He aided a human trafficking investigation in Omaha. Now, he’s facing deportation.

Two weeks before police and federal agents streamed into the New Victorian Inn and Suites to bust an alleged human trafficking ring, Eudis Cuéllar Martínez described to Omaha officers what they would find inside. 

The Venezuelan man told police about six large families living alongside him and other immigrant laborers in the southwest Omaha hotel. He told them that he hadn’t gotten paid for most of his work on the building. He told them that he felt he couldn’t say “no” to his bosses because of his undocumented status. 

Cuéllar Martínez’s remarks — recorded following his arrest on a now-dismissed drug charge — appeared on three pages of a sprawling criminal complaint, bolstering allegations of labor trafficking against his ex-employers, five Indian hoteliers and salon owners. 

Despite his cooperation with police, U.S Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested Cuéllar Martínez during the bust and shipped him to an Iowa jail. As he heads into a Friday immigration hearing without a lawyer, he faces the prospect of deportation to Venezuela. 

He’s part of a group of 14 undocumented immigrants detained during the raid who “were living alongside the trafficking victims” but were not victims themselves, according to the Department of Homeland Security. 

Cuéllar Martínez’s arrest comes as the Trump administration moves to detain more “collaterals” — undocumented immigrants encountered incidentally while serving warrants on other suspects. 

ICE spokeswoman Tanya Román said Cuéllar Martínez’s cooperation with police doesn’t change how the agency handles his case.

“Providing information during an interview does not make someone a confidential human source, and Cuéllar Martínez is not classified as one,” Román said. “ICE arrests criminal illegal aliens when encountered, regardless of whether or not they have provided information.”

In interviews with the Flatwater Free Press, Cuéllar Martínez said it’s unfair that he ended up behind bars after aiding an investigation that nabbed five alleged traffickers and rescued 27 victims.

“In the end, they say that what I told them helped them rescue all those people,” Cuéllar Martínez said in Spanish. “It helped them, but it didn’t help me — all it did for me was get me arrested.”

Hard luck

With his home country in the throes of a prolonged recession, Cuéllar Martínez set out for the U.S. in 2023, leaving behind his wife and two kids. 

The three-month journey, much of it on foot, took the Caracas native through a half-dozen countries before reaching Mexico, where he rode on notoriously dangerous freight trains to the border. 

Cuéllar Martínez turned himself in to ICE immediately after crossing illegally into Texas, he said, but the agency later released him until a court hearing in 2026, where he intended to assert an asylum claim.

He said he didn’t plan to stay in the U.S. forever — just long enough to work for the money he would need to buy a modest house for his family in Venezuela. He took a job as a laborer at an Omaha hotel run by Ketankumar and Amit Chaudhari but left for Denver because he wasn’t getting paid.

Cuéllar Martínez returned to Omaha earlier this year for a second stint under the Chaudharis when they promised him $1,500 for every hotel room he painted and fixed up, plus a place to stay, he said.

He worked on almost 20 rooms and painted other parts of the New Victorian, but after an initial payment, he said, the money mostly stopped coming. A year earlier, he had watched the Chaudharis kick out a worker for complaining about nonpayment, so he tried to keep quiet, he said.

From the outside, it sounds like Cuéllar Martínez was being exploited, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he was being labor trafficked, said Teresa Kulig, a professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha’s criminal justice school.

Cuéllar Martínez said he doesn’t identify as a victim of the Chaudharis. (Kulig noted that it’s common for victims not to recognize their victimhood.) 

On July 30, Amit Chaudhari was driving Cuéllar Martínez to the store for more paint when police pulled them over and discovered a drug called khat and $5,000 in the truck. Officers arrested both men.  

Cuéllar Martínez later told FFP he had no idea about the drugs and thought he was being detained because of an old ticket for driving without a license. He maintained his innocence in a police interview and offered information about his own struggles with the Chaudharis and the conditions in the hotel, though at the time, he didn’t know he was contributing to a larger investigation. 

He remained in jail for eight days on pending drug charges that prosecutors dismissed in late August. 

He returned to his room at the hotel after leaving jail, but four days later, ICE agents arrived at his door. He left the New Victorian in handcuffs.

“In just seconds, everything was over for me,” Cuéllar Martínez said. “I did everything I could to do things right, but it wasn’t worth it.”

Days after the bust, a DHS press release announced the 14 collateral detainees and characterized Cuéllar Martínez as “a criminal illegal alien from Venezuela with pending felony drug possession charges.”

Román said the description was accurate at the time, adding that “regardless of if his charges were dropped or not, he is a criminal who is breaking federal law.”

Cuéllar Martínez said being publicly denounced as a criminal stings since he lived cleanly in the U.S. and has never been convicted of a criminal charge.

When DHS refers to people like Cuéllar Martínez as a criminal, it violates the American presumption of innocence and serves only to dehumanize immigrants, said Juan Carlos García, director of Hispanic outreach for the Columban Fathers.

Román said ICE doesn’t consider Cuéllar Martínez an informant because “becoming a confidential human source requires specific paperwork and a formal process, which Cuéllar Martínez did not undergo.”

Omaha immigration lawyer Rachel Yamamoto agrees that he isn’t an informant in a legal sense, but she said DHS should treat his case with more leniency because of his cooperation with police. However, she doesn’t expect that to happen. 

Under previous administrations, the agency might have let him be released on bond until his next hearing, she said. But under Trump, prosecutors have been ordered not to use that kind of discretion. 

“He’s just a pawn in all of this, and I don’t think the government’s going to give him any consideration,” Yamamoto said. “There’s nothing they need from him anymore, and they have no reason to give him anything.”

It would be unfortunate if someone who helped law enforcement didn’t receive any benefit in his own case, said Kevin Ruser, who runs the Nebraska College of Law’s Immigration Clinic.

Given his experience under the Chaudharis, Cuéllar Martínez could be eligible for a T visa or a U visa, meant for victims of trafficking and serious crimes, respectively, Ruser said.

There’s also a special designation for informants — the S visa, informally known as the “snitch” visa — but Ruser said they are incredibly rare and unlikely to apply to Cuéllar Martínez’s case. Only 200 S visas are available nationally each year. 

Since DHS already condemned Cuéllar Martínez in a press release, Ruser said it’s unlikely the agency will back down from pursuing his deportation because of the political optics.

When word spreads of Cuéllar Martínez’s treatment by the justice system, it will undermine the immigrant community’s relationship with police and cause more crimes to go unreported, García said. 

“We need to trust that when we do help, we’re going to be helped in return or at least enough for us to not face time in jail for doing the right thing,” García said. “If the person that spoke up ends up deported, nobody is going to speak up again.”

Yamamoto said the Omaha Police Department doesn’t have any say in Cuéllar Martínez’s immigration case, and there’s probably little the department could have done to prevent his arrest. 

OPD spokesman Neal Bonacci declined to comment on Cuéllar Martínez’s case. Chief Todd Schmaderer has repeatedly said he wants immigrants to feel comfortable reporting crimes and cooperating with police.

Cuéllar Martínez has spent more than three weeks at Woodbury County Jail in Sioux City, Iowa. He hasn’t communicated with his wife and kids since the bust. 

Ideally, he would like to stay and work in the U.S. for another year, but in recent days, he has become resigned to the likeliest outcome: deportation. 

“Sometimes, I think about saying to send me back to my country. Just tell me and I’ll go, because I’ve never been locked up before,” he said. “I wouldn’t wish anyone to be in prison, because this here is a torture.”

Editor’s note: Abril García, the publisher of Mundo Latino Publications, provided interpretation for some quotes appearing in this story.