In an emotional plea this weekend, the youngest daughter of a Wayne County farmworker detained by federal immigration agents urged people not to look away.
“I wanted to scream, to cry, to ask how something like this can be happening right in front of us, because what is happening to our community is inhumane,” said Miriam Debadts.
Her mother, 54-year-old Dolores Bustamante, is being held at the Richwood Correctional Center, a large immigration detention site outside Monroe, Louisiana.
Bustamante has been a vocal and visible labor rights advocate. Her detention has put a spotlight on the plight of immigrant farmworkers and the removal of longtime residents by the Trump administration — drawing criticism from elected Democrats in Albany and Washington, D.C.
She was detained at her scheduled check-in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement last Wednesday in Buffalo. A federal judge has ordered that her deportation be paused and has scheduled a Thursday virtual status conference to review her case.
“My mother's case is not the only one,” Debadts said. “It's one of thousands, and that's exactly why I can't stay quiet. I won't hide my pain and how I feel just to make others comfortable.”
Debadts spoke to dozens of supporters who rallied Saturday at First Unitarian Church of Rochester on Winton Road in Rochester. Bustamante briefly addressed the group by phone, when she made an unscheduled call to another daughter. She told the group she was OK and thanked them for their support.
Bustamante crossed the border from Mexico more than 20 years ago, bringing with her then-3-year-old Miriam. She was fleeing domestic violence, but her claim for asylum got denied and, in 2018, she was ordered to be deported.
Her case, though, was not a priority under the Biden administration. She instead was enrolled in an alternatives-to-detention program, records show, requiring regular in-person and telephonic check-ins. An app on her cellphone allowed ICE to track her location.
“Generally speaking, there must be ‘changed circumstances’ before ICE re-arrests a noncitizen after a prior release,” her lawyers argued in legal filings last week, arguing that any decision to revoke her release should be subject to court review.
A recent analysis by The Buffalo News found detainees’ fortunes depend, at times, more on the judge they draw than the legal arguments they make. The article looked at decisions to grant a detainee’s release on bond if it was determined they are likely to show up for future hearings and pose no danger to the community.
In a statement, ICE has said that Bustamante "has been afforded all due process to pursue relief," but that ""violating immigration laws is a crime and carries consequences, which includes arrest, detention, and removal from the United States."
Bustamante’s case is assigned to U.S. District Judge Meredith Vacca — a Biden nominee and the first Asian American and woman of color to serve as a federal judge in the district. Vacca was noted as being among the “overwhelming consensus” of judges nationally on what the law says versus the Trump administration’s claim that detention is mandatory.
Bustamante's transfer to Richwood was swift. She was moved to a county jail in Ohio by late Wednesday, then taken out of the jail at 4:41 a.m. the next day and boarded the first of two flights that ultimately took her to the Richwood detention center.
For a time last Thursday, continuing into Friday, neither her family nor her lawyers knew where she was. Bustamante, who speaks limited English, had to ask another detainee, advocates said. Court records show her lawyers scrambled for information into the night on Thursday and only got an answer and a phone call with Bustamante on Friday.
Richwood has been in the news, and on the radar of auditors, for some time.
The sprawling facility in northern Louisiana separately houses men and women. The center, which took in its first detainees in 2019, is privately owned and operated by LaSalle Corrections in partnership with the city of Richwood. While it has a maximum capacity of 1,129, Richwood only began reaching and exceeding those numbers earlier this year.
Female immigrants at Richwood outnumber men, accounting for about 60% of detainees, records show. Nearly 90% of those being held there have no criminal history.
A report last year by USA Today documented issues with poor food quality and quantities at Richwood.
Past federal inspections have found health and safety violations ranging from issues with cleanliness and sanitation to a finding by the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General in 2023 that the facility “restricted detainees’ access to legal visitation and calls,” and recommended corrective action.
Bustamante, in calls to loved ones, has said the food is OK. She has found a faith circle and has signed up to work, mopping, for $1 a day. She is in a holding cell with more than 80 other women, sleeping on bunk beds two or three levels high, she said. Another 13 women arrived the day after she got there.
The women are from various countries, mostly Spanish-speaking. And the stories they’ve told her are “ugly,” she said — including a woman she met who was separated from her 5-year-old daughter, has nobody on the outside, and left the child with a neighbor.
More than 1,200 miles away, back in Rochester, Bustamante’s young daughter told supporters she had “wanted to stand here and be strong and brave ... like she would be,” referring to her mother.
“But the truth is,” she said, “I can't stand here and act like everything's OK, because from the moment that she walked through the doors of that ICE office, I haven't been able to breathe the same.”
