Josue Rodriguez Perez joined the line outside a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office near Miami for his annual check-in on June 5.

Three months later, the Cuban national found himself languishing in the Natrona County Detention Center, 2,000 miles from home, increasingly hopeless as his detention felt increasingly endless.

“You want to die. You pray to God you don’t wake up in the morning, when you’re isolated like this,” Rodriguez told WyoFile over a set of phone interviews from inside the jail.

Rodriguez’s journey from the Florida coast to the middle of Wyoming is a result of complicated immigration law that made him vulnerable to the mass deportations pursued by President Donald Trump and his administration. While some communities around the country are resisting, Rodrigue

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