As she made her way home from church in Spokane Valley one recent Sunday, a mother with a toddler and a baby in tow called to ask if her husband wanted any particular food from the grocery store. He had also been at church and had gone home ahead of her, she said.
“ But he didn't pick up,” she told RANGE. “I thought, ‘Okay, maybe he's just taking a nap.’”
She bought the groceries and went home. When she walked in the door, his wallet and phone were on the table, and his church clothes were nowhere to be found.
Did he go for a walk?
She was starting to feel uneasy about his absence, she told RANGE, but went about her morning. Then, someone called her from an unknown number. Because she screens her calls, she didn’t answer, she said.
The caller left a voicemail. It was her husband.
“‘ I think I'm going to be deported,’” she told RANGE the recording said. “‘ICE came and picked me up. Call me back on this number.’”
He was referring to the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement, one agency that detains and deports migrants.
Horrified at having missed his call, she immediately dialed back. There was no answer.
It was January 26, less than one week into the new Trump administration, which was ramping up efforts to deport “millions” of migrants.
RANGE is withholding the family’s names because they felt printing them would complicate the man’s legal process.
The husband is a Ghanaian immigrant who’d been in the United States for 15 years and earned two degrees from Eastern Washington University: one a bachelor of finance and administration and the second a master of business administration. He was an active member of the evangelical church he attended with his wife and their children — an 8-month-old baby and a 3-year-old toddler. He sometimes gave sermons there.
Three days before he was arrested, he was denied a green card by the federal government, his wife said.
The wife — a Congolese refugee who’d been settled through a naturalization program under the Obama administration — and children are all American citizens. She came here eight years ago and met her husband at church.
Though there hasn’t been evidence here of large, wide-spread immigration sweeps like those reported in larger cities across the country, US Border Patrol and ICE agents have been approaching people at home, arresting migrants at businesses in Spokane, and harassing people of color at public establishments. When arrests are made, in some cases Border Patrol detains them temporarily in the Kootenai County Jail — which has a special agreement with the agencies — before they’re shipped to a facility maintained by ICE. But in response to this, the city of Spokane this week reaffirmed its commitment to following Washington law that bars local governments from helping immigration agents enforce federal immigration laws.
RANGE verified that the husband is being held at ICE’s Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma. ICE did not return an emailed request for comment, and its media contact line was not working.
The wife is working with a lawyer to reopen his case so he can apply again for a green card. She said the lawyer wants to wait until the case is reopened before talking to the media. A friend of the family organized a fundraising campaign to fund the legal costs, which you can see here.
In the meantime, her life has been upended. She dropped out of school to take care of the children — now essentially a single mother. During a phone interview, the baby could be heard cooing in the background, and the toddler was asking where dad was.
She feels tremendous guilt from having missed his call the day he was arrested. Now she waits by the phone at all hours of the day for news from her husband.
“It's so terrifying when I'm here waiting for him to call because of the stories he told me about what is happening in there,” she said. “They just take people. They don't even let you get the phone to let your family members know, [to say] ‘They are taking me now.’ They were just at the house and they were like, ‘You're coming with us right now.’”
After he was arrested, she scrambled to hire the lawyer to make sure ICE would not simply deport him without notifying her. She felt that legal representation could stop the agency from doing that.
“Some of them say they are too busy,” she said of the lawyers she reached out to. “There are a lot of cases now. Some of them will give you next month. Some of them will say, ‘I need two weeks.’ But I needed somebody right there. When they take you to Tacoma and you don't have a lawyer, they can deport you any time. They could send him back to Ghana at any time.”
ICE sent her a letter informing her that in 2015, the federal government issued a deportation order against her husband, but the letter didn’t say why was being deported, she said. Before she got the letter, she said, they didn’t know the order existed.
She pleaded for people to pay attention to how Trump’s deportation efforts are affecting families.
“People need to understand these things are real, and they are affecting children,” she said. “They're really affecting parents.”
