Marcos Gaspar-Da Silva walked out of Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody in Mesa on August 13 with no phone, no driver’s license, and more than 26 pounds lighter than when ICE picked him up outside his home in Maine seven months earlier. An immigration judge had just made him a lawful permanent resident. ICE dropped him off anyway at a church parking lot with nothing but the clothes on his back.
Gaspar-Da Silva, a Brazilian national who had been living in Maine, was taken into custody in January after missing an immigration court hearing on his way to work, according to Phoenix New Times. He had a pending asylum case at the time, and ICE officers handcuffed him before beginning what would become a seven-month journey through detention facilities scattered across the country. His wife, Alessia Da Silva, a U.S. citizen, had already filed a Form I-130 spousal petition on his behalf, a filing that would ultimately determine how his case ended.
That petition mattered because of a quirk of immigration law. Under the Immigration and Nationality Act’s Section 245 and related federal regulations, once someone is in active removal proceedings, the power to grant a green card shifts away from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and lands with the immigration judge overseeing the case, according to the Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review. That is the legal mechanism that let Immigration Judge Victoria Levin grant Gaspar-Da Silva an adjustment of status based on his wife’s approved petition, making him a legal permanent resident through court paperwork rather than a standard USCIS filing.
A Week Sleeping on a Freezing Floor
Before he ever reached a courtroom, Gaspar-Da Silva spent about a week at the Arizona Removal Operations Coordination Center, a staging facility at Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport, per the same Phoenix New Times account. He told the outlet he slept on a freezing floor without a blanket and that staff denied him a shower or a change of clothes. An overflowing toilet, he said, left the floor covered in fecal matter…