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Leosdanis Mulet-Zaldivar, a 35-year-old Cuban inmate at the Butler County Jail in Ohio, as a key witness in a federal lawsuit aiming to end immigration arrests without a warrant statewide.
Mulet-Zaldivar entered the United States on December 24, 2022, through a border crossing in Texas under humanitarian parole and had a pending application for permanent residency under the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966 at the time of his detention, reported the local outlet .
On December 20, 2025, agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) forced the vehicle he was traveling in to stop, pulled him from the passenger seat, and handcuffed him in front of his wife and children without showing any warrant.
"What makes you legal in this country?" the agents asked him. "I answered that I had entered under humanitarian parole and that I had a pending application for my residency card. They told me to 'consult with the judge,'" he stated in court documents.
"My children were crying and were very distressed during this encounter," he added in the same document.
Since January 23, 2026, he has been incarcerated in the Butler County jail. According to his family, he has lost 13.6 kilograms since his detention due to the conditions of confinement.
"I am very worried that if I am not released soon, my family will not have enough money to buy food," declared this married man, who is the father of an 11-year-old son and a three-year-old daughter.
Mulet-Zaldivar is not the claimant in the case, but one of the 13 witnesses in three days of evidentiary hearings this week. The class action was filed in March by four immigrants from Ohio—originating from Peru, Honduras, Kenya, and a fourth unspecified country—against the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Customs and Border Protection Office, and the Border Patrol.
The document accuses "federal agents in plain clothes, masked and armed" of "patrolling the streets of Ohio, arbitrarily stopping individuals without judicial warrants and without probable cause." According to the lawsuit, at least 670 immigrants were detained in the state without a warrant until February 2026, and authorities would prioritize quick arrests to meet national goals of up to 3,000 detentions daily, without individually assessing the flight risk of each person, as required by federal law.
If successful, the lawsuit would eliminate the records of immigrants from Ohio who were arrested without a warrant and would prevent similar detentions in the future.
The government opposes, arguing that the class action lawsuit is too broad and that arrests without a warrant are "not inherently illegal." DHS stated that Mulet-Zaldivar "entered illegally" and offered him a free flight and $2,600 to leave voluntarily. ICE did not respond to questions about the specific reasons for his arrest.
Mulet-Zaldivar moved with his family to Grove City, Ohio, after three months in Las Vegas, according to court documents. There, he worked as an auto body painter and attended church every Sunday. He stated that prior to last December, he had never been arrested or charged with any crime.
The case is part of an unprecedented escalation. According to data from the Cato Institute, the arrests of Cubans by ICE increased by 463% between October 2024 and January 2026, while permanent residency approvals for Cubans fell by 99.8% during the same period, reaching only 15 in January 2026.
A federal immigration judge ordered the deportation of Mulet-Zaldivar on May 13, a decision that his lawyer has appealed. His wife, Susana Pupo Rodríguez, launched a GoFundMe campaign on Christmas Day 2025 to "free my husband and reunite our family"; to date, she has raised $1,365 of a $12,000 goal.
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