Standout student at Suffolk County Community College being deported to Colombia after ICE agents took her in May

She was a standout college student, a peer mentor with a 3.9 GPA who was working on a project for a nonprofit that helps women who are victims of domestic violence.

But at 7 a.m. one morning in May, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents came knocking on the window of the basement apartment in Mastic that Sara Lopez Garcia shared with her mother and younger brother.

They were looking for someone else, and when the agents started asking questions, she answered, thinking she had nothing to hide because she believed she had legal immigration status, according to her fiance and Suffolk County Community College professors.

Now the 20-year-old is sitting in an ICE detention facility in Louisiana, apparently on her way to being deported to her native Colombia along with her mother, according to the ICE detention tracker website. Her brother, 17, was left behind on Long Island.

Her arrest by ICE agents has shocked the Suffolk County Community College community, provoking anger over the detention of a model student and fears the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown may spread to college campuses.

"Our community is outraged by this," said Dante Morelli, a professor of communications at the college and president of its Faculty Association. "It's just an awful, terrible situation."

The fear is especially palpable at the college, where 40% of the student population is Latino, Morelli said.

Cynthia Eaton, a professor of English who taught Lopez Garcia at the college’s Riverhead campus, said she has been teaching for decades and only occasionally came across a student of Lopez Garcia’s intellect and character.

"I've been teaching for 30 years ... and sometimes you meet a student who just stands out," she said. "Sara was one of those."

When she found out Lopez Garcia had been detained, "It hit me like a punch to the gut," Eaton said.

Lopez Garcia is the first known SUNY student in New York State to be detained in the escalating immigration sweeps, SUNY officials said.

Making Lopez Garcia’s case more tragic, professors and her fiance said, is that her brother has been left on Long Island in the care of neighbors since apparently, as a minor, ICE agents decided not to arrest him.

ICE did not respond to requests for comment.

President Donald Trump says the mass deportation campaign is aimed mostly at dangerous criminals and is designed to stem illegal immigration that is out of control. But Lopez Garcia’s fiance, Santiago Ruiz Castilla, said she had no criminal record or deportation orders, and had been given special juvenile immigration status — a designation granted in some circumstances to children who entered the country illegally and who have been abandoned, abused or neglected by one or both of their parents. Lopez Garcia was eligible because she entered the United States at age 15. 

An immigrant with this status typically is not deported while their case is processed, often for years, according to immigration lawyers. Sometimes the process results in a green card. Lopez Garcia and her mother already had legitimate Social Security numbers and work permits, Ruiz Castilla said.

Lopez Garcia "didn't even have a ticket," he said. "We do the same thing every single week. We work, we go to college, we go to church. That's it. That's our life."

The Trump administration appears to have stopped granting protection against deportation to new applicants for the juvenile visa, immigration attorney Laura Calder, of Huntington, said. She fears they may also revoke the protection for existing cases, though U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services stated in June that, in general, it won't do so.

Lopez Garcia was to be married on Aug. 7. Now Ruiz Castilla, also a native of Colombia and a student at the college, has canceled the wedding plans. He plans to fly to Colombia next week to be with his fiancee, whom he expects to be deported soon.

"I thought this was supposed to be about criminals and violent people and bad people and getting them out of the country," Eaton said. "Not my Sara."

It was not clear if Lopez Garcia had legal representation.

Lopez Garcia came to the United States in 2020 and graduated from William Floyd High School, Ruiz Castilla said. The two met there. 

She was majoring in interior design, and her capstone project at college was to redesign a room at Brighter Tomorrows, a nonprofit in Shirley that helps women who are victims of domestic violence, Eaton said. She was looking forward to the fall semester, when she would implement the design, according to Eaton.

At Suffolk, Lopez Garcia served as a tour guide for prospective students and was a member of the Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society for top academic achievers. She also staffed a help desk where students stopped in with questions about the campus, said Eaton, who recommended her for the job.

Lopez Garcia was detained on May 21, the day before commencement. She was not scheduled to graduate yet, but planned to be there to support friends who were receiving their degrees, Eaton said. Some of those friends were planning to give her a bachelorette party before her wedding, Morelli said.

She is despondent in the detention facility in Louisiana and has given up trying to stay in the  United States, Ruiz Castilla said. In June, she agreed to "self-deport."

Morelli said he is worried Lopez Garcia’s arrest could have a chilling effect on students attending Suffolk. Recently, ICE agents were outside the college’s campus in Brentwood, he said.

Her arrest "is yet another egregious act by this" federal administration, Morelli wrote in an open letter in the Faculty Association newsletter. "The federal government is directly harming our students."