What happens after someone is detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement? It’s been one week since agents arrested Alessia Gaspar Da Silva’s husband, Marcos, and a co-worker in Portland. She said Marcos has been transferred three times so far. And in a phone call Tuesday, he said he’s being told he’ll be moved again.
Alessia Gaspar Da Silva was on a video call with Marcos when federal agents pulled him over with another man on Jan. 20.
She said Marcos is an asylum-seeker from Brazil who works as a general contractor in Maine. He had just picked up a man from Guatemala who doesn’t speak English when they were stopped.
Da Silva said she heard and saw the agents, who did not identify themselves, ask Marcos to roll down the windows.
“And they said to him, ‘We are only looking for a dangerous felon who has warrants out.’ He said, ‘Do you have any warrants?’ And he said, ‘No.’ He’s like, ‘Does this guy speak English?’ He said, ‘No, but I can translate for him. He speaks Spanish,'” she said.
Marcos told the agents that his co-worker, Denny, didn’t have any warrants either. Then they asked whether the men were in the U.S. legally. After Marcos explained that his asylum case was pending, Da Silva said agents took both men out of the vehicle and arrested them.
“He’s like, ‘Can I have my phone? Or can you just tell my wife where, where I’m located?’ And I managed to get out ‘I love you’ … and then the hand reached over that was the ICE agent and disconnected the video call,” she said.
Since then, Da Silva and her husband’s immigration attorney have been trying to track him through the Online Detainer Locator System. But he keeps being moved and sometimes his number disappears from the system.
What’s also challenging, she said, is that Marcos often isn’t told where he’s being moved and doesn’t know where he is. Over the past week, Da Silva has figured out that he’s been in detention facilities in Massachusetts, Louisiana and Arizona, where he told her conditions are poor.
“He has no change of clothes. He’s like, ‘We don’t have proper hygiene. Sometimes, some of us are carrying buckets of water to do the bathing that’s necessary.”
Da Silva said when her husband was arrested he only had a T-shirt, so he’s been cold at times. He also told her the food is so bad that he and others have thrown it up.
In a phone call from Arizona on Tuesday, he said he was in a facility — he didn’t know where — in which there were only 20 beds for 50 men and not enough toilets. She said he hasn’t been able to speak to his attorney and calls to her are sporadic at best.
These conditions of detention, she said, are things the U.S. criticizes other countries for.
“We would be outraged if that happened to any of us in their country that was there for whatever reason. And now we’ve turned into that. We’ve turned into exactly what we’ve hated and called other people out on,” she said.
Da Silva said that Marcos is being told he can improve his situation right away if he agrees to be voluntarily deported, but she said he told her he is strong enough to endure this and he is choosing to stay.
This story appears through a media partnership with Maine Public.