an empty desk in her classroom at Logan.

“It definitely impacts all of us as humans and as students who are there to learn, and educators who are building these relationships are also being harmed,” Slagle said.

Reporter Alexandra Duggan contributed to this article.

This story was originally published by The Spokesman-Review and Spokane Public Radio.

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