A New Jersey woman expressed regret for her support of President Donald Trump after immigration agents picked up her husband and detained him for months.
Abdellatif Hafraoui was taken into custody in August at Newark airport, where he had his wife had planned to depart for a two-week vacation to Fort Myers, Florida, and three men in plain clothes and a woman who identified herself as an ICE agent hustled the handcuffed man to an unmarked van without telling his wife where they were headed, reported NJ.com.
“They looked at him and said his ‘status is unclear,’” said his wife, Sandra Hafraoui. “‘You’re going with us.’ Then the lady pointed at me and said, ‘You don’t want to make a scene here.’”
Most of their expenses – flights, an Airbnb rental and car reservations – were nonrefundable, costing the couple thousands of dollars. Two friends from California they had planned to meet up with in Florida helped Sandra prepare paperwork for an attorney and agreed to serve as co-sponsors in Abdellatif’s case, according to the report.
“To be a co-sponsor, you have to prove he won’t be a burden on society,” said Monica Nuñez, who was en route with her husband when they learned Abdellatif had been detained. “We had to show our income, our bank accounts, any property we own — everything. It’s a lot of personal information. But we filled out the paperwork and submitted the documents because we weren’t going to let him face this alone.”
Abdellatif, now 60, came to the U.S. at 22 from Morocco and held valid work permits sponsored by his employer, NJ.com reported. His authorization was renewed after he married Sandra in 2011, but an attorney he had hired before their marriage failed to notify him of a scheduled immigration court hearing and a deportation order was issued in abstentia, according to the report.
That's what ICE agents enforced at the airport.
“To think we were MAGA!,” said Sandra, who voted for the president three times and attended a 2020 Trump rally in Las Vegas. “You said you were going after the worst of the worst, but instead you ruined our life,”
The couple paid a $15,000 bond for Abdellatif's release just before Thanksgiving, after he spent 108 days in federal detention, and he now wears an ankle monitor and was forced to turn over his Moroccan passport to the government while his immigration case proceeds.
“I would like to go back to work, to feel normal again,” Abdellatif said. “To have my life back without all this fear and uncertainty.”