After a run-in with the police that ended in his arrest, Andry’s husband was supposed to be released from a New York jail in November 2024. Instead, he was transferred into ICE’s custody. The couple had come to the United States 18 years ago from the Dominican Republic. Her husband was incarcerated for all of last year.
In December, Andry (who asked not to use her last name to protect her family) seemed to catch a break: an immigration judge granted her husband bond, the only way to get out of immigration detention. The decision was far from a given: the second Trump administration has tried to make broad swaths of immigrants ineligible for bond, detaining them with no ability to get released, and even those who are eligible for a bond hearing might not be granted it. But the amount Andry was told she had to pay in order to secure his freedom was $25,000. Unlike in the pretrial bail system, where defendants can usually pay a fraction of their bail to get released, immigration courts demand the entire amount.
Andry had nothing like that kind of money sitting around. For over a year, she had been raising their two daughters alone without her husband’s income, running their remittance business while driving for Uber as much as she could in between. Beyond making $900 rent payments and covering their family’s expenses, she was using any extra funds to send her husband money so he could make calls or go to the commissary. “¿Qué voy a hacer?” she asked: What could I do?
