CHICAGO — The minutes dragged into hours on Wednesday night as Jose Gregorio Gonzalez tossed and turned through the night. At 5 a.m. the next day, he was scheduled to donate his kidney to his younger brother, Alfredo Pacheco, who was also restless.

By 2 a.m. the two couldn’t stay in bed any longer and began to get ready for a day that they thought would never come.

“Es un milagro, porque todo estaba contra nosotros,” Gonzalez said. “It’s a miracle, because all odds were against us.”

His mind raced back to the nights he spent locked inside an immigration detention center earlier this year, convinced he would soon be deported, while his younger brother pleaded with ICE officials to let him stay.

Gonzalez was Pacheco’s only hope to keep living after being diagnosed with terminal renal failure. When doctors told Pacheco he needed a kidney transplant, Pacheco stepped up.

“Nunca lo pensé dos veces,” Gonzalez said in Spanish. “I didn’t think about it twice.”

But in March, just shy of a few weeks to begin the process for the transplant, Gonzalez was suddenly arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement outside their home in Cicero. Without him, Pacheco’s condition would continue to deteriorate, putting him on an endless waiting list to get a transplant because of his immigration status. And doctors warned that time was running out.

Gonzalez knew it: If he was deported, his brother would die.

On Thursday, the brothers were admitted to the University of Illinois Hospital, where the transplant surgery was successfully performed. Hospital officials confirmed that Pacheco and Gonzalez were recovering well.

After mounting pressure from advocates and elected officials, ICE granted Gonzalez a temporary humanitarian parole so that they could proceed with the transplant, an unexpected move at a time when the agency is ramping up enforcement. Unlike in past administrations, immigration experts say agents today have less discretion over individual cases and are under pressure to meet deportation quotas, leaving little room for compassion.

Although Gonzalez must return to Venezuela by March — after he’s recovered from surgery — he says he’s deeply grateful to the agent who, as he put it, “touched his heart” and gave him the chance to save his brother’s life.

“Con fe, todo se puede,” Gonzalez said, smiling, his voice quiet and weak. “Everything is possible if you have faith.”

Even through the surgery, Gonzalez wore the ankle monitor that ICE activated when he was released from the Clay County Jail in southwest Indiana.

The brothers now face a long and perhaps complicated road to recovery. The two have limited funds from the few hours of work that Pacheco was able to put in after dialysis over the last few months. Gonzalez was still waiting for the work permit that ICE officials promised.

They were able to pay for rent and Pacheco’s health insurance for a few months thanks to a fundraiser organized by his neighbors in the town of Cicero and a page on a GoFundMe page still open. But the money is running out quickly.

Pacheco said he is worried the two won’t be able to rest or take care of themselves properly after the surgery, potentially offsetting the success of the organ transplant and putting their lives on line once again.

“I have to be honest, we were so focused on making sure that I could get the transplant that we didn’t consider much of the rest,” Pacheco said. “We only have each other and cousins here. The rest of our family is in Venezuela.”

Their cousin, Cristalyn Gonzalez, 38, said her husband took some days off work to take care of their two kids so that she can help the brothers while they’re at the hospital.

“I want them to feel supported somehow,” she said. “We never thought that we would go through something like in the country we thought was going to provide us with opportunities to make a better life for us and our children.”

Pacheco was the first one of the brothers to make his way in 2022. Like many other Venezuelan migrants, he made the trek to the United States hoping to get asylum from political and socioeconomic turmoil in Venezuela, where he served as part of the military during his youth.

By January 2024, Pacheco was suddenly diagnosed with end-stage renal disease not long after arriving in the Chicago area from the southern border.

“My world completely fell apart,” Pacheco said, who at first refused to tell his family back in Venezuela. “They were counting on me to help out over there.”

Gonzalez was already at the southern border when he learned of his younger brother’s brother’s prognosis.

Although agents had denied him entry the first time, he tried to enter again a second time, knowing that he would be his brother’s lifeline.

That’s when Gonzalez was detained for the first time at a Texas facility awaiting deportation, but since there were no deportation flights to Venezuela, he was released to join Pacheco in Chicago under immigration supervision in March 2024.

“That was the first miracle,” Pacheco said. “I know God was on our side.”

Because of the previous order of removal, unlike Pacheco, Gonzalez cannot apply for asylum or any other kind of immigration relief. ICE officials had no comment, citing confidentiality rules.

The oldest of six and having lost two younger siblings to accidents over the last few years in Venezuela, Gonzalez felt it was a blessing to be by Pacheco’s side even if it was only for a few months to donate his kidney.

Until ICE took him once again in March of 2025, just shy of a month of starting the process to donate the kidney — as confirmed by UIC hospital officials — and days before his parole ended.

“It has been a difficult, painful and frustrating experience,” Pacheco said. “The American Dream doesn’t exist. It’s a lie. But at least there are good people in Chicago.”

Despite his illness and uncertainty, getting dialysis every other day for four hours in the early morning, Pacheco worked delivering packages for Amazon. He used most of the money to pay for rent and food, and the rest, he said, he would send to his wife and children in Venezuela.

“They think everything is going OK here in Chicago, and that one day I will be back healthy and with enough money to start anew,” Pacheco said.

Pacheco’s children, a girl, 17, and twin boys, 9, still don’t know that their father has a terminal illness. They also didn’t know that we underwent lifesaving surgery on Thursday morning. They do know however, that their father and their uncle are hoping to return to Venezuela sometime soon, when “things are much better,” he said.

“I now pray that my body responds well and that I have the strength to undergo the recovery,” Pacheco said.

The recovery process is not an easy one, said Hilda Burgos, a longtime community activist who was key to the movement that helped to establish and pass legislation in Illinois in 2014 that expanded access to organ transplants, specifically kidney transplants, and the drugs needed to maintain the transplants, for immigrants with an irregular status in the country.

“Undocumented people, ‘illegal people,’ as many like to call us, were allowed to donate our organs to save people’s lives including us citizen, but if we needed one, we couldn’t get one. We couldn’t even get in line to get one,” Burgos said. “These two brothers are a testament to great work that the community has done to advocate for each other. We are not talking about policies here, it is people’s lives.”

Burgos’ passion to advocate for those undocumented people in need of transplants began after her son was initially denied a kidney transplant he needed to continue living when he was 18-year-old in 2009. After mourning pressure, he got the surgery, but it was also then when she became aware of the “unfair system.”

Shortly after, she joined a delegation of faith leaders and medical leaders representing a group of ailing people in need of lifesaving transplants in Chicago. The group, led by the late Rev. Jose Landaverde performed hunger strikes outside the city’s major hospitals, marched from Little Village to UIC and then to Northwestern. And they even conducted a funeral march for one woman who had died after not receiving a liver transplant.

“The fight for transplants was not an easy one,” Landaverde told The Chicago Tribune in 2014.

While the 2014 law represented a significant step, its initial effect was limited due to several factors. In response, the Illinois Transplant Fund, a nonprofit organization, was established in 2015 to provide financial assistance, primarily covering health insurance premiums for eligible individuals, including undocumented immigrants, needing transplants and their aftercare.

Over the last 10 years, ITF has supported hundreds of patients through the transplant process, including Pacheco.

“Senate Bill 741 was a simple, compassionate measure that has saved the lives of those many of us may never meet,” said Democratic Rep. Lisa Hernandez. “It’s in situations like Alfredo’s and Jose’s that we see the urgent need for our fiscal, health and education policy to not single out, but bring in, our neighbors without permanent legal status and those on society’s margins.”

Hernandez was one of the many elected officials leaders who rallied in support of the Venezuelan brothers, with more than 1,700 other people signing a petition requesting that ICE release Gonzalez.

Most recently, in 2021, Illinois passed a new bill directing the Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services to cover post-transplant care for noncitizen kidney transplant recipients. A spokesperson for HFS said that despite the most recent changes, including the dismantling of coverage for noncitizen adults 42 to 65 years old, “noncitizens who are not eligible for comprehensive medical benefits who have End Stage Renal Disease (ESRD) may be eligible for certain dialysis, kidney transplantation, and post kidney transplantation services.”

Immigration advocates say the brothers’ case underscores the human cost of detention policies and the importance of considering humanitarian exceptions.

“We celebrate not just a successful surgery, but the triumph of love and community over fear and cruelty,” said Erendira Rendón, vice president of immigrant justice at the Resurrection Project, which provided Gonzalez with legal and community support for his release. “The fact that this feels like such an incredible victory speaks to how cruel our immigration system has become. Across the country, families are being torn apart as parents, caregivers, coaches and partners are detained indiscriminately and jailed indefinitely in overcrowded facilities that put their mental and physical health at risk.”

As the Venezuelan brothers recover side by side in a small hospital room, the physical pain is a reminder that their journey is far from over. Although the transplant was a hard-won victory, their lives remain defined by uncertainty, limited resources, fragile immigration status and the looming deadline for Gonzalez’s return to Venezuela in March.

And yet, for the first time in months, they can finally rest.

“Le dejo nuestra vida a Dios,” Pacheco said. “We leave our life in God’s hands.”

Their pain, once rooted in fear and desperation, is now part of a story of survival made possible not by policy, they said, but by people. A community of strangers in the Chicago area rallied around them, Pacheco said, offering the kind of support they never expected to find in a foreign country.

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