When Marco Azogue climbed the stairs onto a plane parked on the tarmac of Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, shackled at the wrists and ankles, he assumed the plane was taking him to his home country of Ecuador.

None of the agents or plane staff spoke Spanish. They didn’t answer him when he asked where they were going, or whether they would give him his belongings — his wallet and phone, which he hadn’t seen in days.

“We had no idea where we were going — they didn’t give us an explanation for where they were taking us,” Azogue said in Spanish in an interview with the Reformer.

The plane, it turned out, was headed for Louisiana. Agents loaded Azogue and other immigrants into a van, which drove for several hours into the countryside. Azojue would spend several days in an immigrant detention center in Little Pines, Louisiana, before being ushered onto another plane, this time bound for Ecuador.