Deportation amid pandemic
Enforcement continues despite other federal agencies shutting down
She felt the wind get knocked out of her when she got the call from her husband.
Marinés Espinoza had not heard Remy’s voice for five days — an uncharacteristic silence.
The Amsterdam woman had learned he was no longer in the Buffalo Federal Detention Facility, but she didn’t know where he had been taken. When she finally heard his voice, it didn’t sound like him — it was weak and frail.
On that September call, she found out Remy had been infected with coronavirus. He was one of dozens of immigrants who contracted the virus after being transferred to another U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility (Louisiana, in Remy’s case). He is one of thousands of cases highlighting how immigration enforcement has plowed ahead while many government functions have been shut down during the pandemic. So far in fiscal year 2020, there have been 164,455 deportations
across the nation — compared with 187,833 deportations in 2019 and 121,094 in 2018. This year, New York ranks fourth in the nation with 12,271 deportations.
Remy had worked in this small, struggling upstate city for more than a decade as a contractor, raising his two children with his wife, a social worker.
But he was taken into custody the way many undocumented immigrants are — after a traffic stop a year earlier, in which it was learned he did not have a valid driver’s license. With a criminal history from his troubled teenage years, Remy’s past still counted and could not be erased — no matter how significantly he had changed his life. Now the 50-year-old was adrift in frightening uncertainty, locked away thousands of miles from his family during a pandemic and on the precipice of being returned to the country that he fled in fear from three decades ago.
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A scar runs down the left side of Remy’s head, caused by a gun that got smashed into his head at the age of 12 when members of the Nicaraguan government were attempting to recruit him into the military. It serves as a permanent reminder of the turbulence he escaped from in Central America three years later. Remy is one of 120,000 Nicaraguans who fled to the U.S. during the early years of the Sandinista movement.
His family was opposed to the Sandinista National Liberation Front, a socialist party that came under scrutiny in the 1980s for oppression and human rights abuses. He made his way to the U.S. in 1986 with a group of people, including his older sister, in search of political asylum. His mother stayed behind. Once he arrived and settled down in Los Angeles, though, what he found was hostility.
“It was very difficult, from a place I knew and grew up in to a new territory,” he told the
Times Union in a phone interview through a Spanishlanguage interpreter. “Mostly because I didn’t know the language. And school was difficult because there was a lot of bullying, so I skipped school a lot.”
Remy found refuge in a bad crowd, one that made him finally feel protected, yet pulled him toward negative influences. He ultimately was arrested by an undercover officer for selling controlled substances when he was 18, serving three years in jail for his crime.
He learned his lesson, left that life in the past and moved forward — toward Marinés.
U.s.-born and Puerto Ricanraised, Marinés dealt with her own bullying when her family moved to Staten Island when she was 13. Her accented English drew skepticism from her peers: What was she? American or not? If American, was she American enough?
But Marinés persisted, becoming one of the first members of her family to attend college in New York City — where she ultimately met Remy, passing him every day on her way to lunch with her friends.
“Every time I would look at her and she smiled, I liked her,” Remy recalled. “I think it was love at first sight.”
The pair settled in Amsterdam in 2007 with their son and daughter, where Remy continued working as a contractor. Doing renovation work on one house after another, Remy became a popular hire in Amsterdam — and before he knew it, he was working for teachers, doctors, lawyers, police officers.
And it was in Amsterdam where he found the belonging he sought as a teenager. He nearly forgot he was undocumented because of how accepted he was — and when he later was detained, many of his friends and former clients wrote letters asking for his release.
“For the entire time I have known Remy, I have witnessed him being one of the most hardworking, honest, kind-hearted men I know who is always willing to help anyone in need, as he has done with me, a single mother of 5,” wrote Nancy Spagnola, a teacher and swim coach at Amsterdam High School who has known him for 20 years. “Remy would never refuse to help and make time for us whenever possible.”
In more than a dozen letters submitted to his immigration judge, each person described Remy as someone who is ethical, hard-working, loyal and caring.
“I felt like I was just one of them,” Remy said. “It was nice to feel part of the American way, the American values. I don’t know if I’ll ever see them again, and that’s difficult to take in.”
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He couldn’t put a finger on why, but Remy had a bad feeling about this particular police interaction.
It wasn’t the first time he had gotten pulled over in Amsterdam, but officers usually ticketed him, or even let him go.
Something felt different this time, and his first instinct when he saw the officer on the side of the road was to turn around — but it was too late. The officer pulled Remy over for talking on his phone while driving to work.
Remy showed the officer his expired driver’s license. After license regulations changed post-9/11, as an undocumented immigrant, Remy could not renew his license. This officer stopped him in August 2019: three months after the state Legislature passed the Green Light legislation, allowing undocumented immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses, but four months before the legislation went into effect.
“He knew that driving with an expired license was a risk,” Marinés said. “But in the Latino culture, not providing for his family is a bigger risk.”
The officer ordered Remy to step out of his pickup truck in order to bring him to the police station, without explaining why. A call to Marinés from the Amsterdam police station confirmed the family’s worst nightmare had materialized.
Within the span of a few days, Remy was transported to the Rensselaer County Jail, then transferred to the ICE facility located in Batavia.
“I just feared so much for him,” Marinés said. “It was the moment we’d always been dreading.”
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The food was disgusting. The correction officers sometimes verbally abused or physically assaulted the detainees, Remy said. (ICE did not respond to a request for comment emailed Thursday morning.) He was stuck for he didn’t know how long, away from his family. But what really hit Remy hard during his 13 months in Batavia’s ICE facility was the color of his uniform.
Red. Denoting that he was the highest criminal — an unwelcome souvenir that followed him from his troubled mistake during his youth. When he discovered what the color meant, his identity felt tarnished. After his two children, ages 18 and 20, visited him, they asked their mom how their father could be a criminal. The identity marker was embedded in their minds, too.
Then the pandemic began — and soon spread within the walls of Batavia’s ICE facility throughout April and May, with 49 out of about 300 total detainees contracting the virus within the span of one month.
“They weren’t really taking any precautions with the safety guidelines, and they would just bring in more detainees, not realizing that it’s already a very confined place,” Remy recalled.
The Espinozas attempted to protect Remy, who is deemed at-risk because he has hypertension and congestive heart failure, from the virus, filing three different lawsuits — all of which, Marinés said, were dismissed.
Ultimately, immigration lawyers filed a federal class-action lawsuit against the facility and ICE in May, claiming the facility had not been enforcing guidelines to protect medically at-risk immigrants from COVID-19 during the outbreak.
The lawsuit, which was brought forth by the New York Civil Liberties Union and Prisoner Legal Services of New
York, was settled in August, guaranteeing detained immigrants certain protections, including that vulnerable individuals must receive individual cells without roommates, the ability to eat their meals in those cells, biweekly COVID-19 testing, the option to shower in isolation and access to shower disinfectant, masks and soap.
Remy’s appeal for political asylum was denied by an immigration judge, making his order of deportation final, and Remy was transferred to another ICE facility in Louisiana on Sept. 1 — which Marinés learned after three hours of phone calls to 10 different facilities.
Soon after arriving to his new imprisonment, a hammer felt like it had materialized within him, pounding against his head and neck. Then his body temperature shot up. When a nurse went to give Remy Tylenol, other furious detainees demanded his illness be properly addressed to prevent a spread. That facility has seen a total of 172 positive COVID-19 cases to date.
Remy and the others who were infected were eventually taken to a New Orleans hospital to be treated, handcuffs and chains still intact, he said. But when doctors recommended the immigrants remain at the hospital until they recover, the group was taken to an ICE building and placed in an office with no beds or blankets for the night.
A spokesman for ICE told the Times Union that privacy laws restrict them from commenting on an individual’s health care without his consent, but said that detainees are never denied emergency care. Another spokesman for the Batavia ICE facility did not return a request for comment about Remy’s allegation of witnessing physical abuse there while in custody.
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Marinés hasn’t slept for 14 months.
Until she was laid off in November, Marinés was working two jobs to get by, compensating for the loss of her husband’s income: a day job as a social worker at Centro Civico, and then as a therapist from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. Now, she’s working round-the-clock as a therapist.
But she needs her own therapist now. Her husband’s detainment has caused not only a financial toll, but emotional and physical ones as well. Marinés is depressed and withdrawn. She has high blood pressure from chronic stress and trauma.
Within the span of one month, Remy had been to four ICE facilities. He was quarantined at a second Louisiana ICE facility after his hospital visit for two weeks, then transferred to a facility in Texas to be deported Oct. 1 back to Nicaragua.
His body still feels weak from the virus. And now Marinés spends her days trying to figure out how to bring her partner in life back by her side.
Which elected official could she write a letter to? Should she move on from their ninth immigration lawyer and seek a different one? How could she afford more legal fees? Should she leave her children to be with her husband? Should she abandon her husband to stay with her children?
“The immigration system doesn’t understand,” she said. “I feel like it’s an intentional infliction of emotional distress, because the separation of families has so much of a psychological impact.”