In the third week into the school year, Roberto López Falcón stood before his fifth grade class at Austin ISD’s Hart Elementary School with a simple promise.

“You have to be good,” López Falcón told his nearly two dozen students before leaving the next day for what he described as a very important errand. “I’ll be back on Thursday and we’ll talk about what you liked and disliked about the day.”

He never returned.

One missed day became an entire school year.

Instead, López Falcón was detained the following day by U.S Immigration and Customs Enforcement, after reporting to what he believed would be a routine immigration check-in. The Cuban national spent 297 days in detention while fighting deportation before he was released during the last week of June.

The detention of López Falcón quickly became one of the Austin area’s most visible immigration cases. An award-winning educator as a first-year teacher the year before, he became the most recognizable face of school district employees caught up in the current immigration crackdown. At least five have been detained, the local teacher’s union has said.

For López Falcón, the next nine months became a test of endurance, measured in books read, appeals filed and lesson plans imagined from inside an immigration detention center.

For his students, and their families, those same months became a year of unanswered questions about the teacher who promised he would be back that Thursday in September.

Why had Mr. Falcón been detained?

Why was there nothing they could do to get him out?

And why hadn’t anybody heard from him?

For nine months, neither López Falcón nor his students knew what the other was experiencing.

It became, for everyone, the year without López Falcón.

100 miles away

While students wondered where their teacher had gone, López Falcón remained about 100 miles away at Karnes County Immigration Processing Center.

Dorm 118. Bed 4.

This became his address for the next nine months as he watched his legal case crawl through the immigration system.

López Falcón entered the United States from Cuba in 2022 and applied for asylum, saying he feared persecution because he had clashed with Cuban government officials over his refusal to toe the Communist Party line while teaching civics to high school students.

His asylum case was denied in October amid record-high rejection rates between 80% and 93%. He immediately appealed, triggering a legal process with no set timeline while remaining in detention.

At one point, López Falcón said, agents at the detention center offered him paperwork to deport him to Mexico, an option he rejected.

In March, seven months after he was detained, a federal judge granted López Falcón’s petition challenging the legality of his detention, clearing the way for him to seek release on bond.

He thought he was free.

At least I’m going to see my students at the elementary graduation, he thought.

But back in immigration court, a judge deemed him a flight-risk and denied him that bail, prolonging his stay.

During those 297 days, López Falcón built a routine to keep himself grounded.

He finished 37 books.

Anna Karenina.

The Odyssey.

The Green Mile.

Mapping the Human Universe.

On weekdays, he worked a shift restocking books in the library. He did push-ups and pull-ups when he was allowed recreation time.

Routine shaped to days otherwise defined by waiting.

“Keeping one’s sanity is pure force of will,” he said.

He tried to focus on the future. During his intermittent calls with his wife and daughter who remain in Cuba, he fantasized about securing authorization to remain in the country and eventually sponsor them to join him.

Even in detention, his mind kept returning to the classroom.

He didn’t just imagine going back. He was imagining becoming a better teacher when he did.

What would it take to get my kids to understand long division? Could I use magic tricks to teach them?

The questions that wouldn’t go away

Back at Hart Elementary, with no concrete information to go on, families played a guessing game to fill in the blanks.

At first, many assumed López Falcón was ill.

Then news of his detention reached parents as information circulating between teachers spread. Some parents, students and colleagues rallied in support of López Falcón’s release, attending demonstrations, writing letters to the immigration court vouching for his character and asking the judge to grant him asylum.

Nothing changed.

As the school year wore on, some parents grew frustrated by what they described as instability in the classroom, including the carousel of teachers consisting of substitutes or staff. For parent Marisela Rodríguez, she also noticed a dip in her daughter’s performance.

The Austin school district did not respond to requests for comment about López Falcón’s employment status and parent concerns.

Students remained haunted by the absence of the teacher they had expected back after one day.

Rodríguez said her daughter Camila, questioned López Falcón’s final day in class over and over.

“She remembers and she cries. She makes me cry,” Rodríguez said, adding the girl was diagnosed with depression since her teacher’s detention. “I tell her that we can’t do anything, that these are the new laws of the government.”

Rodríguez didn’t know whether López Falcón had already been deported. She imagined he had been returned to Cuba and hoped he was at least with his family.

That is what she told her daughter.

Another mother, Marta Leal, said López Falcón’s detention forced conversations about immigration to the family’s dinner table. While her older children understood the political climate and the surge of immigration enforcement, her daughter struggled to rationalize why her teacher had been detained.

“She didn’t understand it. She would ask why he was stopped, why he went to his check-in.” Leal said. “I was explaining, little by little.”

Those conversations became even more difficult later in the school year, Leal said, when her daughter came home talking about a boy at school who had been crying because his father also had been arrested due to his immigration status.

Joanna Dreby, a sociologist at the University at Albany, said middle-grade students, or those between third and eighth grades, can understand immigration detentions and deportations through a sense of power and powerlessness, even if they don’t know the nuances of policy or political reasoning. This means they can sense when those around them are affected by the power of others, or the state.

“Fifth grade, it’s a tricky age for this because they’re aware of the power differences,” Derby said. “They’re looking for the answers and may not feel that they have the resources to respond or to know what to do about it.”

Despite parents’ efforts to reassure their children, López Falcón’s absence weighed heavily on students.

Rodríguez watched her daughter’s routine collapse.

“She would come home [from school] and go to sleep. She wasn’t interested in eating. She would only wake up at night and I’d say, ‘Go brush your teeth and have dinner,’ and she’d say, ‘I don’t want to. I’m going to sleep.’”

Eventually, Rodríguez took her daughter to a psychologist, where she was diagnosed with depression.

Rodríguez felt powerless.

An unexpected release

By late June, nearly 10 months into his detention, López Falcón’s hope began to give way to despair.

Though he told other detainees to stay optimistic, he found it increasingly hard to live by those words himself.

So when his brother-in-law called him during the last week of June to tell him the Department of Homeland Security was releasing him, López Falcón said he was “incredulous.”

A federal judge had ordered López Falcón’s release, a ruling the Department of Homeland Security blasted as the work of “a Clinton-appointed activist judge.”

López Falcón’s first days outside detention were filled with sensations he had almost forgotten: the sound of the wind blowing through leaves and branches and the sight of people’s smiles.

Being out has been “an avalanche of the senses. An avalanche of noise, because it’s so quiet in there that it drives you crazy, an avalanche of flavor when you get to eat,” López Falcón said. “It’s as if the city is a new city.”

After his time in detention, López Falcón is trying to rebuild the life he expected to step away from for only a day.

He hopes to return to teaching in Austin this fall.

Because he was in detention when his contract expired at the end of the school year, he has begun speaking with school administrators and applying for open roles, including at Hart Elementary School, he said.

The errand he thought would keep him away for a day ultimately stole his life as a teacher for an entire school year.

But he never stopped thinking about teaching. He filled notebooks with ideas, imagined new ways to explain math and pictured himself back in front of the classroom.

He can’t get those 297 days back. But he can keep imagining the next classroom, and the magic trick that might convince one more child to love math. 

Emiliano Tahui Gómez is an Austin-based freelance writer.