CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Rafael Tum-pu has been sitting in the Mahoning County Jail for three weeks, and he likely will remain there for months after an immigration judge found he may be a "danger to society" because of four prior traffic tickets.
Tum-pu, a 38-year-old husband and father of three U.S. citizens under age 11, pleaded with Immigration Judge Anthony Santoro at a recent hearing in Cleveland to let him out on bond while he tried to argue for citizenship.
"I love this country as much as I love my life," Tum-pu said during the hearing. "This country gave me my life, gave me my kids."
Santoro's order to keep Tum-pu behind bars without the ability to post bond highlighted a growing fear among immigration advocates -- that jails and private prisons are being packed with people who have no criminal records and who were arrested in civil, not criminal, immigration cases.
In Ohio jails, the number of Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrestees has tripled since Jan. 21, the day after President Donald Trump took office and set new policies for detaining and deporting undocumented immigrants, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which tracks immigration cases using federal data.
The Trump administration has said it has specifically targeted undocumented immigrants who are criminals. Supporters of the policy say those who are here illegally should be picked up and face consequences.
"This isn't what they said they were going to do," said Lynn Tramonte, the director of the Ohio Immigrant Alliance. "They said they were going to go after people that were harming our country, but what they're doing is they're going after people that are following the law and putting them in jails."
In January, two Ohio jails housed 111 ICE arrestees. As of June 23, there were 336 in custody at six jails in the state.
Butler County had 96, the Corrections Center of Northwest Ohio had 86, Seneca County had 60, Geauga County had 43, the Northeast Ohio Correctional Center had 26 and Mahoning County, where Tum-pu remains, had 25, according to TRAC.
Across the country, 57,861 people are jailed on civil immigration cases, with 71% having no criminal convictions on their record, according to TRAC.
"It has suddenly become dangerous to leave your house and live your life, to go grocery shopping, to go to church," Tramonte said. "You're running the risk of not coming home."
Tum-pu, of East Palestine, has been in the United States for nearly two decades after arriving from Guatemala. He most recently worked for a concrete company, where he made about $40,000 per year.
He has spent most of his time working and taking care of his wife, who has medical issues, and three children, ages 10, 8 and 6.
Tum-pu was arrested by ICE on June 19 after he was ticketed in Mahoning County for speeding and driving without a license.
During his hearing on June 26, a Department of Homeland Security attorney questioned Tum-pu about how he was paid from his job -- by personal check, he said -- and why he continued disregarding the law by illegally driving to work without a license.
"I have to work," he said. "I have to provide for my family."
Tum-pu said each time he was ticketed, he immediately paid the fines. He said if the judge let him out on bond, his wife could drive him to work.
Santoro, the immigration judge, rejected his argument, saying he was particularly disturbed that Tum-pu kept driving without a license.
"He disregards U.S. law and doesn't appear to be working legally," he said.
In another case, Laura Pietro-Rincon did have a work permit, but she sat in the Mahoning County Jail for more than a month.
Pietro-Rincon initially came to the United States from Colombia on a student exchange program. She later got a work permit while filing for asylum with the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service. That's a less combative way to get citizenship that typically stops a case from immediately entering immigration court.
Her asylum case, filed in August, was still pending when ICE agents arrested her on June 8 in Sandusky for a traffic violation.
Confusion over why she had been arrested with an asylum case pending caused her to appear Thursday, when Immigration Judge David Whipple set her bond at $7,500.
Longtime Cleveland immigration attorney Margaret Wong said jailing people with no criminal history has ramped up in immigration court in recent months.
"It used to be you would have to have a couple drunken-driving charges or something like that to get denied bond," Wong said. "Now they try to find anything, like how many traffic tickets you have, to keep people in jail. They're changing the normal way they've been doing things."
Wong recently filed a lawsuit in federal court on behalf of Mario Monroy Villalta, a 24-year-old living in Cleveland. He has no prior criminal convictions, but he has been held in the Mahoning County Jail since May 24, even though a judge granted him bond.
Villalta was first arrested by ICE agents in February while warming up his car on the way to work, the lawsuit said. An immigration judge granted him a $15,000 bond, which his family paid, and he was released. Homeland Security attorneys dropped the case with the stipulation they could refile it.
After that, Villalta applied for asylum through the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service. He and his family were threatened after his sister was brutally killed in Guatemala, the lawsuit said.
ICE agents arrested him again in May while he took a walk with his father, and he was again jailed.
At what was supposed to be his bond hearing on June 26, a Homeland Security attorney filed an expedited removal order, meaning the case would be largely taken out of the judge's hands and Villalta could be deported within days without a hearing, the lawsuit said.
The lawsuit accused the Department of Homeland Security of violating Villalta's due process rights and challenged the department's arguments that he qualifies for expedited removal.
"That one made me angry," Wong said. "We already got him out on bond. The last three or four weeks they're really changing the way they look at people with no criminal records."