One day he was in class at Ferris High School. The next he was taken by ICE.

Two weeks after his 18th birthday, Dylan “Alex” Alexander Saquic Lopez went to a scheduled immigration enforcement meeting.

Instead, the Ferris High School student was taken from Spokane to Tacoma for deportation.

“He is a young kid who came here with goals and dreams. He was just trying to learn how to fly and they cut his wings,” said his uncle Francis Paul Lopez Guzman in Spanish through an interpreter.

An asylum seeker from Guatemala, Lopez lived with his uncle for the past year in Spokane. He learned English while attending Ferris and working part time at a local restaurant.

Guzman, his teachers and community in Spokane are working to prevent Lopez’s deportation and return him to his family and studies in Spokane.

“It’s so unfair that they have him detained when he didn’t do anything wrong,” Guzman said. “He was simply abiding by the laws and the letter he received and went to the check in.”

The teen spent much of the year working with Manzanita House, a local nonprofit providing assistance to immigrants, on his asylum claim. In February, Lopez received a letter requiring he appear at a May 29 meeting at Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Spokane “in relation to an official matter.” The letter instructed Lopez to come to the meeting with the letter and “all immigration documents and IDs.”

Lopez and his family believed this meeting to be a routine check-in. It was not.

According to what his nephew told Guzman after his detainment, Lopez arrived to the ICE facility on May 29 and presented the letter, which, he told his uncle, was grabbed out of his hands and ripped up. Lopez was immediately arrested.

In between the three months from when the letter was sent and the scheduled meeting, Lopez turned 18 years old on May 15.

ICE spokesperson David Yost declined to comment on Lopez’s detention, describing it as “routine agency activity.”

Spokane Public Schools did not respond to a request for comment.

According to his uncle, Lopez left Guatemala last year because he was approached by a gang. When he refused to join, the gang threatened to kill him. Fearing for his life, the teen traveled north through Mexico and presented himself at the United States border in Arizona and claimed asylum.

After a month of detention, Lopez was allowed to join his uncle in Spokane as his asylum case worked its way through immigration court. According to Guzman, his nephew could not return to Guatemala because of the threat from gangs.

“Guatemala has a high level of violence,” said the uncle. “For a teen like Dylan it can be hard to continue their studies because of pressures to join gangs.”

Last fall Lopez was enrolled in Ferris’ English-as-a-second-language program. Without the ability to speak English, much of his first year was spent in intensive language classes. In the spring he joined English-as-a-second-language teacher Clay Elliott’s world history class.

“He is very much an everyday teenager,” Elliott said. “He is a very kind and generous young man. He loves soccer and sports. He brought in stories of the things he had learned in history. He is a really hardworking kid.”

Elliott’s classes are made up of students at lower levels of English proficiency – a majority of them coming from immigrant and refugee backgrounds. While Lopez is the first of Elliott’s students to be detained by ICE, many parents and family members of his students have been taken. Much of the last school year was conducted under an overwhelming fear of deportation.

“This process is putting a chilling effect on these communities and is a very clear and present danger to my students,” he said.

Immigrant students should not be valued less by the school or community just because they were not born in Spokane, he added.

“They are valuable members of our community that make Spokane a healthier and richer place to live. Students like Alex are just as important to protect as any other student in this school,” Elliott said. “I don’t want to think about a world without him.”

Speaking on behalf of a group of Ferris ESL teachers, Elliott is concerned the community does not know that ICE is targeting those in Spokane.

“I don’t think this is an isolated case, and probably won’t be. There will be more of these cases in the future, so I hope that this can be light on it for the community.”

The semester had not ended at Ferris when Lopez was detained on May 29. It was not until the teenager missed several days of class that Elliott learned he had been taken by ICE.

“I found out about his ICE detention through his friends in early June. I didn’t understand. This made no sense. This was a student who was doing everything that was asked of him,” Elliott said.

The teacher believes immigration officials intentionally waited to detain Lopez until he was 18.

Despite his age, Lopez was a freshman at Ferris because of his lack of English ability. His teachers planned for him to continue high school until he was 20 or was able to graduate. Now facing possible deportation, he may not return.

English teacher Shana Ellingburg wrote on Facebook she spoke with Lopez over the phone since he has been in ICE detention.

“(Lopez) wants everyone to know how thankful he is for all of your support. He also wants to tell everyone that he loves you all so much. From the bottom of our hearts, thank you all so much. What an honor it is to be able to support such a wonderful student leader and community member,” she wrote.

These teachers and other community members helped Guzman set up a GoFundMe for Lopez’s legal expenses. The effort had raised more than $12,000 as of Friday.

Guzman has spoken with Lopez once a week on the phone, and the teen has also spoken with his mother in Guatemala.

“His mom will call me crying, and I don’t know what to tell her. If I could take him out, I would do it in a heartbeat,” Guzman said. “He called his mom crying after he was told there was a possibility he would be transferred to a detention center in Alaska because it’s so crowded in Tacoma.”

Through Latinos En Spokane, Lopez was connected with an immigration attorney who represented him in an initial hearing Friday. Lopez was also joined by one of his Ferris teachers. No decisions were made at immigration court, and his case was continued to an individual hearing on Sept. 3.

According to Guzman, lawyers for Lopez hope to post bond so he can return home to Spokane while he awaits his court date. His uncle hopes that means in the “next few days,” the government could “let him free.”