28-Year-Old Flight Attendant Spent Six 'Absolutely Terrible' Weeks in ICE Custody After Flying Back from Mexico
The nightmare began — as nightmares so often do — without warning.
“I’m being detained,” Selene Saavedra Roman, a 28-year-old flight attendant for Mesa Airlines, reportedly texted her husband on Feb. 12 after she had returned home to Houston from a work trip to Mexico. “Please call the lawyer.”
It’s been six weeks since that brief message for help, almost all of which Saavedra Roman has spent in federal detention in a facility outside Houston.
Her husband of two years, David Watkins, could only visit her once a week, for an hour, separated by “two inches of glass,” he later told reporters. They often talked by phone each morning and evening.
“It has been absolutely terrible,” Watkins said. “Sometimes you have a nightmare and when you wake up you say, ‘Okay the nightmare is over.’ When I go to sleep, I have nightmares. When I wake up, I’m still stuck in the nightmare.”
According to Saavedra Roman’s union, the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, she was brought from Peru to the U.S. illegally when she 3 years old but has been protected under the Deferred Action for Child Arrivals, an Obama-era program temporarily shielding some young immigrants from deportation.
Saavedra Roman’s husband is an American citizen and they were already in the process of getting her green card when she was arrested, he said.
Her attorney, Belinda Arroyo, told reporters that Saavedra Roman’s mistake was in leaving the country while working a flight to Mexico in February.
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DACA recipients are required to apply for special permission in order to leave the country but, under President Donald Trump, the government no longer issues such permissions — essentially forbidding those under DACA from traveling outside the U.S.
Trump has tried to end DACA completely but has been blocked by the courts.
“They’ve been lost in legal limbo, and it’s getting quite ridiculous,” Saavedra Roman’s lawyer, Belinda Arroyo, said Friday. “Her case is basically the poster child for what happens when you leave these people in legal limbo.”
Arroyo said Saavedra Roman’s decision to fly to Mexico was ultimately the fault of her employer, Mesa Airlines, whom she had informed of her immigration status and had asked if it would be okay if she took the February flight assignment.
Mesa said she would be fine, according to Arroyo.
In a statement released Friday while Saavedra Roman was still detained by ICE, Mesa spoke out on her behalf.
“We are deeply sorry Selene and her husband have had to endure this situation. It is patently unfair for someone to be detained for six weeks over something that is nothing more than an administrative error and a misunderstanding,” Mesa Chairman and CEO Jonathan Ornstein said.
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Ornstein said then that the airline was “doing everything in our power to ask the administration to release Selene, and drop all charges stemming from this horrible situation.”
The president of Saavedra Roman’s union, Sara Nelson, also vowed swift response — saying Friday: “Our union is mobilizing and we will not stop fighting until Selene is returned home and all charges dropped. We will fight with every tool at our disposal until justice is done, Selene is reunited with her husband and cleared of these outrageous charges.”
Within hours, as media organizations and national figures such as Hillary Clinton called attention to her case and her union mounted political pressure, Saavedra Roman was free.
She was released from Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody “pending adjudication of her immigration proceedings,” an ICE spokesman tells PEOPLE.
She called her husband in tears with the news.
“She said, ‘Please come get me. They are going to release me,’ ” Watkins told reporters. Saavedra Roman, whom Watkins met while both were students at Texas A&M, walked out of the ICE facility with her flight bags, according to NBC News.
“Being released is an incredible feeling. I cried and hugged my husband and never wanted to let go,” she said in a statement afterward. “I am thankful and grateful for the amazing people that came to fight for me, and it fills my heart. Thank you everyone that has supported [me]. I am just so happy to have my freedom back.”
Saavedra Roman’s immigration status remains unclear. Arroyo said that authorities tried to revoke her DACA protection while she was detained and Sen. Bernie Sanders said on Twitter she would be facing possible deportation “in the upcoming months.”
According to the Associated Press, she has a court hearing in April. Her attorney did not return PEOPLE’s request for comment.
Though now out of custody, Saavedra Roman is still processing the effects of her detention.
“I think my wife is going to have PTSD for a long, long time,” Watkins said.
The ICE spokesman did not comment on why she was held for so long before suddenly being released as her case entered the spotlight last week. ICE has latitude to make case-by-case decisions about those in custody.
A spokesman for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said they could not comment on individual cases.
A spokeswoman for Customs and Border Protection, the agency that initially arrested Saavedra Roman, did not respond to questions about her case.
