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Sixteen-year-old Kerly Sosa Rivero was asleep at home on Detroit’s eastside last month when federal immigration agents burst in. They pointed a gun at her and threw her cousin, also 16, to the ground.
The agents were looking for another migrant. They detained Kerly and three family members, despite the fact all four had upcoming court dates to make formal pleas for asylum from brutal conditions in Venezuela.
Local activists have called the arrests “kidnappings.” But for a Trump administration determined to boost deportations, they were business as usual. The enforcement dragnet routinely sweeps up people who would once have been low priorities.
“My daughter has so many dreams,” Angélica Rivero, Kerly’s mother, told Outlier Media. “She wants to learn English and go to university.”
“They treated her like a criminal.”
Kerly and Antony, both students at Western International High School, are being held at the South Texas Family Residential Center. One each of their parents is also detained at the ICE-run facility. The family’s attorney, Kimberly Renaud of Austin-based Lincoln-Goldfinch Law, said she is asking ICE to let them return home so they can attend upcoming hearings in Detroit.
Just before Thanksgiving, federal agents detained another Western High School student. Mor Ba, a 19-year-old from Senegal, was also seeking asylum when he was arrested, said Seydi Sarr, founder of ABISA, the Detroit-based nonprofit known as the African Bureau for Immigration and Social Affairs. ICE records confirm Ba is being held at North Lake Correctional Facility, an immigration prison operated by the for-profit company GEO Group.
A protest Tuesday evening in Detroit demanded the release of all three teens.
Students also called on DPSCD to publicly condemn the arrests and improve the district’s sanctuary school policy.
District officials didn’t return a request for comment.
The journey to a new home
Kerly was in elementary school when her family fled Venezuela for Colombia to escape widespread food scarcity and political repression, her mother said. After five years in Bogotá, Kerly’s father, Gleiner Sosa, began to see that his limited job prospects could not support the household.
The family made a gut-wrenching decision: Gleiner and Kerly would travel north in search of opportunity while Angélica and Kerly’s two younger siblings stayed behind in Bogotá.
Their three-month journey was both expensive and dangerous, taking them through the notorious Darién Gap in the remote rainforest at the border of Colombia and Panama. Gleiner and Kerly entered the U.S. without legal authorization in summer 2023. They ended up in Detroit, drawn by relatives who live in the area. That fall, Kerly enrolled at Western International High School.
Her dad got a job at a Chili’s restaurant, and soon Kerly and her cousin took jobs there as well. “She has worked since she was a young girl,” Angélica said in a WhatsApp call from Bogotá. “She likes to make money, and she knew we needed the help.”
Kerly’s English teacher, Kristen Schoettle, described an enthusiastic student who “always asks for more information” and loves recommending Spanish-language grunge-rock music, which she knows Schoettle likes.
Now a junior in her third year as a student in the U.S., Angélica said her daughter dreams of going to college — something that was never within reach for her parents.
Angélica said Kerly sounded dejected over the phone as she considered what might happen if she is deported.
“In Venezuela, you go hungry,” Angélica added. “Here in Bogotá, there are so few prospects. She wants a future in Detroit.”
Caught in a dragnet
The federal agents who stormed Kerly’s home Nov. 20 weren’t looking for her or her father. Both had formally applied for asylum, and neither had a deportation order.
The target was an Ecuadorean migrant accused of assaulting an agent and escaping arrest earlier that week. The man, a friend of Kerly’s aunt, wasn’t at the house at the time, though he was later arrested.
When John Morris, chief patrol agent for U.S. Customs and Border Patrol in Detroit, boasted about that arrest, he didn’t mention that the raid had upended the lives of two children. But it wasn’t a surprise to immigration experts, who have watched the Trump administration roll back decades of precedent protecting asylum-seekers.
“While it’s egregious that it’s happening with young people and students, this is something we’re seeing across the board,” said Christine Sauve, spokesperson for the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center. “Many individuals with pending (asylum) applications are being detained.”
This article first appeared on Outlier Media and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
