PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — If you ask Jason Javie about his husband of four years, Henry Diaz, Jason is more of the Eagles fan in the marriage, but Henry is the one who knows how to throw a party.
“He does the tablecloths and the flowers, and it’s usually exquisite food,” Jason said. “He has attention to detail, impeccable taste, sense of style.”
Just two weeks ago, Henry pulled out all the stops for his annual White Labor Day party at their place in Point Breeze for friends and family. Ever the traveling couple, too, the plans for this weekend were to fly alongside Jason’s mom to Kansas City to visit Jason’s brother and see the Eagles play at Arrowhead Stadium.
Instead, Henry was detained by ICE agents as he was boarding the flight to Kansas City early Friday morning at Philadelphia International Airport.
Jason, who had scanned his boarding pass right before Henry, said the first sign of something being wrong came when Henry scanned his.
“There was sort of a strange beep and a man came and sort of took Henry by the arm,” he said.
Jason said Henry was taken out of the boarding line and quickly surrounded by ICE agents.
One of them pulled out a smartphone and showed Henry a photo of himself on the screen.
“You know you have a final removal order, right?” Jason heard the agent say.
Jason’s mom, who was making her way onto the flight right before Jason and Henry, returned to the gate entrance to see the commotion and immediately called her sister-in-law Sharon Javie when she saw Henry being detained.
“She called to ask us to pray because agents surrounded Henry, they handcuffed him, and they took him away,” Sharon said. “All I could say was, ‘Oh dear lord.’”
When reached for comment, an airport spokesperson said they didn’t have any details about Henry’s detention on Friday morning or ICE’s operations at the airport and directed KYW Newsradio to ICE.
ICE has not responded to a request for comment from KYW Newsradio regarding the incident.
Henry’s final removal order dates back to when he first came to the United States as a 17-year-old from El Salvador. As Jason tells it, Henry’s parents sent him north with a group led by a coyote from the nation’s capital, San Salvador, to the U.S.-Mexico border. He crossed into Arizona and was eventually detained by immigration authorities.
Henry was sent to a detention center for unaccompanied minors and was released from there into the custody of his brother, who lives in South Jersey. He also got a court date, but his brother never took him.
“Keep in mind, at the time, spoke no English and was 17 years old,” Jason said. “It was a removal in absentia because he wasn’t there. That, apparently, at least under immigration law, is not an excuse.”
In the meantime, Henry also got busy carving out a life for himself in the U.S. Jason said one of his first jobs was at a McDonald’s while he was in high school, and he also picked up contracting work with a family member. That kept up for Henry through college, and he eventually entered the hospitality industry and started a career.
Over the years, he’s never had a run-in with the law and has tried multiple times with many different lawyers to get his final deportation order reopened and thrown out, but those efforts were unsuccessful.
Henry met Jason in 2015 while he was still in South Jersey, and Jason was in Philly.
“We met on an app,” said Jason. “We disagree about what app it was.”
Love blossomed over the next six years, and the pair married at City Hall in 2021, followed by a memorable surprise party organized by both their friend groups at the Jersey Shore — a regular summer destination for the pair.
Henry had also moved to Philly to live with Jason, and after their marriage, the pair moved to Point Breeze, where they live to this day.
For work, Henry got into the city’s restaurant industry and worked his way up.
“That’s one of the things that I really admire about him,” said Jason. “In any situation, he’s able to rise to the occasion.”
Jason’s aunt Sharon met Henry for the first time in 2018 and said she was immediately enamored with the kind-hearted and considerate man her nephew brought into the family.
“Henry is one of the kindest, most loving people you’ll ever meet,” she said. “He’s just been the person you want in your community and in your family.”
In their relationship, Jason said Henry brought up his immigration status on one of their first dates.
“I think that Henry from the past had dealt with situations where he’s dating somebody, he would bring that up, and that would be a dealbreaker,” he said. “It wasn’t a dealbreaker for me.”
It’s something Jason said was always a concern in their relationship, but it didn’t stop the pair from trying to live their best lives, going on trips and making memories at home in their community. When President Donald Trump was re-elected, the pair weighed trying to get Henry’s deportation order thrown out again, but decided against it after Trump’s campaign, full of anti-immigrant rhetoric.
As a lawyer himself, Jason developed a game plan in the event Henry was ever detained by ICE.
“Our strategy was just to be as prepared as possible — having money for a lawyer, be prepared to do what you need to do,” he said. “And I think like so many other things, you’re never as prepared as you think you are or as you want to be.”
That hit home on Saturday, when Jason visited Henry at the Federal Detention Center on Arch Street and saw his husband for the first time since his detention Friday morning, in a prison jumpsuit.
“I don’t know if there’s anything that could prepare you for that moment when I saw him,” he said. “It’s something I’ll think about probably for the rest of my life.”
Jason said he also wasn’t prepared to go back to their Point Breeze apartment after the canceled trip to Kansas City.
“It’s strange,” he said. “The place looks exactly the way we left it, with one difference: he’s not there.”
But Jason’s game plan is still just getting started. He called it a “kitchen sink” approach to getting Henry out of ICE custody, and has retained a legal team to come up with different strategies. The first effort was to have as many friends and family members write letters on Henry’s behalf for a judge to review at a future hearing.
That hearing or those series of hearings, Jason hopes, will be the ones that finally get Henry’s deportation order rescinded.
“It’s people like him, that have the strong work ethic, that follow the law, that try to do the right thing, that touch everybody, that add to society, that make this country great,” Jason said. “I’m hopeful that the people that are going to make that decision see that.”