Arrested by ICE four days before her wedding, she’s asking a judge to free her

It was far cry from the weekend wedding they had planned, surrounded by friends and family.

Instead, it was a small affair at the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma where one of the women was detained.

The detained woman, a longtime resident of Kent, Washington, and her partner tied the knot on June 28. The woman’s lawyer, stepson, and brother attended as official witnesses.

Outside the detention center, the woman’s wife described it as a bittersweet moment to finally be in the same room together after more than a month apart, with visits through a glass partition at the detention center.

“It was emotional and … it was hard at the same time, like we have to wait for this day just to be able to hug each other,” the woman’s wife said. The wife is a U.S. citizen.

They’ve been together more than 12 years, jointly raising a teenage son. KUOW is not naming the women because they expressed concerns that being named could jeopardize their case.

In May, the couple was four days from getting married when immigration agents arrested the woman during a raid at a beverage company in Kent, where she’d worked for years. ICE arrested 17 workers during the raid; a search warrant shows officials had probable cause to search 41 workers suspected of presenting false green cards or work authorizations.

The woman came to the U.S. from Sinaloa, Mexico, in 2010 on a tourist visa, which she overstayed.

Xiomara Urán, an attorney with the Northwest Immigrants Rights Project who is representing the woman, said her client has several legal options to pursue. One is a family petition through her spouse, now that she is married.

Uran said it took weeks of logistics and paperwork to coordinate the wedding ceremony in detention; weddings there are somewhat rare.

The woman plans to make a request on Wednesday morning to be released on bond so that she can pursue her case outside of detention.

“I don't see how the government can argue that she's a flight risk, because she has three possible ways of regularizing her status,” Urán, the attorney, said. “It would be difficult for the government to argue that she's a risk to the community when she has not had a single ticket in over a decade.”

The woman was convicted of driving under the influence in 2009. She served one day in jail as it was a first offense.

Tacoma has become one of the toughest courts in the country for bond approvals, according to data from the Transactional Records Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. The Northwest Immigrant Rights Project has also filed a lawsuit to challenge how bond hearings are handled in Tacoma, claiming the judges are using an unusually narrow interpretation of their jurisdiction to grant bond.

The wife said they are nervous about the bond hearing but trying to stay positive. That focus on the future was apparent during the spontaneous, personal vows they said to each other during their detention center ceremony.

“I said this is like a test for us, but if we are going through this then we can accomplish many other things,” the wife recalled. “She said that once she's able to get out, she will always be with us and take care of us like she did until she was taken from us.”