When ICE Takes Your Husband Away

"At eleven minutes to eight o'clock on the morning of January 27th, in Corona, Queens, Manuela, a twenty-three-year-old undocumented immigrant from Ecuador, was about to wake up her daughter when she received a string of panicked WhatsApp messages from her husband, Iván. "Mami, migración got me," Iván, who is also undocumented, wrote. It was one of seventeen frantic texts, punctuated by typos and sobbing emojis, in the course of three minutes."

"He had stepped out of the house only minutes earlier, and was heading to his job with a roofing contractor, when he walked right into a group of federal agents near Roosevelt Avenue. Iván was clearly terrified. He had never been convicted of a crime, Manuela told me, but he did have a deportation order to his name. He'd missed a scheduled immigration hearing, early last year. Manuela said that his hearing date had been changed but they had not been notified; it's likely that his notice to appear had arrived at an old address."

"When Iván was detained, his mind leaped to Manuela and Nicole, their three-year-old daughter, who lived with him in a rented semi-basement room up the street. He sent Manuela the texts so that she would know what had happened to him, and in the hope that she would pay his cellphone bill. It had been due a day earlier, and he was evidently desperate for his phone to continue working so that he could contact her later from wherever ICE had taken him."

Manuela, a twenty-three-year-old undocumented immigrant from Ecuador, received seventeen urgent WhatsApp messages from her husband, Iván, reporting that immigration agents had apprehended him on a Queens street. Iván encountered federal agents near Roosevelt Avenue while heading to his roofing job. He had a deportation order after missing an immigration hearing, likely because his notice to appear went to an old address. The couple shares a rented semi-basement room with their three-year-old daughter, Nicole. Iván urgently worried about maintaining phone contact because his cellphone bill was unpaid and authorities often confiscate migrants' phones, immediately disrupting family stability.

Read at The New Yorker