Two Argentine performers who live in Orlando, Florida, and hold work permits while they seek asylum in the United States were arrested by immigration agents on Saturday, November 7, at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport in Arizona, where they had travelled to attend a funeral, the Associated Press reported on Wednesday, November 11. Gustavo Romanello and Agustin Baccega remain in detention, according to a family friend who was on the phone with them when they were taken into custody.
Source: Associated Press, via AmeriLedger, Nov 11, 2026
The two men, a married couple, have lived in the United States since about 2020. They worked as acrobats in Florida — performing in The Untrainable Dragon show at Universal's Epic Universe, and previously at Walt Disney World Resort, according to 12News reporting cited by WDW News Today. A mutual friend had died on Friday, November 6, and the couple was visiting Phoenix for the funeral on Saturday.
Source: WDW News Today, citing 12News, Nov 11, 2026
The arrest at the airport, as described by a friend
Jonathan Batchelor, a family friend, was on the phone with the couple at the time of the arrest, the AP reported. As the couple left the airport, two casually dressed officers asked whether one of them was Agustin Baccega. Batchelor told the AP he heard an officer say, 'Asylum seekers are not in the United States legally.'
Batchelor said he could hear Romanello walking alongside his husband during the arrest and asking the officers how to collect his things. The officers then asked Romanello what his name was, 'and then the guard said, Oh, do you have another set of handcuffs? This is another one.' The voices grew distant, and the call then ended, the AP reported.
Batchelor told 12News the agents did not give the two men reasons for why they were being detained. 'It's terrifying to have men who didn't identify themselves basically snatch you off the street,' he said, according to WDW News Today's account of the 12News reporting.
Their status, according to their friend
According to Batchelor, both men have work permits while they seek asylum after entering the United States about six years ago. 'They came to the U.S. on visas; they applied for asylum, and the U.S. confirmed their applications,' Batchelor said, per 12News. 'They were following the process. They had work permits; they were totally legal to be working. They were paying taxes and Social Security. All their documents were in order.'
Batchelor also told the AP the two men worked as acrobats in Florida and had no criminal record. The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to the AP's requests for comment on the arrests.
'This is just taking good people who have been following the rules out of their lives and out of the lives of those who rely upon them and care about them,' Jonathan Batchelor told the Associated Press. His account of the men's status and of the arrest is the family's account, reported by the AP and 12News; DHS had not commented on these specific arrests when the reports were published.
Where they are being held
Both men remain in detention centres, the AP reported. According to Batchelor, speaking to 12News, one of the men is known to be at the Florence Service Processing Center in Florence, Arizona, and the other was said to be being taken there, though that had not been confirmed. 'They've now been for days without a blanket, a pillow, without anything to lay down on. They're in a room with hundreds of people with no idea as to what's happening,' Batchelor said.
The wider enforcement picture
The Phoenix arrests were reported by the AP as part of a continuing nationwide pattern: immigration arrests have gone on unabated after the Republican losses in the midterm elections, even as President Donald Trump said in a CBS '60 Minutes' interview recorded Friday that his immigration crackdown may have been 'too tough' and suggested sitting down with Democrats. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, meanwhile, said his orders had not changed, writing the day after the election: 'Deportations will continue.' Advocates reported arrests from California to Michigan to Massachusetts in the same period.
For immigrant families in the United States — including Punjabi diaspora families in Arizona, California and elsewhere who travel domestically for funerals, family emergencies and work — the case underlines what advocates have been reporting since the election: that enforcement encounters are continuing at airports, check-ins and in public places, including for people who say they hold work permits and have asylum cases in process. The men's account, as reported, is that their paperwork was in order; no official account of the specific arrests had been published by DHS at the time of reporting.
What happens next
What happens next for Romanello and Baccega will be decided in immigration proceedings: whether they remain detained in Arizona, whether they can seek release, and how their pending asylum cases are treated after the arrest are questions for the immigration courts and their legal representatives. Their friend and supporters say they have been unable to get full information or regular contact since the detention, and DHS had not answered questions about the specific arrests when the AP and 12News reports were published.
Awaaz Punjab will follow this story as official responses or court developments emerge. The central facts in this report — the airport arrest, the men's work as performers in Florida, their asylum and work-permit status as described by their friend, and their continued detention — are drawn from Associated Press reporting published November 11 and from 12News reporting cited the same day; claims about the men's status come from their family friend and are labelled as such.