James Goodman
Supporters in Rochester, New York, write letters to Abigail Hernandez, who has remained in an immigration detention center for over twelve months.
On May 9, Abigail Hernandez, an immigrant who has been held in a federal detention center in New York for more than a year, requested a stay of deportation. According to her supporters, soon after Immigration and Customs Enforcement got wind of this, Hernandez was taken from the detention facility and put on a flight bound for the southern border.
That happened during the early morning hours of May 13, four days after she mailed her request to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Her legal aid lawyer, Hannah Vickner Hough, learned that she was headed to Brownsville, Texas, for deportation, and by the end of the day had been rerouted to LaSalle ICE Processing Center in Jena, Louisiana. A stay had been granted, according to Michael Marszalkowski, the lawyer now handling her federal appeal.
The twenty-two-year-old Hernandez is mentally disabled, and has not lived in Mexico since she left at age three.
After about a week, Hernandez was transferred back to the facility in Batavia, New York, while the Second Circuit reviews her asylum claim.
The twenty-two-year-old Hernandez, the subject of an earlier report by The Progressive, is mentally disabled, and has not lived in Mexico since she left at age three. She would be a vulnerable stranger in a strange land.
“I don’t know anybody in Mexico. I’ve never been there,” says Hernandez, who has no memory of her homeland.
[Update: On July 26, a federal judge ruled that an immigration judge wrongly decided that Hernandez should remain in immigration detention while her appeal is being considered. The judge ordered another bond hearing in immigration court within ten days, and if the government could not prove Hernandez is dangerous, she should be released on bond. The new bond hearing was held but on August 5, Immigration Judge Philip J. Montante, Jr. denied Hernandez bond.]
Rita Gaither
Abigail Hernandez (r) at a community service event in Rochester, New York.
Hernandez’s case provides a window into the chaotic experience of asylum-seekers and others caught in ICE’s system, which can pluck a detainee from one of its facilities in the early morning hours without any notification to family, friends, or lawyers.
But what happened to her is hardly exceptional. According to a report from the Center for Human Rights at the University of Washington, ICE operates “a sprawling semi-secret network of flights on privately-owned aircraft,” deporting 8,078 people between 2011 and 2018 prior to completion of their legal proceedings.
Hernandez recounts the horrors of May 13, which began with an ICE officer awakening her at 4:30 in the morning. She says she was handcuffed and shackled, put on a bus with other detainees, and herded on an ICE flight. All that Hernandez knew was what an ICE officer had announced: “We’re going South.”
“I thought my future would be over,” says Hernandez.
Hernandez has long lived in Rochester, New York, with her mother and stepfather. It is here that she also has a devoted network of supporters.
The core group of about ten includes her longtime teacher and confidant, Rita Gaither, and a couple of members of the Rochester Board of Education, along with women who felt compelled to help Hernandez, based on what they knew about her case and their concern for her special needs.
Her supporters are devoted to Abby, as they call her, noting her resiliency. Hernandez’s inspirational determination to stay in the United States has itself become a focal point for resistance.
“Two or three years ago, as a school board member, I interacted with Abby.” says supporter Mary Adams. “Her limited ability to understand was very clear.”
That meant little to the Trump Administration, which revoked Hernandez’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, status after she posted a threat on the Facebook page of her former high school. Written the day after the school shooting in Parkland on February 14, 2018, Hernandez said, “I’m coming tomorrow morning and I’m going to shoot all ya bitches.”
Gaither, who talked to Hernandez on an almost daily basis for many years, believes she had no intention of carrying that out. Nor, Gaither says, does she have the ability to do so. She and other supporters have visited Hernandez on a regular basis since she was detained.
What’s more, the criminal case against Hernandez for making the threat was resolved with Hernandez pleading guilty to a misdemeanor. Hernandez won’t discuss her motivation, other than to say, “I deserve a second chance.”
But Immigration Judge Steven Connelly, who is based in Batavia, discounted Hernandez’s mental disability and ordered her deported last fall.
The fact that her stepfather and mother know little English has made the supporters’s role all the more important. “She only went to school,” notes Gaither. “And when she went somewhere else, she was always with me—to the hairdresser, wrestling, Clergy on Patrol, and Women Helping Girls.”
Gaither says that Hernandez would be at great risk of being taken advantage of if deported to Mexico.
While Hernandez’s supporters heard she was put on a plane heading to the southern border, they quickly sprang into action.
They worked to keep tabs on her whereabouts in ICE’s difficult-to-navigate tracking system. They also contacted support groups on the Mexico side of the border. They shared photos of Hernandez on social media. And they arranged for someone to be on patrol, on a bicycle, looking for her.
Two of her Rochester supporters even tried to fly Brownsville to assist her, but found the one flight that could get them there was booked that day.
“I packed furiously, made arrangements for my daughter’s care and coverage for classes I was to teach that day, so I could fly to Brownsville and go over the border to Matamoros to look for her,” says Rosalind Walker, who has been involved in various community outreach ministries.
The group, Casa del Migrante San Juan Diego y San Francisco de Asís, on the Mexico side of the border with Brownsville, was also contacted, says Grania Marcus, a Rochester immigrant rights activist who used to do advocacy work at the border.
The treatment of Hernandez made her supporters realize that even the most vulnerable can’t escape ICE’s deportation network. “I have so much anger toward what the administration is doing—the way people are treated,” says Deborah Wachspress.
On April 30, the Board of Immigration Appeals ruled against Hernandez. With the help of another detainee, Hernandez wrote her May 9 request for a stay of deportation. The request, she says, was handed to an officer at the Batavia facility in a stamped envelope, addressed to the Second Circuit in New York City.
The mailing, along with a subsequent visit to Hernandez by a Buffalo immigration lawyer, Anne Doebler, apparently tipped off ICE that Hernandez was not done fighting deportation.
Before boarding a bus bound for the airport, Hernandez gave a detainee a note with telephone numbers to call to alert her supporters in Rochester that officials were moving her. As soon as the phones were turned on at the Batavia facility, Gaither received a call from the detainee, saying: “They took Abby. They took Abby.”
Adams attests to difficulties trying to track Hernandez. After numerous attempts, she finally reached a deportation officer who initially said Hernandez was no longer in the tracking system. With Adams persisting, the officer said Hernandez was in Harrisburg, possibly on her way to Texas.
Hernandez apparently beat the clock. The stay of deportation, according to her appeals lawyer Marszalkowski, was granted by the Second Circuit on May 13. And once that happened, ICE was prohibited from deporting until there was a ruling on her appeal.
ICE did not respond to repeated requests for an interview. According to Marszalkowski, ICE should never have put her on a flight south. “Common sense and fairness let you know she should have stayed in Batavia,” he says.
In her appeal, Marszalkowski is arguing that Hernandez would face persecution if deported. She should qualify for protection under asylum law, he says, because of her intellectual disabilities and lack of protection by family members in Mexico.