LAFAYETTE, LOUISIANA —
On Wednesday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained a U.S.-born woman at a checkpoint in a residential area of Lafayette.
The young mother of four, who is Spanish-speaking, was already anxious as she approached the checkpoint that morning, because her baby daughter was spiking a high fever. At the agents’ request, she showed her ID and social security card. But they called it fake, and she was detained, handcuffed, shackled at the ankles, interrogated, and ultimately transported to South Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Basile. ICE held here there for about five hours, away from her sick child, and released the woman around 2 a.m. after a lawyer intervened on her behalf.
The woman asked that her name not be published for fear of retaliation against herself and her family.
Her ordeal began early Wednesday morning, as her 7-year-old daughter was waiting for the school bus, when she was alerted to the presence of ICE agents at the entrance to her apartment complex. She wasn’t worried for herself — she was born in Colorado — but she feared that ICE might stop her daughter, who is Mexican-American.
But when the mother approached the checkpoint on foot around 8 a.m., a deputy from the Lafayette Sheriff’s Office waved her over and demanded identification. She presented the deputies with her state-issued Louisiana ID and Social Security card, which she keeps on her at all times.
At first, she wasn’t worried. “I wasn’t hiding anything,” she explained through a translator. “I’m not doing anything illegal.”
But the deputies looked and insisted that both her ID and Social Security card were fake. They asked her where she was born. She answered their questions, but they soon called over ICE agents, who also accused her of providing a forged ID, she says.
“He said, ‘Who is making these IDs in numbers for you guys? Because I also have another one from another person, and it looks just like this. So they are fake. Yours is fake too.’”
When she tried to speak up and explain, they told her to stay silent.
Detained and interrogated
For the next 20 minutes, she said, the agents had her wait. She saw them talking on the phone — she wasn’t sure if the call was about her — but they kept coming back saying the ID was forged.
Agents then detained her, put her into a white unmarked vehicle, and took her to what appears to be an unlisted U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) field office in Lafayette. While it is not listed on the USCIS website, two other Lafayette residents confirmed that ICE brings detained people to that office, and that it has government seals on its signage and framed photos of President Trump and Vice President JD Vance on the wall.
There, she was handcuffed and shackled at the ankles. Agents interrogated her, demanding that she name the person who “did these fake papers for you.”
The woman pleaded with them to contact authorities in Colorado to verify her Social Security card. She even provided additional paperwork from her phone, including tax documents for the IRS.
Her ordeal illustrates how ICE’s aggressive new policies and warrant-less arrests have led to what legal experts say are an alarming pattern of rights violations against both immigrants and U.S. citizens.
The woman was incorrectly assigned an Alien Registration number in 2022 when she entered the U.S. from Mexico and presented a Mexican ID at the border.
At the time, she was appointed a lawyer who told her that since she was a U.S. citizen, her immigration case would be dropped. Yet somehow, the case appears to have proceeded without her knowledge or involvement. An immigration judge in New Orleans issued a final order of removal in January 2024.
The Lens reviewed a copy of the woman’s ID and was able to quickly confirm its authenticity by entering her name and license number into the state’s official digital credential app, LA Wallet. The app brought up an image of the same ID with her photo, full name, and date of birth, and identifies the ID as valid.
The Lens has also reviewed a copy of the woman’s birth certificate, which lists the same full name and date of birth, and her place of birth in Colorado.
Accusations of forgery seem to have become part of the ICE playbook, especially with Latino people, as recounted by other U.S. citizens who have been detained. “They kept telling me I’m a criminal because I’m showing false papers, and that my penalty was going to be much higher because I’m hiding the person who created them,” the woman said.
That same day, one of the woman’s neighbors began working on her release. The neighbor, who also asked his name be withheld for safety reasons, had watched a sheriff’s bus and unmarked cars without plates begin setting up what appeared to be a checkpoint around 6 a.m. on Wednesday, he said. The checkpoint was at the only entrance to their apartment complex, where most residents are Black and Hispanic, he said.
Few residents wanted to drive through a law-enforcement checkpoint, he said. “People were scared to go to work.”
After hearing that the woman had been wrongly detained, the neighbor, who is also U.S.-born and Latino, sprang into action. He picked up the woman’s birth certificate from her distraught mother, who was “trying hard not to cry in front of her grandchildren,” he said.
He then made a copy of the birth certificate and brought that to the ICE office. But that still wasn’t enough for the agents. “They said, ‘Oh, we need the original copy…because this could be AI.’”
The neighbor tried to convince them, but stopped when an agent raised his voice in anger and said that they would not be releasing the woman.
Taken to Basile in shackles
After hours of questioning, ICE transported the shackled young mother to Basile, about an hour away, arriving around 6 p.m. She was processed and booked into the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center, which is operated by the private prison company GEO Group.
There she was put inside a shared detention area with people awaiting deportation. “I thought of my kids,” she said. “And my little five-month-old, because she had a high fever.” Before ICE took her, she’d wanted to take the baby to the doctor. Her mother, who was now watching the children, was frightened and would be unable to bring the baby to the hospital if the fever worsened.
“The whole time that I was there, I was just thinking about my kids and being afraid for my little one,” she said. While she was hopeful that she would be released soon, she knew some damage could never be undone. “If something were to happen to my five-month-old, they [ICE] wouldn’t be able to bring her back,” she said.
Immigration attorney Bridget Pranzatelli was able to secure the woman’s release by sending identification documents to ICE over email. Around 2 a.m., about 18 hours after she’d first encountered the deputies, the woman was released. ICE agents drove her back to Lafayette.
She never got an apology, nor an explanation. ICE kept her Social Security card. They also told her she cannot leave the state, she says. Though immigration courts have no jurisdiction over U.S. citizens, ICE officers gave her instructional documents, also reviewed by The Lens.
One form, labeled “Order of Supervision,” instructs her to report back to ICE in person next month. The other document is a letter about her release, saying that “ICE will continue to make efforts to obtain your travel document that will allow the United States government to carry out your removal.”
The woman plans to go to the ICE check-in accompanied by an immigration lawyer to clarify to the agency that she is in fact a U.S. citizen.
The ordeal suggests serious gaps in ICE’s ability or willingness to investigate people’s immigration status before arresting them, amid what has long been called a “detain first, investigate second” approach. “There is just no justification for a U.S. citizen to be in immigration customs enforcement detention,” Pranzatelli emphasized.
In jurisdictions like Lafayette with 287(g) agreements, “where the local law enforcement ends up getting deputized to do these federal immigration enforcement functions,” that risk of unjustified detentions is heightened, Pranzatelli said. “No one along that chain is doing the due diligence necessary to be sure this sort of thing doesn’t happen.”
Local law enforcement often lacks immigration expertise
Lafayette Parish Sheriff Mark Garber has praised his department’s partnership with ICE — specifically noting that it would help his deputies quickly determine a person’s immigration status. But there is little to back his claims that the partnership enhances public safety. Research instead shows that involving local law enforcement in federal immigration matters puts public safety at risk by making undocumented victims less likely to report crimes, for fear of being asked about their immigration status.
That should matter in Lafayette Parish, in the heart of Cajun country, which has become the fastest-growing place in the state thanks to both domestic and international migration, Census data shows. Lafayette’s growth makes it an outlier in Louisiana, which is grappling with severe population decline.
But in December, the Lafayette sheriff’s office entered a 287(g) agreement with ICE, which empowers deputies to detain individuals suspected of immigration infractions, even if they aren’t suspected of having committed a crime. Over the last year, sheriff’s offices across the state have signed agreements with ICE. Sheriff Garber opted to partner with ICE under the “warrant service officer and task force models,” a particularly aggressive form of the partnership, which allows specially trained deputies to arrest people suspected of immigration offenses, according to The Current, an online newsroom in Lafayette.
The task force program has been criticized for encouraging racial profiling. The 287(g) agreement has faced significant pushback from religious and civil rights leaders and sparked protests in Lafayette.
The task force program is what allowed sheriff’s deputies to work alongside ICE agents to create the checkpoint that resulted in the woman’s arrest.
When reached for comment Friday, Staff Sgt. Chris Cormier of the Lafayette Parish Sheriff’s Office confirmed that the “interaction” took place. But he incorrectly maintained that the woman’s ID was fake. Some of his claims about other key details were also inconsistent with The Lens’ findings.
“She approached our deputies with her phony ID,” Cormier said. “She approached us, okay? She approached us. She had a fake ID.” When asked how deputies made that determination, he said that “our databases will tell us that it’s fake or not.”
When asked why deputies then handed her over to ICE, Cormier said it was “because she couldn’t prove her citizenship.” He claimed that “a lot of people a lot of times have forged IDs, and they try to bamboozle us.” Since Lafayette is a college town that presumably sees its share of underage drinking, The Lens asked whether it was standard practice to transfer all people with suspected fake IDs into ICE custody.
“On occasion we can do that, and have,” Cormier said.
The office’s new federal partnership with ICE made the woman’s detention possible, he said. “That’s part of what the 287(g) program allows, is when you can’t determine someone’s citizenship, we can contact ICE and they can further investigate.” ICE should have determined the woman’s citizenship status before detaining her in a facility, he said.
Despite the woman’s release and proof of life-long citizenship, Cormier seemed to maintain, incorrectly, that she was deportable. “If I’m not mistaken, she was already deported a time before,” he told The Lens.
This is untrue. U.S. citizens cannot be legally deported.
Deputies go through an online training put on by the Office of Homeland Security to take part in the task force partnership with ICE, Cormier said. ICE did not respond to a media inquiry about the situation by press time.
The woman plans to pursue a lawsuit against the Sheriff’s Office and ICE. “My kids have trauma,” she said.
