Ms. M

What if your government wrongfully imprisoned you and instantly destroyed the life you worked decades to build? It’d be a nightmare.

But this is not just a nightmare for our client, Ms. M — it’s real life. Ms. M spent eight months in unlawful detention, despite having Temporary Protected Status (TPS) that granted her legal protections from detention and deportation.

Ms. M suffered unimaginable harm, which destroyed her life. That’s why on behalf of Ms. M, RAICES and Morrison Foerster are taking the U.S. government to court to seek restitution for the crippling physical, financial, and emotional effects of her prolonged unlawful imprisonment.

Our government has the power — and responsibility — to redress this harm, and we will use every legal avenue available to fight for and win Ms. M’s case.

For 26 years, Ms. M built a community and a life in the U.S. The U.S. government changed all that in an instant without legal standing.

Ms. M came to the U.S. when she was eight years old from El Salvador. She attended elementary, middle, and high school in Texas, joining JROTC and playing on her school’s tennis team. During her junior year of high school, Ms. M was diagnosed with cardiac cancer and endured 23 months of chemotherapy before her cancer went into remission. And yet she still earned her GED and went on to pursue a college degree while working two jobs.

Ms. M is a beloved member of her community. She volunteered at her temple and helped with bookkeeping, the daycare center, and Saturday children’s school. She helped friends and neighbors with document translation for free at an eviction clinic run by her temple. She successfully built her small local business from the ground up, making enough money to be a full-time provider and caretaker to her mother.

That is until she was pulled over for an expired vehicle registration in October 2019. After spending two months in detention for fabricated theft charges that were later dismissed, she was picked up by ICE, which had wrongfully entered an immigration detainer despite her TPS status.

ICE imprisoned her for eight months.

While in detention, she was given dirty clothing to wear, suffered severe allergic reactions to the food she was given, and lost over 60 pounds as a result. She also lived in fear of contracting COVID-19, especially because she knew her cancer history left her with an elevated risk of death.

Ms. M accumulated debt for the payments she could not make, including rent, car, and credit card payments, as well as substantial sums for her mother’s medical care. Her mother had no means to support herself and was forced out of the apartment they had shared and lost almost all of their belongings. Quite frankly, she lost everything because of a mistake our government made.

After eight months of unlawful imprisonment, ICE admitted that Ms. M had TPS and released her.

It is absurd and negligent for our government to illegally detain a person, tearing them apart from their life and community for months — causing irreparable damage to human life to concede later it made a mistake.

RAICES will be by Ms. M’s side every step of the way until we win her case and continue to fight alongside those who seek justice, accountability, and restitution. Your support ensures that we can continue litigating and fighting for justice in the months and years to come.