Kimiko Jackson works 10-hour shifts as a nurse at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Lakewood, comes home to a 10-year-old daughter and a 5-month-old son, and visits her partner in immigration detention almost every day. Darvi Rivas, a 35-year-old Venezuelan national, was arrested by ICE officers on Interstate 5 near Lacey on July 3 after losing the Temporary Protected Status that had shielded him from deportation for years.
Rivas is one of nearly 1 million Venezuelan nationals who have lost TPS, according to The News Tribune. He lost that protection in November, the paper reported, and was picked up during what the Department of Homeland Security described as a targeted operation. DHS has said Rivas will receive due process and will remain in ICE custody pending removal.
Jackson, 46, told the paper that Rivas worked, paid taxes and had no criminal record. She hired a lawyer for him, and that attorney has requested a bond hearing, now scheduled for Tuesday, August 25. Rivas has told the paper that reactivating his TPS would be a huge help, and that he passes the time in detention at the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma drawing pictures of his family, saying the drawing relaxes him.
A Family Built, Then Upended
Rivas arrived in the United States on September 9, 2022, and was encountered by Customs and Border Protection the next day in El Paso, Texas. The Biden administration released him after that encounter, and he filed an asylum case that year. That case was dismissed in 2024 because he qualified for TPS instead, per the paper’s reporting. He went on to work full-time delivering for DoorDash and Amazon Flex, while Jackson, a single mother of two now that Rivas is detained, had returned to work at the VA after maternity leave shortly before his arrest…