This text was initially printed by the Texas Observer, a nonprofit investigative information outlet and journal. Join their weekly e-newsletter, or observe them on Fb, X, and Bluesky.
Moizali Momin spent the ultimate months of 2025 bouncing round immigrant detention facilities in Texas, Louisiana, and Arizona.
Like tens of hundreds of others who had been spared deportation underneath former President Barack Obama, Momin, who got here to the US illegally 26 years in the past and settled within the Houston space, the place he has a U.S. citizen spouse and two teenage youngsters, was vacuumed up by the unprecedented immigration enforcement program of President Donald Trump’s second administration.
Momin was launched two days earlier than Christmas, a few month after a federal choose in California dominated towards a Trump administration coverage that mandates detention for anybody who entered the nation illegally, no matter when and regardless of their ties to the group or whether or not, as with Momin, they’re within the means of acquiring authorized standing.
“I used to be saying to God, ‘Thanks a lot,’” Momin, who’s initially from India, stated in a January interview. “I used to be so joyful, you possibly can’t consider that. Once I got here outdoors, noticed the solar and all the things. … I known as my pal, my spouse and my son. They’re so joyful.”
However Momin questioned why he, a longtime resident with citizen relations who, not like many individuals caught up in Trump’s deportation program, has a shot at authorized standing, was detained for months and bused and flown hundreds of miles across the nation, all at taxpayer expense. “What’s the profit?” he requested.
Immigration attorneys say that the cramped, unsanitary detention circumstances Momin described — he’s Ismaili, a department of Islam, and stated he wasn’t given meals that met his non secular weight loss program restrictions — are their very own type of punishment.
“Detention is the simplest solution to deport individuals,” stated John Gihon, a former lawyer for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) who now represents immigrants in deportation proceedings. “Individuals who would keep within the nation and combat their case on the non-detained docket … [decide] ‘I don’t wish to sit in custody in any respect, I simply wish to return to my nation.’”
Momin entered the nation illegally from Canada in 1999. He was shortly arrested at a lodge by immigration officers, issued a discover to look in immigration courtroom, then pushed to a bus station and launched. Momin says he didn’t converse English and didn’t perceive he was in deportation proceedings. He made his solution to Texas, becoming a member of an Ismai’ili group close to Houston. Unbeknownst to him, Momin stated, an immigration choose ordered his deportation in 2000. Within the ensuing years, Momin met the girl he’d finally marry, they usually had two youngsters.
It wasn’t till 2015, in line with data in a lawsuit Momin’s immigration lawyer filed final 12 months in search of his launch, that Momin discovered concerning the elimination order. Momin, by then the supervisor of a lighting retailer, went to an air cargo terminal to select up merchandise for his employer. When he gave his title to the customs officers, they took him into custody.
On the time the Obama administration had instructed ICE to give attention to deporting threats to public security and to nationwide safety. Counting on the doctrine of prosecutorial discretion, a longstanding authorized precept that claims the federal government isn’t required to implement each single legislation towards each single particular person, longtime residents who had been deemed to have robust ties to their communities, even when they had been undocumented, had been thought of low-priority for deportation. Momin was launched and put underneath an order of supervision, a instrument immigration officers had used for many years. Such orders had been used when somebody’s residence nation wouldn’t settle for them after they had been ordered deported, or for humanitarian causes: Somebody with a elimination order who was caring for a sick U.S. citizen member of the family is perhaps positioned underneath supervision, for example, somewhat than be deported. This elevated underneath Obama’s prosecutorial discretion program, immigration attorneys say.
Momin continued checking in with ICE for the following decade. In 2018, his spouse started the method of sponsoring him for a inexperienced card; one of many few avenues for people who find themselves undocumented to get authorized standing is thru a U.S. citizen partner. Many immigrants in related conditions need to return to their residence nations as a part of this course of—an issue Biden tried to handle with a 2024 government order that was blocked by the courts. However Momin’s lawyer stated he’s exempt from this requirement as a result of his case is so previous that it falls underneath a grandfather clause within the immigration legal guidelines.
That authorized course of was nonetheless pending when, early on the morning of August 5, Momin drove from his cul-de-sac-filled subdivision outdoors Houston to the squat, Seventies concrete workplace constructing in northern Houston that homes ICE’s subject workplace. When officers informed him he was being detained and could be deported, “I used to be utterly shocked,” Momin stated. His first thought was that he was unprepared. He had no cash on him or change of garments. Then he considered his household. Momin’s spouse has suffered from a sequence of diseases, together with an autoimmune illness, Hodgkin lymphoma, and, most just lately, a respiratory illness, in line with medical data included within the lawsuit. He questioned who would handle her, who would pay for his son’s school tuition, and who would take his 15-year-old daughter to basketball observe.
Momin stated he was held for 3 or 4 hours on the ICE workplace, then pushed to the Montgomery Processing Heart within the Houston suburb of Conroe. He was taken to an consumption facility, which he described as a type of holding cell with a glass wall by which the personal detention facility’s staff may supervise immigrants.
“That facility is, like, horrible, horrible,” Momin stated. “There’s lots of people in there. Lots. Every room has like 45 capability. They usually’re placing like 60 individuals in every room. The restroom is a multitude. Soiled. Persons are sleeping on the ground, persons are sleeping within the restroom.”
After a minimum of two days—Momin stated he couldn’t keep in mind precisely how lengthy he was in consumption—he moved to the big, barracks-like rooms with rows of cots for long-term detention.
In September, Momin’s lawyer filed a writ of habeas corpus, a civil continuing earlier than a federal district choose, demanding Momin’s launch, arguing ICE by no means performed a legally required “individualized evaluate” of his detention and didn’t give him “a possibility to organize for an orderly departure.” The subsequent day, Momin’s telephone account on the detention heart in Conroe was canceled, in line with courtroom filings. It wasn’t till he known as his household a number of days later, utilizing one other detainee’s telephone privileges, that they discovered ICE had transferred him to a detention heart in Arizona, the place he was scheduled to be placed on a aircraft and deported again to India.
In an interview, Momin stated that he had been rousted from mattress in Conroe at 5 a.m. and pushed, shackled hand and foot, to a different facility in Houston, then to Louisiana, the place he sat on the bus for an additional 4 hours earlier than he was loaded on a aircraft and flown to Arizona. (In courtroom, Justice Division attorneys stated the timing of Momin’s flight to Arizona was primarily based on when the Indian consulate issued journey paperwork ICE wanted.) After three or 4 days at a detention heart, in the identical garments, and not using a bathe, Momin stated, he was informed he’d be deported. The next afternoon he was bused to an airport.
Again in Texas, Simon Azar-Farr, Momin’s San Antonio-based immigration lawyer, was frantically attempting to stop the deportation. The identical day Momin was taken to the airport, a federal choose in Houston signed a brief restraining order stopping ICE from eradicating him.
Momin stated he was returned to the Arizona detention heart, spent one other couple of hours in consumption, which he stated didn’t have the identical overcrowding points because the detention heart in Conroe, earlier than being allowed to sleep on a cot and at last getting a bathe. A while late the following night time or early the next morning, he was taken to a different room the place he waited round 10 hours, shackled once more, then was flown again to Texas. Again in Conroe, Momin stated, he went by the identical overcrowded consumption facility.
Momin stayed in Conroe till early October, when he was but once more shackled, loaded on a bus, and pushed to a detention heart in Livingston, Louisiana, the place extra detainees boarded. The bus continued to an airfield, the place Momin stated he assumed he’d be deported to India. He contemplated being dropped within the nation he hadn’t seen for 26 years, one which’s suffering from persecution of Muslims.
“That is the second time that is occurring,” Momin stated in an interview. “I used to be crying, as a result of nothing is prepared. I don’t have the cash. I’ve [dirty] garments with me. … How can my household see this particular person coming again after 26 years? How are my mother and father going to really feel?”
One after the other, individuals on the bus had been known as by title to be led off and board the Boeing 737 Momin may see parked on the tarmac. “Fortunate me, they stated ‘The aircraft is full, we’re taking you again to Livingston,’” Momin stated.
Within the meantime, Azar-Farr had requested an immigration choose in New York to reopen Momin’s elimination proceedings. She did, then stayed his elimination. Finally, she rescinded the previous elimination order, discovering that deporting Momin could be a hardship to his household and considering that he had the chance to legalize his standing.
Momin was not vulnerable to imminent deportation, however the elimination proceedings towards him had been nonetheless open. Below previous presidents, together with the primary Trump administration, Momin would have been given the chance to ask ICE to evaluate his case and determine whether or not he was eligible for bond. If the company refused, he may ask an immigration choose. However in July, the Division of Homeland Safety (DHS) had carried out the Trump coverage that immigrants who’d entered the nation illegally may not obtain bond. In September, the Board of Immigration Appeals, a division of the chief department that oversees immigration courts, agreed that immigration judges don’t have authority to set bond for individuals who entered the nation illegally. So Momin was saved on the facility in Conroe till late December—after that federal choose in California dominated towards the bond restriction—when Momin paid $5,000 and at last returned to his household. (Late final week, a fifth Circuit appeals courtroom panel diverged from the California choose, discovering in favor of the Trump administration’s bond coverage, casting doubt on how circumstances like Momin’s in Texas will now play out.)
In a press release, ICE spokesperson Timothy Oberle defended Momin’s arrest, saying that the latter’s petition for a inexperienced card couldn’t have been processed till after his elimination order was rescinded in October. “ICE transferred Momin on a number of events to a staging space in an try to hold out his elimination, nevertheless, every time numerous last-second filings by his lawyer delayed his elimination,” Oberle wrote in an electronic mail.
Oberle stated that Momin had not requested a spiritual weight loss program whereas in detention in Conroe, including that the middle had not exceeded its capability whereas Momin was detained nor had detainees slept within the restroom. “Moreover, the Montgomery Processing Heart is without doubt one of the most well-equipped detention amenities on the earth offering detainees with a secure, safe and humane residing surroundings and a high quality of life that far exceeds trade requirements,” the spokesperson wrote.
Momin’s case illustrates the truth that the Trump administration isn’t focusing its detention and prosecution sources on the so-called worst of the worst, whilst ICE detention swells to record-breaking ranges. Some within the administration had been by no means shy about this: Tom Homan, a former high-ranking ICE official and at the moment Trump’s border czar, stated at 2024’s Nationwide Conservatism convention: “Nobody’s off the desk. In case you’re right here illegally, you higher be wanting over your shoulder.”
That philosophy has manifested itself within the second Trump administration’s willingness to disrupt the lives of on a regular basis People to hold out its immigration agenda. In blue states, hundreds of federal brokers have descended on main metropolitan areas to hold out lethal road sweeps. In Texas, individuals like Momin, who had been thought of by previous administrations to be too necessary to their households and too unthreatening to the nation to be deported, at the moment are low hanging-fruit even when they’ve Congress-created pathways to legalization.
“These individuals needs to be given each alternative to hunt the aid they’re eligible for,” Gihon stated. “Why are we creating guidelines or legal guidelines, then not giving individuals the chance to make use of them?”
Although he’s Ismai’ili, Momin’s household celebrates a standard American Christmas, placing up a man-made tree and lights. After his launch, as an alternative of a giant gathering with prolonged household, he and his spouse and kids exchanged presents amongst themselves. Although he’s within the means of getting his authorized standing, Momin stated he lays awake at night time generally, worrying. He’s afraid that if he’s pressured to return to India, his spouse, who’s Pakistani, received’t have the ability to be a part of him.
“Now he’s out, and his case simply goes on till he is ready to receive his everlasting residency,” Azar-Farr stated. “So a severe particular person ought to ask, I believe, ‘What precisely was the advantage of all that detention?’ If he’s bought a case and he’s pursuing it, what was the purpose of placing him in jail for 5-and-a-half months?”
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