Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained a mother of four earlier this month after she traveled back into the U.S. with her passport and valid green card.
Jemmy Jimenez Rosa, who was born in Peru but has been a lawful permanent U.S. resident for 33 years, was detained at Boston’s Logan International Airport in front of her husband and three of her four children on Aug. 11 after a family trip to Mexico. Todd Pomerleau, her attorney, claims that she, her family and her legal team were not given any justification for her detainment except a misdemeanor marijuana conviction from two decades ago that had been pardoned.
During her 10-day detainment, Jimenez Rosa was hospitalized twice because she was not given any of her prescribed medications, moved around to multiple facilities, including one only for men, and denied her access to her legal team, her attorney told HuffPost. All the while, her family and legal team struggled to get information about her whereabouts and why she was detained.
Jimenez Rosa was released on Aug. 20 with no charges after a judge vacated her decades-old conviction. However, authorities did not allow Jimenez Rosa to wait inside the detention facility to be picked up and did not notify her husband and attorneys of the details, her attorney said. Instead, she walked through a rainstorm for about a half mile to the Burlington Mall, where a stranger allowed an exhausted and depleted Jimenez Rosa to use their phone and let her husband know of her whereabouts, the attorney said. Her family and legal team then met her at the mall, which was about thirty miles away from home.
The arbitrary detainment, inhumane treatment and careless release that Jimenez Rosa’s attorney says she experienced are just the latest caused by a racist, anti-immigration agenda pushed by the Trump administration.
President Donald Trump and his administration have repeatedly claimed that their immigration crackdown and corresponding mass deportations are an effort to detain “dangerous criminals” and “the worst of the worst.” But Jimenez Rosa has no criminal record aside from pleading guilty to a marijuana possession misdemeanor in 2003. However, that charge was dismissed by Gov. Maura Healey (D), who granted mass pardons for marijuana possession misdemeanor convictions across the state of Massachusetts in March 2024.
Moreover, as of Aug. 10, 70.4% of immigration detainees, or 41,822 out of 59,380 detainees, do not have a criminal record, according to Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonpartisan research organization tracking immigration data.
“People who are entitled to immigration court hearings and due process just end up outside of the country and have been ‘disappeared’ with no respect for the constitutional and statutory rights,” Pomerleau told HuffPost on Monday. “We had a strong concern that she may have been ‘disappeared.’ She was held for several days, no written notice, no access to a phone call, and when three lawyers from my office went there to meet her, [they] were told she doesn’t have a right to counsel.”
A Customs and Border Protection spokesperson gave HuffPost a boilerplate statement when asked about Jimenez Rosa’s detainment:
“A green card is a privilege, not a right, and under our nation’s laws, our government has the authority to revoke a green card if our laws are broken and abused. Lawful Permanent Residents presenting at a U.S. port of entry with previous criminal convictions may be subject to mandatory detention and/or may be asked to provide additional documentation to be set up for an immigration hearing,” the spokesperson wrote in an email.
Regardless, Pomerleau told HuffPost that her detention was “unlawful.”
He brought the case before a judge, who vacated her already pardoned marijuana conviction.
“I was demanding to know why she was detained. I still don’t know for sure, but they suggested, after I vacated her conviction, that was why; that’s the only acknowledgment I ever got,” Pomerleau said of immigration officers.
The attorney added he doesn’t know if Jimenez Rosa and her family will ever recover from the experience.
“I’ve never seen such an egregious set of facts in my career. It was totally unnecessary and uncalled for. There was no legal justification for this. It was inhumane,” Pomerleau said.
Marcel Rosa, her husband, told HuffPost he felt “ambushed” when he, Jimenez Rosa and their daughters, ages 3, 6 and 7, returned to the U.S.
When the family went through customs at the airport, Jimenez Rosa was made to do additional questioning despite having both her passport and green card.
“You would have to be in that room while things were transpiring to really understand how I felt. I came from going on vacation, had a great time with my family, had the greatest vacation that you can ask for,” he said. “When you look at my daughters, how they was, when you looked at my wife, how she was sunk into the chair. Her whole soul was gone. And I just looked at the Customs Border Patrol agent that was making the decisions, and he was acting as if this was a nothingburger, and he was literally destroying my family for no reason.”
Since his wife’s release, Rosa said his family is struggling to go back to normal.
“My wife just consistently keeps crying. She doesn’t want to talk to anyone. She’s paranoid. I mean, everyone’s paranoid, to be honest. I think she’s permanently damaged,” he said.
At the time of writing, the family has raised more than $26,046 through a GoFundMe fundraiser for emergency legal fees and other expenses.
“We went through a lot in 10 days — a lot of unnecessary things that happened. And right now is my main concern is just the mental health of my family, my kids. You know everything happened right in front of them,” Rosa said. “I really don’t know the amount of damage that was done to them.”
He also warned that people who are not U.S. citizens should be wary of traveling right now.
“If you have a vacation planned and you’re not a U.S. citizen, you should cancel the vacation. You should literally cancel the vacation, even if you lose your money. It’s really not worth the nightmare,” he said. “It can happen to anyone. And then once you get caught up in the system, it’s very hard to get out.”