ICE released this Mass. mom with no phone, 30 miles from home in the rain after detainment for a sealed marijuana conviction

Marcel Rosa watched helplessly as federal agents led his wife, Jemmy Jimenez Rosa, away at Boston Logan International Airport on Aug. 11. Their three young daughters clung to him in tears, fear and confusion.

What should have been the end of a joyful vacation to Mexico for the Canton family, with over 30 relatives, had turned into a nightmare. Jimenez Rosa, a legal permanent resident and mother of four U.S. citizens, was detained over what her lawyer believes was a decades-old, personal-use marijuana charge, which is no longer a crime in Massachusetts today.

“I was just like, ‘Girls, we might never see your mother again in this country,’” Marcel Rosa, 38, said on Friday.

“I looked over to the officer and said, ‘Am I telling the truth?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, that could be possible.’ I told my kids right in front of the officer that she’s being arrested, and the girls just started crying, hugging her,” he said.

“I know most parents would not have told that to their kids, but there was no way I was going to allow those officers to think they’re just going to rip my wife away from my family, thinking it’s going to be ‘business as usual.’”

Neither U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement nor the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts, federal agencies involved in Jimenez Rosa’s detainment, would respond to inquiries from MassLive, several inquiries from the family’s lawyer, Todd Pomerleau, and Boston 25.

Federal authorities never directly said why Jimenez Rosa was detained. An email to her lawyer from ICE hinted at the reason shortly before her release on Aug. 20.

During the 10 days after Jimenez Rosa was detained, the family would be thrust into a bureaucratic maze as the 42-year-old mother was shuttled between detention facilities — including one for men only — from Massachusetts to Maine. She was denied proper health care for her diabetes, asthma and other serious health issues, which led to two hospitalizations, her lawyer said.

All the while, her husband — a former Department of Homeland Security employee who grew up in Boston — struggled to locate her and secure her release through court intervention.

“Jemmy’s detention was brutal and capricious and never should have happened,” said state Sen. Paul Feeney, D-Bristol/Norfolk, who was on hand in Burlington when Jimenez Rosa was reunited with her family Wednesday.

“[She was] needlessly, unjustly and cruelly taken from her family and deprived of basic rights in the most un-American way possible,” he said.

Jimenez Rosa’s time in custody ended with her alone, wet and begging for help at The Cheesecake Factory in the Burlington Mall, after ICE agents released her into the rainy street outside the detention facility Wednesday night. She was 30 miles from home, with no phone and a broken spirit.

The family fears that their nightmare will never truly end.

“I know she’s not, I know she’s not okay … I don’t think she’ll ever be the same, to be honest. I really don’t,” Marcel Rosa said.

In the Boston Logan backrooms

Jimenez Rosa, her husband and their three girls — all under 10 — landed in Boston from Mexico at 6:30 p.m. Aug. 11, and like all international travelers, went through customs.

But when they handed their passports and Jimenez Rosa’s Green Card with her permanent resident status, which wasn’t set to expire until 2035, the agent told her to go to a room downstairs at the airport for additional questions.

This is when federal agents made a vague reference to her arrest on marijuana possession charges from when she was in college, 22 years ago, Pomerleau and Marcel Rosa said — but never stated the specific charges.

“There was an officer sitting at the opposite end of the room where I was seated, and he said to my wife, ‘Tell me about your arrest,’” Marcel Rosa recalled.

“She was confused, like, ‘What arrest? I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Five seconds later, in my head, I was like, ‘He’s probably talking about the arrest over two-plus decades ago,’” he said.

But the agent never directly told them — or their lawyer — the charges they were referring to while she was detained.

The agent simply told the couple he was “doing an investigation” into Jimenez Rosa, Marcel Rosa said.

In 2003, when Jimenez Rosa was a 20-year-old college student, she was arrested for possession of a small amount of marijuana, Pomerleau said, to which she pleaded guilty at the time and fully served probation for.

It was the only criminal charge — one that’s no longer a crime under Massachusetts law — that Jimenez Rosa has faced in her life since coming to the United States at 9 years old, Pomerleau said.

Her records were sealed over a decade ago, Pomerleau added, and he noted that based on police reports, there was never any amount of marijuana listed — blaming Jimenez Rosa’s defense attorney for allowing her to plead guilty 22 years ago to “something that apparently wasn’t even a provable crime.”

“Her records were sealed for 12 years. They [federal officers] would have had no access to these records unless somebody illegally handed them over … They never once asked for records from me about the case, and I had to guess that it might have been a marijuana charge because I was left in the dark for a week,” Pomerleau said.

The CBP agent then took Jimenez Rosa into another room for more questions before the family said their tearful goodbyes.

Marcel Rosa told the agents about his wife’s diagnosed serious health concerns when she was taken into custody, including her diabetes, asthma, depression, anxiety and several other conditions, and asked how she would be medically taken care of. An agent told him, “‘If you have her medicine, you can leave it here with her,’” Marcel Rosa recalled.

“I told them I don’t have all of her medicine with her — we’d just got back from vacation — and at that point, they pretty much just stopped answering questions.”

Within two hours of her detainment, Jimenez Rosa was rushed to Massachusetts General Hospital for a medical emergency related to her health conditions. She was able to tell her husband where she was because a nurse let her borrow their phone, and neither had any idea she’d be transferred back to Boston Logan at 2 a.m. — or that it would be the last time they’d speak for days.

Held at the airport

Marcel Rosa barely slept and didn’t put his phone down for the next 10 days.

He quickly got in contact with Pomerleau, who put about a dozen staff members on Jimenez Rosa’s case and filed a habeas corpus petition for her release on Aug. 12. A judge ordered that she not leave Massachusetts while the case was pending.

Marcel Rosa said he called CBP every day of his wife’s detainment and on Aug. 13, he spoke with the supervisor who was present when she was taken into custody.

“That supervisor started off the conversation by telling me he could neither confirm nor deny whether she was there, or if she was transferred into another facility,” Rosa recalled. When Rosa asked why, the agent cited “privacy laws.”

“I said, ‘That’s my wife. There’s nothing private. I’m the person that’s going to sign everything in her behalf, and do everything,’” Rosa said.

When Rosa asked about his wife’s medical care, the agent cited HIPAA laws as a barrier to knowing her health issues. Taken aback, Rosa pointed out that doctors can share medical information with law enforcement when a patient is in custody, which is specifically outlined in HIPAA.

“He said a very disgusting joke after that,” Rosa recalled.

“He said, ‘We’ll notify next of kin if she dies.’ And at that moment, I knew that I was no longer dealing with humans.”

“I knew I was dealing with someone that is sick in the head, and this was the person who made the decision to incarcerate her,” Rosa said.

Three of Pomerleau’s lawyers on staff went to the airport on Aug. 14, demanding Jimenez Rosa’s immediate release. CBP claimed she was “still in inspection” and had “no right to counsel,” Pomerleau said. The agents refused to let the lawyers see her and forced them to turn off video recording of their interaction.

Pomerleau and his team also began to plan to overturn her marijuana conviction — which Pomerleau had only “guessed” at being the reason behind his client’s detainment, he said, since federal agents refused to communicate with him on the case.

Detained in Maine

Around Aug. 15, Jimenez Rosa was transferred from Boston Logan to an ICE facility in Burlington, Massachusetts, where she had her first shower in nearly five days — after flying in from Mexico, being detained and getting treatment at the hospital.

According to her husband, the shower was at an all-male facility. Pomerleau said there are no facilities in Massachusetts that house female detainees.

Afterward, on Aug. 15, Jimenez Rosa was brought to the Cumberland County Jail in Maine, where she was finally able to call her husband and lawyer, “traumatized,” Pomerleau said. That was when Jimenez Rosa first realized she even had a lawyer, he added.

She said rats were running in the walls “all night long” during her detainment, Marcel Rosa said. There was a water leak in her ceiling and she got little sleep because of the continuous clanging of metal gates as people were brought through the facility.

On Wednesday afternoon, Pomerleau was able to get a judge to vacate Jimenez Rosa’s past marijuana conviction in a Roxbury courtroom, and immediately filed a motion for her release.

“Thank God I guessed right,” he said.

“After the motion was filed … they cowered, and the ICE lawyer said something to the effect by email, ‘They’re going to let her out now, because clearly the marijuana charge isn’t around anymore.’”

“It’s like, well, thank you for letting us know in writing that was the basis for her detention, which we still have never seen,” Pomerleau said.

Pomerleau and her family would later discover she had been hospitalized a second time while in custody, her blood pressure at 198. Jimenez Rosa was handcuffed to the bed and this time, told she couldn’t make any calls.

Alone at the Cheesecake Factory

Even at the end of her detainment, it was not easy to find Jimenez Rosa.

Around 3 p.m. on Wednesday, after her conviction had been vacated, Pomerleau called Cumberland County Jail and was told Jimenez Rosa had left 15 minutes earlier, but they wouldn’t say where she went.

After failing to reach ICE, he called the jail again, where staff eventually said two men had picked her up and they “assumed” she was en route to the ICE facility in Burlington, Massachusetts, to be released.

It was raining when Marcel Rosa picked up their three children before leaving with Pomerleau to find their wife and mother.

Then, the phone rang. It was Jimenez Rosa.

“She was at the Burlington ICE facility before any of us were there. She said, ‘They’re going to kick me out, or they’re going to keep me in the jail cell till you guys get here, because they’re closing soon,’” Pomerleau said.

When they finally got to the facility at 1000 District Ave., Jimenez Rosa was nowhere to be found.

“Then, she called because a stranger at The Cheesecake Factory, in the Burlington Mall, lent her their phone because she was so distraught,” Pomerleau said. Without a way to contact her family, the mother had made her way to the mall about a half mile away seeking help.

She “couldn’t even stand up” when Pomerleau’s lawyers finally got to her in the restaurant, and her “spirit was destroyed,” her husband and Pomerleau said.

“She was completely disheveled … She reminded me of asylum seekers who have been absolutely victimized. She was constantly breaking down in tears. She was trembling. All she did was just hold on to her kids and hold on to her husband, and she just sat there and cried for 45 straight minutes. She couldn’t even function,” Pomerleau said.

Back in Canton

Since she returned home in Canton, Jimenez Rosa has been “crying throughout the day” and “she’s not herself,” Marcel Rosa said Friday. The family is making appointments with a psychiatrist and for a full hospital workup, he said.

A GoFundMe has also been established to offset the legal expenses the ordeal has cost the family. It’s raised over $14,000 as of Friday, with a $16,000 goal.

Marcel Rosa warns other families of the same fate.

“If anyone is on a Green Card, you need to talk to an attorney before you travel … but based off my experience, I don’t think you should be traveling. You’re better off taking that loss than getting arrested and being in the same situation that my wife went through,” Marcel Rosa said.

“Locking up a legally present Massachusetts mom, who has been here legally since she was 9 years old, and taking her away from her husband and young kids, one of whom was celebrating a birthday, does not make our community safer,” state Sen. Feeney said in a statement to MassLive.

“It only serves to instill fear and undermine the rule of law, which seems to be the goal of the president as he regularly forsakes commonsense and common decency to score political points,” Feeney said.

And while Pomerleau said the federal habeas corpus case he filed seems to be in limbo, given the lack of response from the government, “we’re not stopping till we get justice for Jemmy,” he said.

Despite his client’s release, Pomerleau said he will continue the fight.

“It is a big deal when law enforcement violates the law under the guise of enforcing it … but I took an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States as an attorney. The rule of law needs to be respected,” he said.

“If it can happen to a non-citizen, Green Card holder who’s been following nearly every rule her whole life, paying taxes, it can happen to you. It can happen to anybody, and we are taking a stand,” Pomerleau said.

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