Rachel Leidig was taking a break from work in San Francisco two Fridays ago when she got a phone call she had been dreading for months.
“It was a 360 number — a Washington number — and my heart dropped,” Leidig said by phone Thursday, shortly after arriving in Tacoma.
Guilherme “Gui” Silva, Leidig’s 35-year-old husband and the father of the baby boy she is due to deliver in October, was calling from an Immigration Customs and Enforcement Agency holding room in Bellingham. Silva, who moved from Brazil to the U.S. about eight years ago, told Leidig that about six or seven unmarked ICE vehicles surrounded his car on San Juan Island that morning, shortly after he left his cabin there to pick up his 4-year-old daughter from her grandmother in Friday Harbor.
Masked ICE agents emerged from the vehicles, pulled Silva from his car, confiscated his cellphone and detained him, his wife said. When Silva, who worked as an attorney in Brazil, asked to be shown an arrest warrant, one of the ICE officers refused, Leidig said he told her that day.
Leidig, a U.S. citizen who works as a hairstylist and makeup artist in San Francisco, said her past week has been a frenzy of trying to keep Silva from getting deported and permanently separated from her, his little girl and his future son. She said Silva has no criminal record and no outstanding warrants, and shortly after they married in April, he hired an immigration lawyer to apply for a green card. San Juan County District Court records show Silva was fined $100 for speeding in late 2024.
On Thursday afternoon, Leidig saw Silva for the first time since he was detained July 11, a wall of glass separating them inside the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma. She said he told her he has met other detainees who say they have been held there for months without court dates and unable to get legal representation, despite having green cards.
This is a nightmare," Leidig said via text message after their visit. "There is no such thing as due process."
ICE did not respond to inquiries Thursday or Friday.
In an email Friday, the Department of Homeland Security said that in November 2016, Silva was issued a B-2 visa, which allows non-U.S. citizens to temporarily enter the country for tourism, pleasure or medical treatment. The agency said Silva was arrested because he did not leave the U.S. when his visa expired in March 2017.
Silva, who lives in San Francisco when he's not on San Juan Island to be with his daughter, earned his law degree in Brazil, Leidig said. While he started a career as a lawyer, he always nursed a passion for art. He moved to the U.S. to apprentice under professional muralists, developing his own colorful, bright style inspired by his Brazilian upbringing. Silva started dating a woman and the couple eventually married and had their now 4-year-old daughter, Leidig said.
Silva's former wife sponsored his first green card application, but withdrew her sponsorship when she filed for divorce in 2022, Leidig said.
Leidig met Silva — whom she calls “Gui” — in August 2023, when a mutual friend who had grown up in the same town as Silva in Brazil invited them both to see The Flaming Lips perform at Golden Gate Park. Leidig said she was struck by Silva's kind, quiet nature, and his humility about his art.
The pair hit it off and started dating long distance, with Silva traveling across the U.S. to paint murals and to San Juan Island to see his daughter, with whom he shares custody with his ex-wife.
Leidig, 36, said she had always put her career first, but knew she wanted to be a mother one day. Seeing the kind of father Silva is — one who lets his daughter dress him up as a princess to match her, then dance around their home — was “part of the reason (Leidig) fell in love with him.”
“As a dad, he is so amazing,” she said. “They’re best friends. They’re the same person.”
Leidig found out she was pregnant in February. The couple got married at Oakland City Hall on April 21, and hired an immigration lawyer the next day to start applying for Silva’s green card — a process they knew they wanted to “start immediately because of the Trump administration,” she said.
The couple found a place to live in Sausalito in May, hoping to find a “slower pace of life.” Leidig had already moved in, and Silva was scheduled to join her there Aug. 1, Leidig said.
During their phone call hours after Silva was picked up, Leidig said, Silva told her he left his home on San Juan Island that morning to pick up his daughter when he noticed a black SUV parked nearby on a private road. He told Leidig the car seemed to follow him as he drove toward Friday Harbor, and after he turned onto the main road, about six other unmarked vehicles “ambushed” him, Leidig said.
After being told they didn't need to show him a warrant, an agent grabbed Silva from his car, took his cellphone out of his hand and pushed him against the car, Leidig said her husband told her.
Silva told his wife he asked the agents why they were detaining him, and two agents gave him different answers. They took him off the island on a private boat and to an ICE holding room in Bellingham, where Leidig said he called her.
Leidig said she didn't hear from her husband again until two days later, on Sunday, July 13, when he called from the ICE detention center in Tacoma. Silva told her ICE agents transported him the day he was detained from Bellingham to another holding room in Ferndale. At one point that day, he told Leidig that ICE agents made him take off all of his clothes so they could inspect his tattoos, asking him if they were gang-related. He spent the next 38 hours in the Ferndale holding room, sleeping on the floor with about 35 other people, Leidig said.
ICE agents then shackled Silva’s ankles and put him in a car, driving him three hours to the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma, where he has been held since, Leidig said.
“Gui’s not part of a gang. He never has been. It’s just crazy,” Leidig said. "They don’t care who they’re arresting, or if they have a background — they’re just trying to get their numbers up.
A July 29 hearing is scheduled, Leidig said. Their immigration attorney plans to request that Silva be released on bond that day, and for his future court hearings to happen in San Francisco, near Sausalito. Leidig also said she filed an I-130 form, a document claiming Silva as her relative, the day he was detained, and that Silva met with a Tacoma attorney last Monday to sign the application for a green card.
During Silva’s calls from ICE detention sites in Bellingham and Tacoma, Leidig said her husband has remained “strong and calm,” advising her on what to do, while trying not to cause her stress so late in her pregnancy. But his descriptions of ICE officers’ behavior and the conditions he and other detainees are experiencing are harrowing, she said.
“I’m worried about the psychological damage for (his daughter) going through this, and I want our little boy to know his father,” she said. “I’m seven months pregnant. I need my husband.”
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