Wendy Brito, an El Salvadorian asylum applicant and mother of three from the New Orleans region, failed to return from a regular check-in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement last month.
Her family had no idea what had transpired until Brito surfaced on an ICE database, which showed she was arrested in Basile, Louisiana, some 200 miles away.
“She calls me crying, hysterically, saying they arrested and took me,” Brito’s partner, Kremly Marrero, told WWLTV on Wednesday.
Marrero added that Brito has been in the United States for 15 years and came here “to get away from vicious people.”
“I just want her home,” he said about Brito, a volunteer at McDonogh 26 Elementary School. “I need her at home. If not for me, then for our children. I can hold on, but my children need her.”
“Because of our operational tempo with routine, daily law enforcement operations, and increased interest in all our mission sets, we aren’t able to research and confirm or deny many specific cases,” ICE told the publication in response to their reporting.
According to Marrero, officials informed his family that Brito was removed due to “new regulations under the new administration.”
Migrants and advocates report that people are increasingly being detained at regular immigration checkpoints.
Mohsen Mahdawi, a lawful permanent resident and pro-Palestine activist at Columbia University, was arrested last week shortly after appearing for a citizenship interview at a US Citizenship and Immigration Services office in Vermont.
Beginning April 11, the Trump administration authorised immigration judges to bypass the standard hearing process and quickly refuse asylum claims from people whose cases were judged “legally deficient.”
According to The Independent, many of ICE’s most high-profile inmates, as well as those involved in lesser-known cases, are kept in rural Louisiana, where detainees have complained horrible circumstances, difficulty finding legal representation, and a higher-than-average incidence of asylum refusal.