Dolores Bustamante has been in this country for 23 years.
On Thursday, she was given 30 days to decide whether to self-deport back to Mexico. If she decides to do so, supporters said, relaying the federal directive, she has another 30 days to leave.
“Right now, I am not thinking about this. I just want to rest,” the 54-year-old farmworker said in Spanish, speaking through an interpreter a day after being released from ICE detention.
“In the next couple days, I will consider what I need to do,” she continued. “Like I always say, I don’t want to go to Mexico because I have made a life for myself here. When I left Mexico, I left a lot behind. I left my entire life behind. And right now, I have an entire life that I don’t want to leave behind here.”
The U.S. Attorney’s Office has declined comment on her case. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, in a statement Thursday evening, criticized U.S. District Court Judge Meredith Vacca — who ordered Bustamante’s release from ICE detention a day earlier — as “an activist judge appointed by Joe Biden.” The statement recounted Bustamante’s years-long effort to stay in the country despite having received an order of removal in 2018.
“For nearly eight years, she has pursued remedies to remain in the U.S., but her petitions to both the Board of Immigration Appeals and the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit have all been denied,” the statement read. “This is yet another example of an activist judge trying to thwart President Trump’s mandate from the American people to remove illegal aliens from our communities. President Trump and Secretary Mullin are now enforcing the law and arresting illegal aliens who have no right to be in our country. We are applying the law as written. If an immigration judge finds an illegal alien has no right to be in this country, we are going to remove them. Period.”
Bustamante came to the United States in 2003 with a 3-year-old daughter, fleeing domestic violence and what she has described as a lack of options for safety. Her children are now grown, including two daughters locally. She is a grandmother of seven, and a prominent advocate for the rights of undocumented farmworkers.
Her detention last month during a scheduled ICE check-in was not unexpected. But in court this week, her lawyers argued that ICE did not provide her a required notice that her supervised release would be revoked, or a hearing to contest the decision. Little more than 24 hours later, Vacca ordered her release on supervision, and on Thursday was fitted with an ankle monitor.
Bustamante spoke to reporters Thursday via Zoom from her kitchen, in a small house outside Wolcott. Family and friends passed by in the background, as she pressed tortillas that she had been craving.
During the 45-minute exchange, she laughed, retelling the confusion, quickness and joy of her release. But she also struggled through tears, as she recounted her detention: Ninety women to a room with seven toilets, she said, three or four of which were regularly broken. Breakfast served at 3:45 a.m., and being forced to throw away whatever was uneaten after 15 minutes. But the hardest was the stories of other detainees, she said.
“I watch as a mother speaks to her little girl via video screen, and the child, weeping, begs her to come get her,” she said, according to a translation, speaking of separate families and children left with neighbors. “The mother — fighting back tears herself — tells her, ‘I’ll come tomorrow,’ just to calm the child down, even though she knows it isn’t true; she is simply saying it to soothe her daughter. It hurt me so deeply to witness that. Fortunately, I don’t have small children of my own, but seeing that — it hurt me so very much.”
Bustamante also spoke about her faith, and her prayer group in detention.
“Whenever I felt like I couldn’t go on any longer, I would say: ‘My God, do not let go of my hand. I might let go, but You must not let go of me,’” she said. “‘There are times when I feel myself slipping away, but hold me tight — for if You sustain me, I cannot fall.’
“And every night that we did this,” she said, “it gave me the strength to keep going.”
She spent most of her detention in an ICE facility in Louisiana but was transferred back to Western New York before her court hearing and placed in the Allegany County Jail. When told she was being released, she said, she raced to pack her things. She then was left, unattended, in the jail lobby, she said, until being picked up by advocates and whisked to a meetup with family in a nearby store parking lot.
Her reunion with her daughters — being able to hug them, not just see them through glass — was emotional, she said.
“It was such a beautiful experience that I could hardly believe it,” she said, according to a translation. “In fact, I think that was one of the things that kept me from sleeping last night; I would close my eyes and think, ‘What if I wake up and this — this reality I’m living right now — is just a dream? What if I’m actually still in prison, merely dreaming that I’m free?’
“I didn’t want to fall asleep.”
Image: Dolores Bustamante, who received an immigration removal order in May 2018 and lost her appeal, is seeking an emergency stay while a motion to reopen her case is adjudicated. Her case was not considered a priority under the Biden administration but was later moved back onto the agenda under the Trump administration. (Max Schulte/WXXI News)