EXCLUSIVE: Breastfeeding mom of US citizen sues Kristi Noem after being grabbed by ICE

Kristi Noem in El Salvador
U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem speaks as prisoners look out from a cell during a tour of the Terrorist Confinement Center in Tecoluca, El Salvador. Alex Brandon/Pool via REUTERS

NOTE: This story has been updated. Due to a miscommunication, the original version attributed quotes to a lawyer, Daniel Perez, that were actually made by his paralegal, Jay Bar-Levy. Perez declined to comment.

A breastfeeding mother from Colombia living in Florida with a pending asylum application was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on Sunday and faces a potential transfer to Texas, according to a filing in the U.S. District Court, Middle District of Florida, obtained by Raw Story.

Despite Yury Ussa Polania's claim of “lawful presence” in the U.S. and “irreparable harm” to her young child, a U.S. citizen to whom she provides primary care, immigration lawyers said the 43-year-old, who filed a petition for writ of habeas corpus following her arrest for a "non-violent misdemeanor" on May 5, faces an “uphill battle” to be released — a situation becoming more common under the Trump administration's hardline immigration policy, Hector Diaz, an immigration attorney in Miami, told Raw Story.

Jay Bar-Levy, a paralegal for Daniel Perez, Ussa Polania's lawyer in Gainesville, Fla., said she was being subjected to "diesel therapy" — a prison slang term for inmates being transported and transferred to different facilities. Bar-Levy also said Ussa Polania was being pressured to sign a voluntary deportation agreement and had been in four facilities since her arrest last Friday.

Perez declined to comment.

"When they want a defendant to plead guilty, what they do is they don't let them sleep, and they transfer them from place to place until the person gets tired," Bar-Levy told Raw Story.

"This is un-American to try to force or coerce someone to get tired and voluntarily sign the death penalty, technically … she faces a horrible, horrible fate if she goes back to wherever she came from."

Filing a petition for writ of habeas corpus means Ussa Polania alleges her detention “goes against the Constitution, and for that reason, [she] should be released immediately,” said Nicole Whitaker, founder and managing attorney at Whitaker Legal, an immigration law firm in Maryland.

Whitaker and Diaz reviewed Ussa Polania’s filing, shared by Raw Story. Neither is representing Ussa Polania.

“In my opinion, she's not being treated fairly, but she's being treated just like everybody else is being treated, which is they don't care that she just had a child,” said Diaz, managing partner at Your Immigration Attorney. "Even then, the likelihood of success is very small.”

Ussa Polania is currently more than 100 miles away from Seminole County Jail in Sanford, Fla., where she was first held. Her last known whereabouts is now Pinellas County Jail in Clearwater, Fla, according to a database from the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office and and the online detainee locator system from ICE.

In her petition, Ussa Polania said she faces “imminent transfer to Texas.”

Ussa Polania was booked at Seminole County Jail on May 2 for charges related to petty theft with an estimated value between $100 and $750, according to Frances Matos in the booking department at Seminole County Jail and an arrest report from the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office shared with Raw Story.

Ussa Polania “left with ICE” on May 4, Matos said.

Bar-Levy, the paralegal for Ussa Polania's lawyer, said there was a "misunderstanding at a Walmart for $34."

Stefany Garcia Izquierdo, 34, a family member of Ussa Polania, shared with Raw Story a receipt that Ussa Polania's husband paid on May 3 for her $500 bond, yet she wasn't released.

Ussa Polania is married to Garcia Izquierdo's cousin and also has an 11-year-old son. Garcia Izquierdo is godmother to Ussa Polania's baby daughter.

Garcia Izquierdo, a preschool teacher, is helping take care of the children with Ussa Polania's sister. That has been challenging, Garcia Izquierdo said, as the baby has been crying and experiencing diarrhea. The girl is being fed with breast milk Ussa Polania had refrigerated.

"For $34, look how hard she's been going. This is a nightmare," Garcia Izquierdo told Raw Story.

The Orange County Corrections Department told Raw Story Ussa Polania was being detained at Pinellas County Jail but did not confirm if she was ever held by the Orange County Corrections Department. The public information officer declined to provide comment from the warden, named as a respondent in Ussa Polania's petition.

The Pinellas County Sheriff's Office’s website shows Ussa Polania was booked on May 6 at 3:37 p.m. and remains in custody.

“I think it's wild that she was detained without having any more serious criminal convictions,” Whitaker said. “It's just a waste of resources, and it's clearly just this intent to inflate their enforcement numbers.”

In her petition, Ussa Polania challenges her “continued detention” and says she is both the mother of a U.S citizen child and holds “valid work authorization through 2029 pursuant to her pending application for asylum and protection under the Convention Against Torture (CAT).”

The filing names as respondents Kristi Noem, Secretary of Homeland Security; Pam Bondi, U.S. Attorney General; Pete R. Flores, Acting Commissioner for U.S. Customs and Border Protection; ICE; the Orange County Sheriff’s Office and the Warden of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department.

The White House, ICE, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the Orange County Sheriff’s Office did not respond to requests for comment. According to a filing from Judge Carlos E. Mendoza, respondents have until May 27 to respond to the petition.

Megan Mann, chief deputy of operations for the Middle District of Florida, confirmed the case was "pending."

Raw Story attempted to contact Ussa Polania and her husband but did not receive a response.

Bar-Levy said: "Even though I voted for Trump, it doesn't mean that I'm gonna allow these kind of things to happen. This is not normal."

‘Carte blanche’

Whitaker and Diaz said they have worked with clients in similar situations.

Whitaker said she represented a Hondouran national in Baltimore, Md., who lives with his girlfriend and infant child. The man, who has no criminal record, “not even a traffic violation,” had approved special immigrant juvenile status and deferred action, meaning “protection from deportation based on his approved petition,” Whitaker said.

The man made a delivery on a military base. Based on his work permit identifying him as an immigrant, ICE was called, Whitaker said. Without detention facilities in Maryland, the man was transferred to two facilities in Arizona, requiring him to hire three lawyers.

“Procedurally, because there's so many people being detained, because there aren't enough people, there's not enough organization in the detention center,” said Whitaker, who said her client had yet to be processed when she went to the ICE holding facility in Baltimore, meaning a formal bond request wasn’t heard before the man was transferred to Arizona.

“They want to increase how effective their enforcement looks, but in doing so, they're just detaining anyone who is considered low-hanging fruit, including people that are lawfully here, that are eventually going to go before an immigration judge and be released on their own recognizance,” Whitaker said.

Diaz said he appears in Texas “a lot,” typically experiencing “zero tolerance for any arrests.”

He represented a 22-year-old Brazilian man who came to the U.S. with his mother at 10 years old. The family couldn’t afford to return to San Antonio for a hearing, and the man “didn't know he was supposed to go to court,” Diaz said.

Even though the man had “zero, nothing … on his record” and was “taking care of an autistic sister,” judges were hesitant to release him on $7,500 bond, Diaz said.

“Now ICE officers and everybody else thinks that they have carte blanche to do whatever they want, and there's no accountability to anybody because they feel that leadership is going to back them up for whatever they do, so they're just doing whatever they want.”

‘Treated like a number’

Ussa Polania will likely face an “uphill battle if she goes to Texas and goes in front of those judges,” Diaz said.

Especially because Donald Trump signed the hardline Laken Riley Act into law in January, Ussa Polania might face “mandatory detention” for the petty theft charge, Diaz said.

“I know how she's going to be treated. She's going to be treated like a number,” Diaz said. “Immigration obviously doesn't care about your personal circumstances, and now, there's basically zero tolerance for anything.”

Diaz anticipates an ICE attorney will recommend no bond for Ussa Polania and defense against deportation will be “super hard,” even for asylum as Colombians face abuse from militant groups, as detailed by Human Rights Watch and CNN.

“They're going to wear her out, and then, if she has the wherewithal to withstand all that, she can make it to an asylum individual merits hearing, which will probably be four to six months down the line,” Diaz said.

“She'll have to stay in custody. What does that do? It makes you want to give up. ‘I'd rather go home than be incarcerated for six months.’ That's probably what's going to happen if she does not get out on bond.”

Whitaker was more optimistic that Ussa Polania would get to stay in the U.S. for a hearing before an immigration judge, but acknowledged it takes “forever,” even for a non-detained individual — as much as 10 years.

“It’s cases like these that are clogging up the system in general,” Whitaker said. “It’s making it, ironically, hard for her to get this bond hearing that she needs so quickly to be released.”

ALSO READ: ‘Pain. Grief. Anger’: Families heartbroken as Trump backlash smashes adoption dreams

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In a Friday night ruling, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the Trump administration’s controversial policy to detain nearly all individuals facing deportation without bond, even if they have no criminal record and have lived in the U.S. for decades.

The decision, handed down by a divided three-judge panel, reverses three decades of federal precedent and contradicts thousands of lower court rulings nationwide, Politico reported.

“That prior Administrations decided to use less than their full enforcement authority … does not mean they lacked the authority to do more,” Judge Edith Jones, a Reagan appointee, wrote in the 2-1 majority opinion.

The ruling from the conservative New Orleans-based appeals court – a win for the MAGA administration – marks a stark break from the standard practice of allowing bond hearings for deportation cases, which has been upheld by the “vast majority” of judges across the country, according to the outlet.

“A POLITICO review of thousands of ICE detention cases found that at least 360 judges rejected the expanded detention strategy — in more than 3,000 cases — while just 27 backed it, in about 130 cases,” the report said.

Despite the Friday night ruling, legal experts say the case is likely to end up in the Supreme Court, where Trump’s hand-picked conservative justices hold a supermajority.

But according to Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, the ruling is "AWFUL news for due process."

"This decision will wipe out the availability of release through bond for tens of thousands of people detained in or transported to Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi by ICE," he wrote Friday. "This decision overturns 30 years of interpretation of a law passed in 1996."

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Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer didn’t waste any time firing back at President Donald Trump on Friday over claims that it was the New York Democrat who suggested renaming New York Penn Station and Washington Dulles International Airport after Trump.

“Chuck Schumer suggested that to me about changing the name of Penn Station to Trump Station,” the MAGA leader reportedly said while speaking to reporters on Air Force One.

But Schumer fiercely rejected that premise.

“Absolute lie,” Schumer wrote in a post on X. “He knows it. Everyone knows it. Only one man can restart the project and he can restart it with the snap of his fingers.”

The political back and forth came as reports emerged this week that Trump wants his name on both Dulles and Penn Station while threatening to withhold federal funding for a major transportation project connecting New York City and New Jersey. Schumer swiftly rejected the suggestion, according to media reports.

Schumer later targeted the president's since-deleted racist post depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes.

"Your dad has no obligation to post racist memes," he wrote in a reply post to Donald Trump Jr. "I wish someone would tell him that."

President Donald Trump used a lengthy Truth Social post on Friday to claim credit for a new commercial fishing proclamation – while issuing a plea to Maine and New England voters to remember him as the November midterms approach.

“Another BIG WIN for Maine, and all of New England!” Trump wrote. “Hard to believe you vote for Democrats who did this to you, but not for ‘TRUMP,’ who gets you out of this Environmental and Economic Malaise.”

He urged residents to “VOTE REPUBLICAN FROM NOW ON” and then went on to bash “the Radical Left” for what he called “Burdensome and Unnecessary Restrictions on EVERYTHING, including our Great American Fishermen.”

“In my First Term, I reversed the prohibitions placed on Commercial Fishing, but Joe Biden, or whoever was using the AUTOPEN, foolishly reinstated them. Since Day One, I have taken historic action to END these disastrous policies,” Trump claimed in his Friday post, adding that the proclamation he signed today “will revitalize our Fishing Industry, and STRENGTHEN our Booming Economy.”

He then congratulated “all of our Great Fishermen,” before making a direct plea to voters.

“Please remember I did this for you, against strong Democrat opposition, and VOTE REPUBLICAN IN THE MIDTERMS!” Maine voted Democratic in the last nine elections, according to 270towin.com, including in 2024 when Kamala Harris led Trump by 7%.

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