Security camera footage of Martinez's June 9 arrest by ICE.
(Updated) Nancy Martinez boarded an airplane with dozens of other migrants Thursday morning. She was allegedly shackled by her hands, feet, and waist, and flown down to Brownsville, Texas.
A month after masked ICE agents seized her in front of her home in the Hill — spiriting her away to detention facilities in Rhode Island, Maine, and New Hampshire — she thought she was finally about to get her chance to appear before a judge in immigration court.
Instead, soon after landing, she and roughly 40 others were put on a bus, driven to the border, and taken to the port of entry by the northern Mexican city of Matamoros.
“When I got to the border, they said I could go now and now I was free,” Martinez recalled federal immigration agents telling her.
But her husband, her 13-year-old daughter, and her 8‑year-old son remained 2,000 miles away in New Haven.
“To be with my children,” she said on Friday. “That’s my greatest desire.”
Martinez, 37, described the emotional, disorienting, and at-times harrowing experience of her deportation during a phone interview with the Independent Friday evening.
Speaking in Spanish, as interpreted by New Haven legal aid lawyer Ben Haldeman, Martinez was on a bus to Monterrey, preparing for a flight to Mexico City.
Martinez’s removal from the United States to Mexico on Thursday took place a little more than a month after masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arrested her in front of her home on Frank Street on June 9.
A factory worker and Mexican immigrant who had been in the United States for 15 years, Martinez was getting ready to take her 13-year-old daughter and 8‑year-old son to school that day when she was boxed in and taken away by the ICE agents. That same morning, she also had a scheduled court hearing for an ongoing criminal case for two misdemeanor charges stemming from a babysitting-related fight she allegedly got into with her sister-in-law. Martinez has not yet entered pleas to those two charges; her next state court date is scheduled for September.
This account of what happened to Martinez after ICE seized her in the Hill on June 9 is based off of interviews with Martinez and her lawyer, Haldeman, as well as with Martinez’s husband and with Unidad Latina en Acción’s John Lugo.
Update: On Saturday afternoon, ICE confirmed that Martinez was removed to Mexico on Thursday.
ICE Boston spokesperson James Covington provided the Independent with a statement describing Martinez as “an illegally present, previously deported Mexican national.” He then referenced her arrest on charges of third-degree assault and second-degree breach of peace in New Haven in March.
ICE also told the Independent that, in September 2010, Martinez was arrested by U.S. border patrol and then deported the next day by ICE for illegally entering the country near Nogales, Arizona.
Haldeman, Martinez’s lawyer, responded to ICE’s statement by noting that Martinez had been arrested once in 15 years “on misdemeanor charges that would’ve been dismissed if ICE hadn’t taken her in the middle of her case. Permanent exile, especially with two US citizen kids and a path to relief, does not seem like a fair, reasonable or proportionate response. And it does far more to destabilize her community than make it safe.”
No Day In Court
According to Haldeman, Martinez was sent to Wyatt detention facility in Rhode Island after she was arrested by immigration agents in front of her home in the Hill a month ago.
The next few weeks saw Haldeman and Martinez try and try to figure out why Martinez had been detained. The federal government contended that she had an order of removal dating back to when she first crossed the border from her home country of Mexico to the United States in 2010. Haldeman and Martinez pushed to figure out if that order was valid.
Haldeman wound up filing a habeas petition in Rhode Island, “essentially saying you can’t hold her without telling us the basis on which you’re holding her.”
The government ultimately produced “something that looks like an older removal order,” and then provided documentation stating that that removal order had been reinstated as of the day of her detention on June 9.
ICE could have put her in “regular removal proceedings” to let her fight her case, Haldeman argued, even after they reinstated the removal order from 2010. They could have given her a chance to make an argument in immigration court as to why she should be allowed to stay.
“Here is a woman with real equities” — including two kids, one of whom has special needs, Haldeman said. She’s married, works, has virtually no criminal history, beyond the March arrest, on misdemeanor charges she had not pleaded guilty to or been convicted of. She had letters upon letters upon letters of support from friends and family speaking up on her behalf.
“This is someone who really is not a problem,” Haldeman said. “She is a blessing to her community.”
He believes she would have had a good case for “cancellation of removal” — if only ICE had let her go to court. “Just put her in regular proceedings. Let her fight her case,” he recalled pleading with the federal government. “They didn’t respond to that request.”
And Martinez never got to appear before an immigration court judge.
Haldeman said that Martinez’s chances at staying in the U.S. became all the stronger when he found out that her husband was potentially eligible for a U visa, which is reserved for victims of certain crimes. A U visa could have extended protections for Martinez that would have allowed her to stay with her family. “It does overcome a prior removal order,” Haldeman said. “If you get a U visa granted, your order is automatically rescinded.”
But after Haldeman and Martinez withdrew their habeas petition, ICE moved Martinez from Wyatt up to Maine. She spent four or five days there, he said. Then, on Wednesday, “I had a missed call from Maine in the morning.” Martinez’s deportation had begun.
Flown, In Shackles, To Texas
Haldeman and Martinez said she was transferred to the Strafford detention facility in New Hampshire on Wednesday. There, he said, she was put in a room that was “freezing cold.”
“It was really cold in part because it was all concrete,” Martinez said. “They gave me a torn blanket, and so I asked for another one. They refused, until a person came on much later” and helped. “They told me I didn’t have a right to make any phone calls,” she said.
She spent the night in that cell in New Hampshire, Haldeman said. Then, on Thursday morning, ICE boarded her on to a plane bound for Texas. (Haldeman said he wasn’t sure if the flight left from Dover or Boston, but the last facility Martinez was held in was Strafford in New Hampshire.)
“I was shackled the whole time,” Martinez said about the flight. “My feet. My hands. My waist.”
She said she tried to remain calm. She took comfort in thinking that they were bringing her to a detention center in Texas. She said she was told that, in Texas, she’d see a judge and be able to continue the process of fighting her removal order.
Martinez said that the plane was roughly half full. She estimated that there were around 70 migrants on board. She said many were from Mexico, as well as some from other countries, like Honduras. She thinks it was a private charter plane that took her to Texas, though there was no clear airline insignia.
Martinez said she was given an apple and water on the flight. “It was really hard to eat because of our shackles. I had to ask someone to open my water because I was thirsty.”
When they landed in Texas, Martinez said, she and roughly 40 others were promptly put on a bus and driven to the border near Matamoros. All they left her with was her clothes and “part of the money she had in her commissary,” Haldeman said.
She is now en route to the southern part of Mexico, the area where her parents live.
Her two children — both of whom were born in the U.S. — and her husband, meanwhile, remain in New Haven.
“There’s a lot of things that you don’t see on the television. Everyone there is suffering in their own way,” Martinez said when asked to reflect on her past month of immigration detention and, now, removal. “They humiliate us. They treat us like animals. They give you things with gloves like you have some sort of sickness.”
What got her through each day and night, she said, was “telling myself that I was ok, that I’d just keep fighting my case as long as possible.” That she would find a way to be reunited with her two kids and husband in the community she has long called home.
She and Haldeman said they are going to continue to fight to find a way to bring Martinez back together with her family. That task is much harder now that she has been taken out of the country.
"A Complete Failure Of Compassion"
Haldeman criticized ICE for not giving her a day in court.
“The whole time they could have exercised their discretion to not reinstate her original removal order and let her seek cancellation of removal in normal proceedings,” he said. ICE could have waited for the U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services (USCIS) office to make a determination on the U visa application, which could have allowed Martinez to stay despite her removal order.
Instead, ICE chose to remove her without giving her the chance to appear before a judge. This was “not only not necessary, but harmful to the whole community and many people who are citizens, including her two kids.”
“The people need to understand, this is something that’s touching our own community,” said ULA’s John Lugo. Lugo helped organize a block-party fundraiser for Martinez last weekend that raised more than $1,800 for her family. He said he plans on organizing more fundraisers for her to come.
“This is something affecting our kids, that’s affecting us,” Lugo continued. “This is something that we should not allow to happen in this country,” especially “without due process.”
Haldeman concluded that ICE had “plenty of opportunities to do the right thing. They could have let her fight her case in regular immigration court proceedings. They could have granted her request for a stay.”
But they didn’t. Instead, they removed her to Mexico. “That’s a complete failure of compassion for someone who has real long-standing important ties to this country.”