Lilian Calderon, a Rhode Island mom who was taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) last month, is free. Calderon was detained after she and her husband, a U.S. citizen, had gone to a meeting with immigration officials in their ongoing attempts to adjust her status. “It was just a routine interview,” Calderon later said. “We didn’t think anything of it.” But under Donald Trump, these routine meetings have become anything but routine, and she was arrested.
While a judge blocked her imminent deportation, she continued to remain in ICE custody and separated from her family. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a suit, “arguing that Calderon’s continued detention violated her constitutional right to due process and federal immigration laws and regulations.” By Tuesday evening, she was finally reunited with her loved ones:
“I am so happy to see my husband and children again and to be out of immigration detention, which was a terrible ordeal for our family,” Lilian Calderon said in a statement released by the American Civil Liberties Union after her release Tuesday from detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement authorities in Boston. “What the government is doing to my family, and to so many others, is simply wrong.”
“Everyone thinks that when you get detained by ICE its because it’s either drugs or violence or crime, like it has to be crime related,” Calderon told UPRISE RI. “But it’s not true … so for you to think that I had to be picked up because it was either drug related or violence or some sort of crime, that’s a misconception. [People] say to me, ‘You shouldn’t have gone through the system,’ but I say, ‘No, I’m trying to do the right thing.’ But it’s a broken system.”
Gabriela Domenzain, head of Roger Williams University’s Latino Policy Institute, said that “there are many, many tears of joy being shed in Rhode Island tonight. While Lilian was in prison, hundreds of Rhode Islanders came together in solidarity and support of a woman they’d never met. This was the first time many experienced how our immigration system rips apart families.”
Calderon said that despite being transferred to an ICE unit, she struggled to get answers regarding her case and why she had been detained in the first place.
Calderon told UPRISE RI that the prison she was in has only two caseworkers for the entire unit, and when she was finally able to speak to one, they said, “You know, I don’t know anything about immigration. I can’t help you. I don’t know what to tell you. We’re here because we work for the jail and we have to be here but I can’t help you”:
“The ladies in the ICE Unit kept asking me, ‘Why are you here?'” said Lilian. “Even the [correctional] officers were asking, ‘Why are you ICE? Why are you here?’ No one understood.
“Every time I got moved they would say to me, how are you ICE? Is it drugs? And I was like, no, it’s not. And that’s a problem because everyone thinks that when you’re detained you’re detained because of drugs.
“They don’t tell you that the women detained in that unit are moms and grandmothers and they’re daughters,” continued Lilian. “And while I was there there were a few other women who were also there because they went to their immigration interviews with their husbands who are citizens and they have citizen children and they were detained as well. With no reason, no explanation…
“Some of them have been there a month, two months. I met a lady that was there for three years. She was shuffled from one place to another place and finally to where we were. She didn’t know what her situation was she was just waiting for her release.”
Calderon also said that while the prison offered classes and programs for inmates seeking help regarding addiction, for example, there was nothing on immigration. “I said to one of the caseworkers, ‘Do I have to pick a class?’ I really don’t want to go outside of my unit because I feel safe where I am,” Calderon said, adding that many of the women in the unit served as support for each other. But the caseworker threatened Calderon with solitary if she didn’t comply.
Meanwhile, Calderon’s family was struggling in her absence. Her husband “had to juggle work and child care solo and the children began seeing a psychologist to deal with the stress of their mother being away. Their father told them only that their mother was at work.” Six million kids have at least one undocumented family member. Research shows anti-immigrant policies can “cause children emotional distress and economic insecurity in early childhood interfere with their healthy development and derail their future success.”
While Calderon is now free following action from the ACLU, her case remains ongoing. “In this case, the government’s left hand beckoned her forward, and its right hand grabbed her,” said Steven Brown, executive director of the ACLU of Rhode Island. “This is yet another local example of families torn apart and lives disrupted for no legitimate immigration enforcement purpose. We are glad that she is able to return to Rhode Island and her family.”
Domenzain said that because more than 20 percent of Latinos in the state are undocumented, communities must stay alert and keep fighting. “How we respond as a state matters,” she continued. “What our leaders say during these times matters. And Rhode Islanders said loud and clear that we are a state that leads with humanity and solidarity.”