Women trying to escape domestic abuse instead detained by ICE

They were victims, not abusers. That’s what they told police officers, attorneys, visitors and anyone else who would listen. It didn’t matter. The women were all taken to a sprawling immigration detention center in the woods of west Michigan and handed thin jumpsuits — red, to mark them as a high security risk.

Inside the North Lake Processing Center, they talked about the men whose calls to police landed them there. The boyfriends or husbands who threatened to get them deported and cut them off from their children. The men, or sometimes women, who hit them, pulled their hair or choked them, bruising their throats.

They didn’t know where to go for help before, but now, in the confines of a cold cellblock in a former prison, the women helped one another. If one spoke to somebody on the outside who could connect them with advice, legal aid or money for the commissary, she’d pass around a tablet used for calls so others could tell their stories.

Migladys Bermudez, an immigration attorney in southeast Michigan, remembers a call in May from a Peruvian woman detained at North Lake. Her name was Pilar, and she’d heard about Bermudez from a fellow detainee who had been a client. Pilar told Bermudez about the boyfriend she tried to escape before her arrest, when she used makeup to cover the marks she said he left on her face. But he had accused her of being the abuser, resulting in her arrest.

Pilar handed the tablet to a Cuban woman named Leya. Over the echoes of the other detainees’ chatter, she described how her boyfriend insulted her, isolated her and gave her a black eye. Then, after grabbing him by the arm during an argument, she was the one behind bars, separated from their nursing daughter. On video calls, the girl didn’t seem to recognize her mother anymore. She stopped calling her “Mamá.”

Bermudez was taken aback. All three women in that chain — the former client, Pilar and Leya — said they were trying to get out of abusive relationships when they were arrested by local police on domestic violence allegations. In all three cases, the charges were dropped or never filed at all. The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained the first woman during a routine check-in a few months after her charges were dropped. The others were handed over to ICE by local officials.

It’s long been intimidating for immigrants who suffered abuse to call 911, regardless of who was in the White House. They knew — and their abusers knew — that their immigration status made them vulnerable. But previous administrations treated victims as just that, people who needed help, not as targets for deportation. Bipartisan coalitions in Congress have long supported the Violence Against Women Act, which creates a pathway toward legal status for immigrants who are victims of domestic violence or other serious crimes.

Now, under President Donald Trump, all bets are off. On inauguration day, his administration rescinded guidelines that largely prevented immigration agents from making arrests at sensitive locations — including domestic violence shelters and hospitals. About a week later, the administration eliminated key protections granted to VAWA applicants and other crime victims. For the first time in decades, immigration authorities could disregard those protections and more freely arrest, detain and deport immigrant victims.

Life became more harrowing in other ways for immigrants who were victims of domestic violence. Federal immigration agents made arrests outside specialized domestic violence courts. And the administration persuaded more and more local police and jails to carry out the president’s mass deportation campaign, sweeping still more immigrants into custody.

Even communities without these so-called 287(g) agreements are helping the government round people up. In west Michigan’s Kent County, where Pilar and Leya were arrested, the county jail turned over more immigrants to ICE in the first six months of 2026 than it did during the entire Biden administration.

Advocates across the country say they’re seeing signs of an alarming increase in the numbers of domestic violence victims who are detained and deported. And many immigrants are staying in abusive relationships, fearful of calling for help or even stepping outside their homes.

“It’s just probably the most dangerous time for immigrant women right now who are victims of domestic violence,” said Bermudez, who took on Leya’s immigration case.

The arrest and detention of domestic violence victims is, in part, an unanticipated consequence of an effort meant to keep them safe. In much of the country, law enforcement officers are encouraged — or even required — to make an arrest when they have probable cause to believe that a domestic violence assault has taken place. Sometimes victims are mistaken as the abuser and taken into custody. Then, if they’re immigrants, they can be turned over to ICE — even if they were never criminally charged.

There’s no comprehensive way to track how often this happens or how many domestic violence victims have been detained by ICE or deported. But ProPublica spoke with a half-dozen alleged victims who were locked up together in a single facility, North Lake, and reviewed police records about others who were there, too. Their stories offer a picture of why Congress created programs like VAWA in the first place, and what’s at stake when those guardrails are taken away.

A coalition of immigrant survivors and advocates have sued the Trump administration, saying changes to how immigrant victims are treated not only undermined public safety, but also broke promises enshrined in federal law and policy.

“We were seeing our clients be more scared, be systematically targeted, be arrested, and deported very quickly,” said Kathleen Rivas, supervising attorney of the survivors team at Public Counsel, a law firm that’s involved in the litigation.

In May, a federal judge ordered the government to restore protections while the case played out. The Trump administration has appealed the order.

White House spokesperson Lauren Bis said in a statement that ICE is targeting the “worst of the worst.” The real story, she added, is the “American women whose lives have been taken by illegal alien criminals.” A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that “we will never apologize for deporting illegal aliens, because that’s how we save lives.”

But Leya, Pilar and other immigrants we interviewed have no criminal records. And advocates said communities are less safe now because immigrants are afraid to call police when their partners hurt them. This gives more ammunition to the threats of their abusers, said Casey Carter Swegman, director of public policy at the Tahirih Justice Center, a national nonprofit that advocates for immigrant survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault and human trafficking.

“Certainly more immigrant survivors are feeling like the violence and abuse they experience behind the closed door is somehow more tolerable than the violence and abuse they could experience if they tried to leave,” she said.

The first time her boyfriend’s fist slammed into her face was in July 2025, Leya recalled. They were living in Florida with his relatives. Only a month before, Leya gave birth to their daughter.

One night, she said, he heard her laugh in the kitchen with his mother and a man his mother was dating. Leya’s boyfriend flew into a jealous rage, she said, and punched her a few feet from their sleeping baby.

Leya called 911 but hung up when the operator answered. She was afraid of what might happen. She was 26; her boyfriend was a decade her senior. Leya, a recent immigrant from Cuba, had applied for status and was in active immigration proceedings. She said he was a permanent resident, with permission to work in the U.S. and better command of English. She felt trapped.

Sheriff’s deputies arrived and spoke with Leya and her boyfriend. They took photos of her puffy and bruised face, with the white of her left eye bright red. Her boyfriend said the injury occurred during an “argument,” according to the report, but he didn’t specify how. He was arrested on suspicion of domestic battery.

Leya said her boyfriend’s mother threw her out that night. Unsure of where to go, she and her daughter moved in with another one of his relatives. Pursuing a criminal case felt daunting. She said his relatives urged her to drop the charges and reconcile with him. Eventually, she asked prosecutors to drop the charge because the battery took place in “a moment of impulse that he feels very sorry for,” records show. Her boyfriend didn’t enter a plea before the case was dismissed.

Like other immigrants interviewed for this story, Leya asked not to be fully identified because of her pending immigration case, and because she worries about repercussions for her and her daughter.

She and Pilar also asked that ProPublica not interview their alleged abusers because they’re afraid the men will interfere with their cases, hurt them or take away their children. To report their stories and get their partners’ perspective, we reviewed records from law enforcement, immigration court proceedings and habeas corpus petitions seeking their release from detention. We also interviewed attorneys, family and others who interacted with them.

Soon after the Florida arrest, Leya and her boyfriend moved to the city of Wyoming, Michigan, a suburb of Grand Rapids that’s a magnet for immigrants who come for jobs in manufacturing and food processing. The unpretentious city is dotted with temporary staffing agencies, money-wiring businesses and Mexican restaurants.

Leya said their relationship worsened. Her boyfriend pushed her, pulled her hair and broke her phone, she said. He made her delete her social media accounts and isolated her from friends and family. They fought about money and talked about breaking up. One night in April, during an argument, he called the police.

“I’m having problems with my wife,” he said in Spanish, according to a recording of the call. The operator asked if there had been any violence. “No, no, no. None,” he said. “Just a discussion.”

He told officers who came to their apartment complex that Leya got angry because he had talked to an ex-girlfriend, according to body camera footage and a police report. When he tried to leave, he said, Leya pushed him and grabbed his arm. Then she attempted to hang up his phone when he dialed 911.

He said he wasn’t injured, though he accused her of hitting him several times a few days earlier.

Officers interviewed his brother, who mentioned the arrest in Florida, according to bodycam footage. “They had a cycle of problems where she called the police for abuse and he was detained for three days,” he said in Spanish. “My brother is trying to avoid having that happen again.”

The police report doesn’t mention the earlier arrest.

Footage of the interview with Leya was redacted due to state privacy laws, in part because she was interviewed inside their residence, unlike her boyfriend, who was interviewed outside. According to the police report, she “minimized” the argument and said there was no physical contact. She acknowledged trying to hang up the phone.

In an interview with ProPublica, Leya said they argued when she learned he sent money to his ex-girlfriend, who is the mother of his son. At the same time, she said, he had told her he couldn’t afford to buy diapers for their daughter. She said she has never hit him.

Officers arrested Leya on suspicion of domestic assault and interfering with a 911 call. They didn’t arrest her boyfriend or seek charges against him. Leya said she didn’t tell officers she was a victim of abuse because she thought she’d be able to tell a judge.

She never got a chance.

The Wyoming Police Department’s written policy encourages officers to make an arrest in incidents involving domestic violence “when there is reasonable cause to believe an assault was committed.”

Arrests demonstrate that “violence in the home is recognized as a serious crime,” according to Michigan’s law enforcement training manual on domestic violence. This approach is common across the country. Twenty-four states require an arrest when there’s probable cause of a domestic assault.

But domestic violence scenes can be chaotic, with both partners accusing each other of being the aggressor. It can be difficult for officers to understand what happened, said Erin Ross, a former domestic violence prosecutor who works at the national nonprofit Vera Institute of Justice. Sometimes, the wrong person ends up in handcuffs.

“The complexity of DV situations can thus lead to survivors being criminalized by the very system meant to protect them,” Ross and her co-authors wrote in a 2025 report about the effects of arrests on domestic violence survivors.

The Vera report doesn’t touch on immigration. But Ross and a dozen other domestic violence advocates across the country told ProPublica that immigrants who don’t speak English or understand their rights are, under the Trump administration, especially vulnerable to an arrest that can have irreversible consequences.

ProPublica reviewed hundreds of habeas corpus petitions filed nationwide since January 2025, in which immigrants challenged their ICE detention on constitutional grounds. We found dozens of petitioners who were arrested on suspicion of domestic violence and turned over to ICE, even though they were never charged or their charges were dropped. Using jail and police records from Florida and Michigan, as well as newsreports, we identified even more cases.

In their petitions, several immigrants said that officers mistook them for the aggressor. The underlying arrest records show that officers often had to make close calls in messy cases where it was unclear who was the victim and who was the aggressor. Either way, under Trump, there’s little grace for immigrants.

In one case in Florida, a state where sheriff’s offices cooperate with immigration authorities, a deputy came upon a Venezuelan couple arguing in the street in November 2025. In his report, the deputy said the woman pulled at her husband’s pants, necklace and arm, leaving marks on his body. The woman said her husband had taken her keys and phone. She didn’t want to be left stranded, she said, so she ran after him.

She was charged with misdemeanor battery; her husband wasn’t charged. The woman was turned over to ICE while the case was pending. Prosecutors later dropped charges. The sheriff’s report didn’t mention any allegations of prior domestic violence, but the woman later said that, during their marriage, her husband had beaten her and threatened to kill her. In her habeas corpus petition, she said she was “afraid to report the abuse to the police.”

The woman was released in May, but during the five months she was incarcerated, her husband took their daughters out of state, her attorney told ProPublica. She still hasn’t seen the girls in person.

For Leya, it was a shock to find herself handcuffed, sitting in the back of a police cruiser, headed toward the Kent County jail. She was silent during the 15-minute ride, unable to make sense of what had just happened: “I had suffered from domestic violence,” she said. “But the one who ended up in trouble was me.”

The next day, a detective asked the prosecutor’s office to file charges against her. Prosecutors declined to do so,saying there was insufficient evidence, there were no injuries and Leya hadn’t successfully interfered with the phone call.

Still, she wasn’t released.

Leya had no criminal history, apart from this arrest, according to a DHS record. But her fingerprints had been run against state and federal databases, flagging ICE officials who could match them with her prints from when she arrived in the U.S. In addition, Leya said, a jail official asked about her status, and she told him she was waiting for an immigration court hearing.

ICE issued a detainer, essentially asking the jail to hold Leya until agents could pick her up. Kent County officials honored their request. A day later, Leya was at the detention center in the woods.

She cried in despair over her daughter. They’d never been separated. The 80 miles between Wyoming and North Lake seemed infinite. Her breasts ached from the drying milk. Leya wondered whether she’d be deported and if their separation would be permanent.

From a narrow window in her cell, she saw people outside holding signs, protesting ICE. She could hear their chants in English. Though she had trouble understanding them, she felt comforted by the care of strangers.

Inside, she familiarized herself with the routines. She spent most of her time in a large, open room with other women in red. Cameras eyed them as they talked about their children and upcoming court dates. They shared contact information for relatives in their home countries in case one of them got deported and had nowhere to go. To pass the hours, they watched telenovelas, played rounds of Uno and pieced together jigsaw puzzles of forests and farms.

Leya grew close to a few women from Latin America and Eastern Europe who said they, too, had been in abusive relationships. Several had called police for help, records show. A Honduran woman said her partner tried to choke her. A Dominican woman said her husband, a U.S. citizen, hit her, pulled her hair and chased her with a stick.

Then there was Pilar, Leya’s first cellmate. The asylum seeker from Peru had also been arrested on suspicion of domestic violence in the city of Wyoming.

Pilar, her boyfriend and her teenage daughter called 911 five times in the 15 months before her arrest, records show. On one occasion, Pilar’s daughter said she worried that the boyfriend would hurt her mom; according to bodycam footage, Pilar assured officers that everything was fine. On another, the man said he experienced mental abuse and wanted to find a shelter. On yet another, Pilar said she just wanted him to leave.

None of these calls ended in an arrest. Officers ensured that the boyfriend had another place to stay when he sought help, and they told Pilar to call back if he tried to return and hurt her, according to the footage. They advised the couple to go to civil court for future disputes over money and property.

In an interview with ProPublica from North Lake, Pilar, 48, said that her boyfriend took financial advantage of her and physically assaulted her. And in her habeas corpus petition, she described the relationship as one of “physical, mental, psychological, economic abuse.” Her sister took a photo of the bruises around Pilar’s neck and feared the worst. “I would tell her to leave that man,” she said.

Pilar said she was ashamed to go to her job at a food-processing plant with bruises on her face. She wondered what her co-workers would think. She distanced herself from relatives and friends. Pilar said she never told the police the full story because she worried about the possible repercussions — not for herself, but for her boyfriend. She didn’t want him to be deported. Despite everything, she loved him and felt he loved her.

One night in October 2025, her boyfriend drove up to their apartment complex in a rental car. The couple argued in the parking lot. He called 911.

“I need police,” he said over and over in English.

Pilar called moments later: “This man is leaving my house and he’s not giving me my keys,” she screamed in Spanish. “This man has hurt me. He has scratched my whole arm.”

When officers arrived, they separated the couple. The boyfriend said that Pilar slapped his head, grabbed his shirt and tried to pull him out of the car while he was in the driver’s seat, according to bodycam footage and the police report. One side of his T-shirt was torn. He said he never assaulted Pilar and any injuries were her own fault. “I’ve never hit her,” he said in Spanish.

He told officers that he’d become a U.S. permanent resident two months earlier and that Pilar was jealous. “She is making this up because she knows she can get papers,” he said.

Pilar insisted she was the victim. She showed officers the scratch marks on her arm and said her boyfriend was to blame. She begged them to make him return the apartment keys, according to bodycam footage and a police report. “I’ve been trying to kick him out for a while and he won’t leave, and he doesn’t want to help pay the rent,” she said in Spanish.

An officer asked how her boyfriend’s shirt got ripped. Pilar said she grabbed onto him when he started driving away in order to avoid being dragged by the car. The officer asked her several more times about the ripped shirt. Pilar told him she wanted to speak to a lawyer.

In their report, police noted that the boyfriend had called 911 first. His shirt was ripped. Pilar’s wasn’t. If the boyfriend had thrown her down, the officer wrote, then her shirt should have been ripped because he was “much taller and heavier (around 80lbs more).”

Her boyfriend wasn’t arrested. Pilar was.

Wyoming Public Safety Chief Kip Snyder declined to speak about the arrests of Pilar or Leya. In an email to ProPublica, he said officers don’t “participate in enforcing federal immigration laws. We encourage trust and cooperation with all residents and aim to ensure that everyone feels safe reporting crimes or seeking assistance.”

Shortly after Pilar’s arrest, a police detective asked the prosecutor’s office to file domestic violence charges against both her and her boyfriend.

Prosecutors declined to file any charges, citing insufficient evidence. Pilar wasn’t released. Apart from this arrest, she had no criminal history, according to DHS records. She also had a pending asylum case.

Still, ICE put a detainer on her and jail officials turned her over.

A few years earlier, Kent County Sheriff Michelle Lajoye-Young said a handoff like this wouldn’t happen.

In 2019, she announced that deputies would stop automatically honoring detainers and instead require warrants signed by a federal judge or magistrate. The move came after a U.S. citizen — a Marine combat veteran — was transferred from her jail into ICE custody.

“There needed to be a judicial oversight inserted into that process to give us the assurance that somebody wasn’t erroneously detained without due process,” Lajoye-Young said around that time.

Trump called Kent a “sanctuary jurisdiction.” The label haunted the county, which in the 2016 election voted for Trump. A national think tank that aims to reduce immigration put Kent County on its list of sanctuary communities, while Republican state lawmakers tried to compel its cooperation with federal authorities.

Yet it’s unclear whether Lajoye-Young ever delivered on her promise. ProPublica requested copies of all department policies, procedures, memos and instructions on how it handles ICE detainers since 2018. None said a judicial warrant was needed. ProPublica also asked for copies of judicial warrants for Pilar and Leya. The county said no such records exist.

Lajoye-Young,who retired last week,declined interview requests. Sgt. Scott Dietrich, a spokesperson for the sheriff’s office, didn’t directly answer questions about whether the policy was ever implemented. But in a statement he said that detainers are “handled under applicable law and established policy, consistent with our commitment to public safety, due process, and fair and impartial enforcement.”

Gema Lowe, an organizer with the local chapter of an immigrant rights group, said the sheriff had backtracked on her promise and wasn’t being forthright. “I don’t understand why they’re being secretive,” she said.

The shift deepened the mistrust among immigrants in a county with one of the state’s fastest-growing immigrant populations. Lowe,an immigrant herself from Mexico, said she advises victims to think twice before reporting domestic violence to the police because of the risk of arrest and deportation, while pointing them to other local resources like shelters.

She and others said the stakes are especially high now. ICE arrests have skyrocketed under Trump. Nobody is off limits, including immigrants with pending asylum claims and no criminal records.

And more local authorities are helping ICE make arrests. In January 2025, fewer than 150 state and local law enforcement agencies had signed 287(g) agreements with DHS to help carry out the president’s deportation agenda. That number has ballooned to more than 2,600 today.

“Partnerships with law enforcement are critical to having the resources we need to arrest criminal illegal aliens across the country,” a DHS spokesperson said. “We have had tremendous success when local law enforcement works together with us.”

Kent County doesn’t have a 287(g) agreement. Still, the jail hands over the vast majority of people with detainers to ICE, records show. Dozens of people who were turned over to ICE this year had their criminal charges dropped, or, like Pilar and Leya, were never charged in the first place.

Dietrich said the dismissal of a criminal charge “does not, by itself, mean the original arrest lacked probable cause.” The sheriff’s office also doesn’t “determine whether criminal charges are ultimately prosecuted, nor does it determine whether an individual is deported,” he said.

DHS told ProPublica in a statement that both Leya and Pilar “illegally entered the country” in 2022 and that both “will receive due process” in their immigration proceedings.

Kent County Prosecutor Chris Becker said he hadn’t heard of victims getting detained by ICE after calling the police. In his experience, he said, more perpetrators with active cases get deported.

Becker said he tries to get the message out that his team serves all victims, regardless of their immigration status. He’s aware that immigrants are reluctant to seek help. His own staff has told him that victims are afraid to testify or file restraining orders. They don’t want their partners — often the breadwinners and the fathers of their children — to be deported.

“There’s been a chilling impact to women coming forward in domestic violence situations due to what’s going on,” Becker said.

As the months passed at North Lake, Leya watched as women she befriended started to leave.

Some were deported, including at least two Mexican women who were also arrested in Kent County on suspicion of domestic violence. Others were released. New women took their cells. Some told Leya that they, too, had been arrested after 911 calls about domestic violence.

Leya fought for her freedom. She met with volunteers from Kent County, who raised money to hire her lawyers and pay for a required physical exam and fees. Even her ex-boyfriend, the one who she said gave her a black eye, wrote a letter on her behalf to help her case, calling her “a calm person.” He explained that he had called the police after their argument “escalated” and that “problems are situations that can happen in any relationship.”

Leya, he added, “deserves a second opportunity to remain in this country and be close to our daughter, as our baby truly needs her very much.” While Leya was locked up, their little girl celebrated her first birthday, got her first teeth and took her first steps.

At virtual hearings, Leya sat with her arms crossed, her dark, wavy hair neatly braided in cornrows and wearing an oversized coat over her red uniform. She tried to follow the discussion of people who seemed to have her life in their hands.

In late August, a judge granted Leya bond. While her immigration case played out, she could be free.

It was a profound relief. At the same time, it felt awful to leave behind her friends. It seemed like some of them were never getting out. Pilar was approaching a year in detention.

Four months after her arrest, Leya walked out of the old prison. She thought about how she would live on her own now and support her daughter.

She promised herself she wouldn’t go back to the man who hurt her.