A mother and her three children who were placed in police custody by immigration and customs application (ICE) agents as part of a scan in the small hometown of the “Tsar border” of the Trump administration, Tom Homan, were released after the days of an uproar of community personalities,, Defenders and demonstrators calling for their freedom.
During the weekend, about a thousand demonstrators worked outside Homan’s home in a small village in New York, calling for the family release after their stop last month. The family has not been appointed or spoken publicly.
Jaime Cook, director of the Sacket Harbor school district where the children would have taken the courses, wrote a letter to the community pleading for the safe return of the students.
She described students as having “no connection with criminal activity” and that they are “loved in their classes”.
“We are in shock,” reads the letter. “And it was this shared shock that unified our community in the call for the release of our students.”
The family was placed in police custody during a raid of March 27 in a large dairy farm in the remote city which has a population of less than 1,500 in the county of Jefferson, in the northwest of New York State, on Lake Ontario near the Canadian border. The objective of the raid would have been a South African national accused of trafficking in sexual abuse for children, which they apprehended, customs and borders protection agents (CBP).
But the authorities resumed separately and owned the family, as well as three other immigrants who, according to them, were without documentation. The family was transferred to Karnes County Immigration Processing Center, a private detention center in Texas, on March 30.
Cook’s letter said the family told the immigration judges, attended the court on their assigned dates and followed the legal process.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said that the children were nine, 15 and 18 years old. The New York New York branch of the advocacy group qualified the “scandalous” detentions and their release “a huge relief”.
The family release was confirmed on Monday by local officials, school administrators and the governor of New York, Kathy Hochul.
Hochul said in a statement that she had directly confirmed Homan that “this family – a third year student, two teenagers and their mother – are currently on the way back in Jefferson County. I cannot imagine the trauma that these children and their mom feel, and I pray to be able to heal when they return home. ”
The demonstrations were organized with the help of the Jefferson County Committee of the Democratic Party. Corey Decillis, president of the committee, told NBC News that these raids “occur in the last 60 days across the country, but when this happens in your backyard, I think that is what attracts people’s attention.”
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A declaration of the ACLU said: “While the agents made a raid on the farm, they entered another house on property without a judicial mandate and owned a mother and three children, aged 9, 15 and 18 years.
The New York Civil Liberties Union has published its own declaration saying that the level of “inhuman and cruelty” in this raid and others like them send shock waves through society.
“The scandalous events last week indicate a clear thing when people from all corners of New York see the real human impact of the cruelty of ice and the mass expulsion machine of Trump, they mobilize, have pronounced and fight,” said Margaret Tso du Nyclu, Margaret Tso.
She added: “During the rally on Saturday in Sacket Harbor, I saw dozens of teachers, families, organizers and residents from all over the same thing, singing the same thing:” bring this family home to our community where they belong “. Families should not be torn apart, children should not be torn from the class and people should not be transported to thousands of kilometers from their homes.
Nina Lakhani contributed the reports
