Maklim Gomez Escalante texted his wife at 12:50 p.m. Jan. 20, letting her know he had arrived at the Magisterial District Court in Baldwin to testify as scheduled at 1 p.m. The text was followed by one more: “ICE agents are here.”
She didn’t hear from him again that day.
“They did tell us that some days they’re busy,” said Rebecca Mackin, a friend and former neighbor of the family, of the district court location. “By the time it was 7, 8 p.m., we knew he wasn’t there.”
Later that night, by tracking the phone Gomez Escalante had taken to court, his wife, Natalia Garcia de Gomez, discovered her husband’s location: the Northern Regional Correctional Facility in Marshall County, W.Va.
He had been detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“She feared, obviously, that that was what happened, based off of what he said,” said Mackin, who translated Garcia de Gomez’s interview for TribLive on Tuesday. “But she was so confident, just even in the fact that they were going through this (immigration) process legally, had never had any issues that he wouldn’t have gotten taken that way.”
Gomez Escalante, 35, of Brentwood in the South Hills, emigrated with his family from El Salvador to seek asylum in 2021 and has approached the process legally, according to Mackin, 36, of South Park. He and his family have Social Security numbers and valid work permits that don’t expire until 2030, according to documents provided by the family.
Garcia said she was able to regain contact with her husband two days after his detainment.
After talking with Gomez Escalante, Garcia learned her husband had presented his work permit card to the four ICE agents outside the district court, whom he said were wearing plainclothes.
“They snapped it in half and threw it away,” Mackin said.
The next day, he was transferred to Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Clearfield County. Moshannon Valley is one of the largest immigration detention centers in the Northeast.
On Monday night, Garcia said, she received a call from one of her husband’s fellow inmates at Moshannon Valley, saying he hadn’t been seen at the facility since around 10 a.m., when he needed medical attention and had been taken to a hospital.
As of Tuesday, his whereabouts are unknown.
“The person that I spoke with knew that he wasn’t there, was able to confirm that he wasn’t physically there, but could not tell us where he was.” Mackin said of Moshannon Valley. “He was still showing up in the record as being a detainee there.”
As of Tuesday evening, Gomez Escalante’s status on ICE’s Online Detainee Locator System is listed as “in ICE custody,” with the detention facility listed as the Moshannon Valley Ice Processing Center in Clearfield County.
Seeking asylum
Garcia de Gomez, 32, of Brentwood, described conditions of violence, corruption and poverty in her family’s home of La Paz in El Salvador — which led to the decision to emigrate and turn themselves in at the U.S. border in August 2021.
“There were two main rival gangs, and if you were not in one of their areas that they control, then it was the other. She said you really couldn’t go anywhere, like even just going to a corner store or to a little market,” said Mackin, who translated Garcia de Gomez’s interview. “They extort people for money. They try to recruit children and men.”
The Gomez family is Christian and very religious, Garcia de Gomez said. At one point, they were taking a parishioner home from church and were stopped by gang members with guns drawn.
“I think people felt like there was really nowhere to turn … and no hope,” Mackin said. “It really was just a build-up, but she was studying in the university, she would get robbed, you know, going to and from. Her husband would get beaten up … almost for nothing.
“You would leave your house and never know what was going to happen. She said that it’s not reportable because people are too afraid to report it because they also don’t know who they can trust or who’s involved at the police level. … They finally just decided, I think, that things were too bad that they needed to try to leave.”
But the journey to seek asylum in the United States wasn’t easy.
A group of eight family members — including Garcia de Gomez, her husband, their daughter and five others — left together. In order to be able to afford to travel, the family leveraged Garcia de Gomez’s mother’s home.
To reach the U.S. border in Texas, the family traveled north through El Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico. The journey took 12 days, she said, as well as numerous methods of transportation, including buses and the bed of a truck.
“Part of that journey, they were under blankets, essentially in the bed of a pickup truck, with other things on top of them,” Mackin said. “They were lying down. And she just described how, when they were doing that, it was raining really hard … lying underneath that and soaking wet.”
The family needed to stay hidden and not be stopped, so that’s why those lengths were taken, according to Mackin.
Mackin said the “easiest legal route” for many fleeing Central American countries is to cross a U.S. land border, turn themselves in and then file for asylum status.
“You have to be physically present in the United States to request asylum status. You can’t do it from your home country,” she said. “So a lot of people view it as like people entering undocumented, but really, you have to be here to even be able to ask for a asylum. So it’s almost like you have to enter that way because you have to physically be in the United States to file for that paperwork for asylum.”
According to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, people may apply for asylum if they “are at a port of entry or in the United States … regardless of your immigration status.”
Once a person is granted asylum, they are protected from being returned to their home country, are authorized to work in the United States and may apply for a Social Security number, according to the American Immigration Council.
Once the Gomez family turned themselves in at the border, they were held in a facility for four days, according to Garcia de Gomez. Women and children were separated from men, she said.
“They crossed the Rio Grande … which she said was difficult,” Mackin said. “She said they saw, I guess, part of the wall, or part of the border, some physical barrier, and there was, like a Homeland Security or border patrol station. She said, ‘You know, we literally just walked up to it and turned ourselves in.’ ”
They then filed their asylum-seeking paperwork in Texas. Their status is still listed as “open,” Mackin said, and the latest task they had to do was get fingerprinted in August as part of the process.
The family’s work permit cards became valid in February 2025, and will be valid until February 2030, according to their paperwork. They decided to live in Pittsburgh because Gomez Escalante’s cousin was able to get him a job in construction.
Garcia de Gomez has worked “whatever she can,” according to Mackin, including in various restaurants, cleaning homes and selling Salvadoran food to her community. She also gave birth to the family’s second child while in the Pittsburgh area.
“It was the middle of winter … and she literally didn’t have a way to get home from the hospital or anything,” said Mackin, who asked her dad to help pick up Garcia de Gomez at the hospital. “It broke my heart, you know, to be leaving a hospital in a country that’s not yours with a newborn baby and not even have a way to get home.”
The Gomez family usually gets around via bus or Uber.
Lack of communication
Since Gomez Escalante was detained, “not a single person” has contacted his wife, Mackin told TribLive.
“He had never been given the opportunity to make a call or notify anyone,” she said. “Anything we’ve found out is just from constant digging and investigation.”
Mackin, who works as a Spanish teacher, used to live down the street from the family. She said Gomez Escalante had an issue with a former employer who is also an immigrant. The Gomez family ended up having to call police to their residence in late December because they felt “threatened,” according to Mackin.
“He was subpoenaed to appear as a witness against this individual,” she said, which is why he went to district court Jan. 20.
The Baldwin district court location, with presiding Judge Candace Stockey Seymour, on Tuesday did not return TribLive’s request for comment on the subpoena or ICE detainment.
Prior to being detained, Gomez Escalante was experiencing heart-related issues, his wife said. Since he was apprehended, he has described in phone calls to his wife that he has “severe headaches” and facial paralysis to half of his face.
Garcia de Gomez said she pays around $30 or $40 per two or three video calls through the ICE facility and has heard from her husband once or twice per day up until Monday.
ICE did not immediately return a request for comment on Gomez Escalante’s detainment and medical statuses.
A TribLive search of state and federal court databases showed no criminal record nor pending charges against Gomez Escalante.
Allegheny County Common Pleas President Judge Susan Evashavik DiLucente did not return calls for comment. First Assistant District Attorney Rebecca Spangler also did not return calls.