On the morning before Thanksgiving, Mor Ba got into his car to go to work but was hemmed in by unmarked cars. Immigration officers poured out and asked for someone whose name he didn’t recognize. Ba doesn’t have a criminal record and wasn’t breaking any laws. He was just months away from his first big hearing in an asylum case he’s been waiting on for years.
As soon as he was allowed to use his phone, he started calling his aunt, Seydi Sarr, a Detroit-based immigrants’ rights advocate. She was in the middle of translation work, but answered the phone when Ba’s calls kept coming in.
“I picked up the phone and I'm like, ‘Boy, it's not because you're graduating early that you're going to wake up in the morning and calling me 25,000 times, what's up?” she recalled. “And he said, ‘Hey Auntie, I'm here at the ICE (office).’ And I’m like, ‘What you doing at ICE?’”
Ba came to the U.S. as an unaccompanied minor from Senegal. He doesn’t have any other family here besides his aunt.
He had just graduated a semester early from Western International High School, a Detroit school with a program for “newcomers” to the U.S. like himself. The 19-year-old was determined to attend college and had brought all of his application materials to Sarr’s house the night before. But she had been busy preparing to host Thanksgiving and told him to come back after the holiday.
By then, Ba was at the North Lake Processing Center, an immigration detention facility in the northwest corner of Michigan.
“The asylum process is supposed to protect you.”
Sarr, who founded an immigrant advocacy organization called African Bureau of Immigration and Social Affairs (ABISA), was shocked to learn that her own nephew had been detained. Not least because Ba is an asylum seeker and was finally a few months away from the master hearing that would lay out a timeline for an immigration court to decide whether he could stay in the U.S.
“The asylum [process] is supposed to protect you,” Sarr said. “Nothing is supposed to happen to you when you file for asylum until you lose your asylum.”
Immigration officers generally didn’t target asylum seekers as long as they engaged with the years-long process of court hearings, ICE check-ins, and abided by the law. That changed after President Donald Trump began a major deportation campaign.
Trump repeatedly told voters that he would carry out the “largest deportation effort in American history,” and that his efforts to do so are the fulfillment of that campaign promise. His administration has repeatedly described those who are arrested as criminals, although data shows that only a small minority have been convicted of criminal offenses.
Even with years of experience working on issues related to immigration, Sarr was at a loss when it came to getting her nephew out of North Lake, until she started making calls to advocates in other states. They told her to file for a writ of habeas corpus in federal court.
“I never heard of habeas being filed in immigration cases,” she said. “And they were like, ‘yeah, you have a little slither, but you can slit in here because we have been filing these habeas and getting our people out,’ because that's the only way right now to go.”
These habeas corpus petitions have forced the government to explain why it’s detaining someone, or release them on bond.
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Michigan Public found a wave of more than 800 people in immigration detention in Michigan filed similar petitions over the last 5 months. Judges ruled in most cases that people were being held unlawfully without a hearing, in violation of their due process rights.
That’s what a judge ruled in Ba’s case.
“I don't want people to go through what we went through.”
After two months in detention, an immigration judge granted Ba a $10,000 bond – an amount that Sarr raised through crowdfunding, since immigration cases require payments up front, in full.
In late January, she and a colleague made the four hour drive to the North Lake detention center to pick up her nephew. She shouted with joy when she saw him, and pulled him in close for a picture in the snow-strewn parking lot.
The time he spent in detention caused Ba to miss his chance to start college this semester, but he’s preparing to enroll soon.
For now, Ba is back to work and is trying to get his life back on track. The trauma of being locked up can make it hard to sleep.
“Sometimes,” he said, “I can't sleep because I see a lot of friends over [in North Lake].”
Thinking of them troubles him because many are still there, and, according to Ba, “They were there for no reason.”
That’s how he feels about his own case; Ba spent months in detention, filed a federal lawsuit, and paid a steep bond only to end up in the same place he was before he was arrested, with the exact same date for the master hearing in his asylum case.
“Getting him home, it's a good feeling,” Sarr, Ba’s aunt said. “[But] I don't want people to go through what we went through to have that feeling.”
For her, the relief was short-lived. One week after she picked Ba up from North Lake, another young person she cares for – her cousin’s son – was arrested by ICE.
Sarr just paid a bond to get him out of North Lake, too.
