Networks Make Sure Migrants Have Support When They’re Released From ICE Jails

This June, Haydi Torres found herself on the phone with a stranger in Arizona who wanted to help free Ivan, a 39-year-old Russian man, from the San Luis Regional Detention Center, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) jail near Yuma. Ivan had already been granted bond. But by the time an advocate contacted Torres, who is a bond and community associate at Envision Freedom Fund, about Ivan’s situation, he needed more than just money for bond — he needed help making a more than 2,000-mile trip home to western New York.

“They’re sending people to new jails all across the country where you don’t even know what’s going on,” said Torres, who shared the details of Ivan’s case with Truthout on the condition that his real name was not used. Envision Freedom Fund helps pay immigration bonds and provides other support to migrants whose homes are in New York or New Jersey. When Torres was preparing to cover Ivan’s bond, she told Truthout, “I was scared that he’s not going to have a phone, and he doesn’t speak English, and he’s going to get lost.”

Stories like Ivan’s are becoming more and more common as the second Trump administration shuffles migrants through its growing nationwide network of immigration jails to execute its mass deportation agenda. For migrants and their loved ones, being granted an immigration bond and securing the funds to pay it are huge reliefs. It means not only that a person can get out of jail and return to their community, but also that they will have more resourcesand often extra time to build their immigration case.

But what comes after a bond is paid can be high-risk because “the same death-making machine that is detaining and deporting people also doesn’t care what happens after they get released,” Elizabeth Nguyen, who coordinates immigration bonds for the National Bail Fund Network, told Truthout.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) often releases migrants in the middle of nowhere, sometimes overnight, and sometimes without a means of calling for help. Some have died after release, including Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a 56-year-old low-vision Rohingya refugee whom Border Patrol agents abandoned on an evening in February in freezing temperatures on the outskirts of Buffalo, New York. His death was later ruled a homicide. The following month, Daphy Michel, a 31-year-old Haitian woman, froze to death after she was similarly released in harsh winter weather in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, while she was experiencing a mental health crisis and wearing only summer clothes. Her death was also ruled a homicide, and her family has said they intend to sue.

To prevent tragedies like these, bond funds and mutual aid groups have launched ad hoc networks to fund and coordinate transportation home for migrants after their release. To get Ivan home, Torres coordinated with his pastor in New York and organizers in Arizona. Envision Freedom Fund bought him a plane ticket, and a local volunteer brought him food, ensured he arrived safely at Yuma International Airport, and helped him check in and print his boarding pass. Ivan spent the night at the airport before catching the next flight to New York. Torres told Truthout that her organization has coordinated transportation and local support for community members who ended up jailed in New York or New Jersey and at least seven other states, as far away as California.

The Boston Immigration Justice Accompaniment Network (BIJAN) does similar work to support migrants jailed in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, as well as those jailed elsewhere who will return home to Massachusetts after release. Aliza Arzt coordinates transportation for those being released from any of four migrant jails in the region, many of whom were taken from their communities in Maine last winter when ICE launched a crackdown in the state. “The amount of person power and concentration and coordination that we have to do in order to make this happen is outrageous and it’s tremendous — and it doesn’t have to be that way,” she told Truthout.

Organizers in the Boston area, and those doing similar work nationwide, are up against a seemingly willful lack of communication and often outright neglect from DHS agents and others working in the immigration jail system. As an example, Arzt told Truthout that most migrants jailed in the region who have been bonded out are transferred to an ICE field office in an industrial area outside Burlington, Massachusetts, and released from there. But her work is not as simple as arranging for a volunteer to meet the person when they arrive in Burlington, because she never knows exactly when someone will be there.

“They never answer the phone,” Arzt told Truthout of the Burlington office. Rather than a loved one or a volunteer calling that office to find out when someone will arrive, organizers must regularly call the migrant jail the person is being transferred from to ask if they have been picked up and estimate their drop-off time in Burlington from there. “We have somebody call the detention center at about noon and say, ‘Is so-and-so still there?’ And if they’re still there, we have them call about 3:00 pm,” and again at 6:00 pm, she explained. “If so-and-so is still there at 6:00 pm, we have to assume that they are not going to be released that day, and that means that we start it all up again the next day.”

To ensure no one slips through the cracks, a small group of volunteers also waits near the Burlington office for several hours every evening and on Saturdays, watching for anyone who comes out onto the street looking lost. BIJAN launched those efforts after Nurul Amin Shah Alam was killed in February. “We are spending hours and hours on Signal, finding standby drivers and volunteer drivers, and making chats and connecting just because the Department of Homeland Security won’t call us and say, ‘So-and-so is due to arrive in Burlington at 9 o’clock,” Arzt told Truthout. “It’s unnecessary, and it’s cruel.”

Once local volunteers have located a person outside the Burlington facility, they can help them get to a train or bus station or serve as the first link in a larger chain of drivers who help get the person home. Sometimes, Arzt said, volunteers stop on the drive to help a person shop for necessities, like warm clothes in the winter and bottled water, snacks, and toiletries, or volunteers bring a backpack already stocked with supplies.

Some of the drivers Arzt calls on are working through a partnership program with the Boston-based Chinese Progressive Association (CPA). That organization launched a pilot program in March to hire trusted Chinese rideshare drivers who have been unfairly pushed off platforms like Uber or who do not have enough work to drive migrants with vulnerable statuses around the region. It is now working to expand the program. Arzt told Truthout that the support of this small pool of professional drivers — about half a dozen were involved in the pilot program — has been “essential” to the success of BIJAN’s work to get migrants safely home after release. The drivers also help community members get to medical appointments, ICE check-ins, and other necessities.

Yu Sin Mok, organizing director at CPA, told Truthout that the program has built solidarity between migrant communities that are often siloed. She also said it has provided an alternative means of bringing those communities together when many are scared to organize in more traditional ways because the Trump administration has wielded immigration crackdowns to attack organized political movements. “Even though the drivers and the passengers speak different languages and we have to coordinate between Chinese, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, and Spanish all the time, even just going to people’s neighborhoods, picking people up, driving people, [that] does a lot for people to get to see what others are dealing with,” Mok told Truthout.

Nguyen, of the National Bond Fund Network, recommends that people concerned about the lack of communication and support that leaves migrants in high-risk situations after their release should start to raise the issue in local politics. Thousands of migrants in ICE custody are caged in county jails through agreements between ICE and those municipalities. Constituents in those places could demand intervention from their local lawmakers, including elected sheriffs. Nguyen told Truthout those county jails could play a role in “trying to do some of this communication and support people who are being released.”

Organizers who spoke to Truthout also said that those who want to help ensure released migrants can safely reunite with their communities should look for bond funds, mutual aid groups, or others in their area already offering that support and join their efforts. “Families, advocates, and attorneys are very grateful for the transportation support we provide,” Torres said. That support, she added, depends “on the collective of mutual aid groups doing the work of picking someone up, providing housing, meals, and a kind smile to people who have experienced the cruelty of ICE detention.”