Chinese Mother Taken by ICE With Her Two Sons at a Los Angeles County Biometrics Appointment: Lawyer Says Family Was Sent to Texas and Has Been Ordered Released
On the afternoon of November 3, at around 2 p.m., Lifeng Guo, an asylum seeker from China, arrived with her two sons, aged 12 and 4, for a scheduled biometrics appointment at a U.S. immigration Application Support Center in the City of Industry, in Los Angeles County, California, and was taken into custody on the spot by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers. November 3 was Election Day in the midterm elections.
Video recorded by community watchers shows a masked officer leading Guo's 4-year-old son by the hand toward a black SUV, the boy still holding a toy car.
According to the family's lawyer, Chuangchuang Chen, who spoke to Univision, Guo applied for asylum on grounds of religious persecution and her case is still pending. The mother and her two sons were then sent to the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas. The lawyer said a federal judge had already ordered that the family not be transferred outside the Central District of California, and that the federal government acknowledged in court that the transfer was a mistake and was evaluating the family's return to California and their possible release.
Memo Torres, a Los Angeles community reporter, reported on November 6 that a judge had ordered the mother and children released from the Dilley center, and that on returning to California the family was expected to enter the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program (ISAP) and be fitted with ankle monitors. No public statement from ICE on the case had been issued as of publication.
Application Support Centers are facilities where immigration applicants attend scheduled appointments to give fingerprints, photographs and signatures. The South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley is one of the federal government's main facilities for detaining immigrant families and has repeatedly been at the center of controversy over family detention.
Source: Univision
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：德克萨斯州 Dilley 的南德州家庭居住中心（资料图，2014 年该中心启用时摄）。照片：美国国土安全部，公共领域，经维基共享资源。 / Photo: The South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas (file photo, taken at the center's opening in 2014). Photo by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
