ICE Detains 23-Year-Old UC Berkeley Student at San Francisco International Airport
Last Friday, Paula Albornoz Hernandez sat in San Francisco International Airport, waiting to board a flight to Portland, Oregon with her boyfriend.
They planned to head up the coast to enjoy some of Oregon’s infamous waterfalls before midterms started. Instead, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents detained the 23-year-old Colombian asylum seeker before she could board the plane, her lawyer, Nikolas De Bremaeker, said.
ICE then transported Albornoz Hernandez to ICE’s California City Detention Facility, a remote center in the Mojave Desert that De Bremaeker called “an atrocious place where no human being should be sent.”
Albornoz Hernandez entered the country in 2022 and applied for asylum for gender-based violence “well before” the one-year deadline, said De Bremaeker.
The attorney told KQED that the arrest was illegal and that he filed a habeas petition — a federal petition used to argue that someone is being held without legal basis or being held under unacceptable conditions — on Monday.
“She has built up so many ties,” De Bremaeker said. “The government can’t just step in and say ‘Oh, I’ve changed my mind, I’m going to detain them now.’ Our Constitution prevents that.”
ICE did not respond to KQED’s request for comment.
De Bremaeker said Albornoz Hernandez is a student in U.C. Berkeley’s business administration program and is an active member of her community.
“She’s missing her classes and her exams,” De Bramaeker said. “I know she’s stressing out about it right now.”
U.C. Berkeley Chancellor Richard Lyons sent an email to the university community late on Monday expressing the school’s support for Albornoz Hernandez.
“This student is a valued member of our community, and campus leadership is doing everything within our power to support them so that they may return to their life at Berkeley to continue their studies with us,” Lyons wrote in the email.
Even though immigrants have the right to travel domestically in the U.S., De Bremaeker recommended that “anybody with an [uncertain] immigration status should refrain from traveling by plane without checking in with an attorney.”
He said that the government is extensively monitoring travel to know when people enter ports or cross borders.
“It’s just a convenient way for them to carry out their agenda,” De Bremaeker said. “They’re desperate to meet their quota.”
President Donald Trump has directed ICE to arrest 3,000 per day. Data from the Deportation Data Project shows that while California arrests fell in January, they started climbing again over the summer.
“Going on a trip to Portland really should not mean that you get detained by ICE,” said De Bremaeker.