Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained a mother of four earlier this month after she traveled back into the U.S. with her passport and valid green card.
Jemmy Jimenez Rosa, who was born in Peru but has been a lawful permanent U.S. resident for 33 years, was detained at Boston’s Logan International Airport in front of her husband and three of her four children on Aug. 11 after a family trip to Mexico. Todd Pomerleau, her attorney, claims that she, her family and her legal team were not given any justification for her detainment except a misdemeanor marijuana conviction from two decades ago that had been pardoned.
During her 10-day detainment, Jimenez Rosa was hospitalized twice because she was not given any of her prescribed medications, moved around to multiple facilities, including one only for men, and denied her access to her legal team, her attorney told HuffPost. All the while, her family and legal team struggled to get information about her whereabouts and why she was detained.
Jimenez Rosa was released on Aug. 20 with no charges after a judge vacated her decades-old conviction. However, authorities did not allow Jimenez Rosa to wait inside the detention facility to be picked up and did not notify her husband and attorneys of the details, her attorney said. Instead, she walked through a rainstorm for about a half mile to the Burlington Mall, where a stranger allowed an exhausted and depleted Jimenez Rosa to use their phone and let her husband know of her whereabouts, the attorney said. Her family and legal team then met her at the mall, which was about thirty miles away from home.
