Life After ICE

In June, after 73 days locked in three different ICE detention facilities, Evelyn Wihongi was suddenly free. She had been taken off a plane at LAX while returning from a trip to New Zealand, detained over a weed conviction from 13 years earlier that had already been resolved. Her lawyer had successfully gotten that conviction quashed, but ICE kept moving her between facilities, missing court dates, and losing internet connections during Zoom hearings. Then one morning at 1:30 a.m., a guard unlocked her door and said, "You leaving." She shot out of bed, rolled up her sheets, and started sliding notes under her cellmates' doors. The guard came back and said she wasn't leaving until 3:30. "I didn't think you were going to get out of bed so quick," the guard told her.

The release that wasn't clean

The bus ride from the Eloy Detention Center in Arizona to a visitor center in Phoenix was different from the other transports she'd been through. The bus driver spoke Spanish to most of the passengers, then noticed Evelyn didn't understand. "Where are you from?" he asked. "New Zealand." "Oh, you're Māori," he said, and shook her hand. When they started putting on the shackles, he looked at her leg irons and said, "Looks like you need big boy ones for your big boy calves. I don't have any." She didn't wear leg shackles that day.