Wayne County farmworker Dolores Bustamante must be immediately released from ICE detention, U.S. District Court Judge Meredith Vacca ordered on Wednesday.
The 54-year-old grandmother and worker rights advocate was detained last month during a scheduled check-in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
In court on Tuesday, her lawyers argued the agency failed to provide her with required notice and a hearing on why it had decided to revoke her supervised release. The government was unable to produce any documentation of who made the decision to do so, and when.
Vacca ordered that Bustamante must be placed back on supervised release. And should ICE again seek to detain her, the judge wrote, it first must provide her written notice that it is revoking her release, with “an enumerated reason and by an individual with the proper authority,” court records state. Bustamante then must receive “an informal interview promptly after her return to custody, should that occur, to provide her an opportunity to respond to the reasons for revocation stated in the notification.”
Bustamante and her youngest daughter came to the United States from Mexico in 2003, fleeing domestic violence. She moved to New York in 2012, working on apple farms, and has been on supervised release since receiving a final order of removal in 2023. Her advocacy on behalf of undocumented farmworkers, along with her personal immigration battle, has garnered considerable media coverage over the years, including in the days leading up to her detention.
Vacca ordered federal authorities to confirm, by 4:30 p.m. Thursday, that Bustamante has been released. For the past month, Bustamante has been in an ICE detention facility in Louisiana but was brought back to Western New York for her court hearing, and currently is in the Alleghany County Jail.
