In a brief text message just after noon on Wednesday, Dolores Bustamante wrote the words supporters had feared: "ya me encarraron.”
“I’m locked up,” her advocate Carly Fox translated for the more than two dozen people who had waited for hours outside the glassed building that houses the local office of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The 54-year-old apple farmworker and labor rights advocate had gone for her check-in with ICE knowing detention was likely. She had previously been ordered removed, but was arguing she had a path to legal residency, if given more time. Her attorney had advised her to skip the meeting, but Bustamante had said she did not want to live in fear.
Now her fate rests in a last-ditch legal motion, filed immediately after her text, arguing her detention is unwarranted.
“I can’t call,” Fox said, continuing to translate the message. “I’m locked up. They have me locked up here.”
She had arrived for the appointment smiling, having spent the ride to Buffalo with Fox talking about her church choir, with whom she spent part of the night before.
“I forgot where I was going,” she said in Spanish, then exchanged hugs with some of her supporters.
“I don’t feel alone,” she said before heading inside, “no matter what happens.”
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
