An Irish woman who has lived legally in the US for four decades has been detained by immigration officials for the last week because of a criminal record dating back almost 20 years.
Cliona Ward, 54, was detained at San Francisco airport on 21 April after returning from Ireland to visit her sick father and is being held at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) facility in Tacoma, Washington.
Ward holds a green card but has convictions for drug possession from 2007 and 2008, which she believed had been expunged, her family said.
I’m a citizen and I’ve been detained like 100 times and I have a clean record. Detaining people over bs isn’t new. It’s nice that people seem to care at the moment but I bet they don’t care enough to fix it, because most people underneath it all are authoritarian. They’re happy as long as they’re in power and the govt is detaining the “right” people.
Is it closer to 100 or closer to 3?
You’ve been kept for a week and flown 1000 miles away from your destination hundreds of times?