Long Island relatives of ICE detainees wait for phone calls rarely made

Jonathan Interiano's family says he landed in the emergency room at Huntington Hospital for several hours on Sept. 7 after ICE agents attempted to snatch him from outside a convenience store and a struggle ensued.

Since then, his relatives said, he has vanished. More than two weeks later they haven't received a call from him. They don't know where he is, how he is or what he was charged with. It's left them conjuring up images and memories of people kidnapped, or "disappeared," in countries like his native El Salvador or Chile or Argentina in the 1970s and '80s.

"It totally feels like a kidnapping," said Interiano’s stepbrother, William Coreas, who lives with Interiano and other relatives in Huntington Station.

"We haven't gotten a single call from him," Coreas added. "It's ridiculous."

Interiano's plight is a familiar one, according to civil rights experts: Immigrants without criminal records in the United States and arrested as part of a Trump administration crackdown on immigration are denied their rights to promptly call family or attorneys.

"They're being held effectively incommunicado," said Amy Belsher, the director of immigrants’ rights litigation at the Manhattan-based New York Civil Liberties Union.

"They are not given access to the phone," Belsher said. "They are certainly not given access to privileged phone calls, private phone calls to speak with attorneys."

Responding to questions from Newsday, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials did not release information about Interiano or confirm they have him in custody. 

The agency has previously stated detainees are given "opportunities to communicate with their family members and lawyers in accordance with strictly enforced national detention standards."

An online ICE detention tracker listed Interiano, 30, in New Jersey at one point but that reference has disappeared from the website, Coreas said.

"Now it just says call ICE for details," he said. When family members call the number listed on the website, he said, no one answers.

Last Friday and again on Tuesday, when Newsday plugged Interiano's "A number" or immigration number into the ICE tracker, it showed someone with the same last name but different first name as being held in an ICE facility in Florence, Arizona.

A person who answered the phone at the facility on Friday said there was no detainee there with that last name.

But on Tuesday, a person who answered the phone said Interiano was there, and had been there for a week. She said detainees are given cards allowing one five-minute call. After that they need to have money in an account to make calls, she said. She identified herself as an ICE contractor.

Detainees are routinely denied what ICE regulations and a court order have specified they should have — at least one phone call within 24 hours of arrest, and an additional call for each subsequent 12-hour period of detention, according to immigration lawyers familiar with ICE efforts on Long Island and the region.

Sometimes detainees are prevented from contacting anyone for days or even weeks, the lawyers said. 

Benjamin Remy, an immigration attorney with the nonprofit New York Legal Assistance Group, said some detainees get to make calls fairly soon while others don't — with some like Interiano disappearing into the immigration system's version of a "black hole."

"We call them the notorious one-minute phone call," Remy said. "They're almost exclusively one minute. People barely have time to give out any information."

Barriers to legal help

Even if detainees eventually are allowed to reach an attorney, Belsher said, it is often too late for them to be of much help. Within days the detainees are moved out of the state or even the country, she said. That makes it difficult for attorneys based in New York to meet with clients or file motions such as a habeus petition that could delay their transfer or deportation and get them a hearing in immigration court.

Often detainees in New York are sent to southern states where providing legal help from New York is more complicated since their attorneys are not on the scene and immigration judges there are generally more conservative, Belsher said.

"Those first early days are critical to access family members and lawyers, family members because they're distraught," she said. "ICE agents are now conducting these arrests in plain clothing, wearing masks, putting people into unmarked vehicles. It's terrifying. It looks like a kidnapping."

Often family members witness the arrest, either in person or on videos that circulate on social media — as was the case for Interiano's relatives — and then don’t hear from them for days or weeks.

By then, the NYCLU litigator added, the detainees are often far away.

"The problem is that once somebody is removed outside of the state, it becomes very hard to file for their release, at least in the state, to file what's called a habeus petition, asking the court to release them because their detention is unconstitutional," Belsher said. 

The arrests are part of what President Donald Trump pledged will be the largest mass deportation campaign in U.S. history. Trump contends it is targeting dangerous criminals while advocates say many of those picked up are blue-collar workers in restaurants, factories, on farms, and in other businesses, and have no criminal record.

Hundreds of immigrants have been rounded up by ICE on Long Island, including an honors student at Suffolk County Community College, a manager of a popular bagel cafe in Port Washington, and a manager of a McDonald's in Oceanside.

A plea for her children

Even if immigrants are allowed to communicate with their families and counsel, there appear to be limits on them during those first critical hours after an arrest, according to advocates. 

Nuvia Yessenia Martinez Ventura, 30, of Brentwood, last saw her five children on June 11, the day she showed up for what she thought was a routine immigration check-in in Manhattan on her pending political asylum case. Instead, ICE agents arrested Martinez Ventura and later flew her to Texas, where she remains in custody at an ICE detention center in Houston. 

While in New York after her arrest, Martinez Ventura was allowed to make a one-minute telephone call to her family on the first day — just long enough to express shock at her predicament and plea for someone to pick up her children at school, according to her sister, Maria, who did not want her last name used for fear of repercussions. 

There was hardly any time to talk about connecting her sister with a lawyer, Maria told Newsday in Spanish.

"The only thing she could say was to help her and don’t leave her alone," Maria said. "For us it was something sad, something painful."

Martinez Ventura was able to make a second short call, apparently because a worker in the ICE facility in Manhattan lent her a personal phone, Maria said.

The next day, June 16, Martinez Ventura was flown to Texas, where she remained as of Tuesday. Her East Islip-based lawyer, Ala Amoachi, eventually was able to speak with her by phone. Filing papers online, Amoachi later in June managed to win a stay of deportation for Martinez Ventura from a federal immigration judge in Virginia. She had fled gangs in El Salvador a decade ago after they killed her husband, according to Amoachi.

Her fate remains unclear. She hasn’t seen her children, ages 3 to 11, though they can now talk by phone or video call more frequently, although she is left to shoulder the cost. Relatives are taking care of her children, including three born in the United States.

Waiting for a call

Interiano's relatives have run out of ideas on how to communicate with him. He had no criminal record and was trying to legalize his immigration status here, they said. He worked for a pool company.

Interiano was taking a routine walk on a Sunday morning two weeks ago when agents grabbed him outside the Huntington Station 7-Eleven, according to videos that circulated on social media and confirmed by his family. The videos show him struggling with agents and afterward, his family said, he was taken to the hospital. 

As relatives waited outside the hospital that day, a Suffolk County police officer told them Interiano would "call you within an hour or so," Coreas said.

"Never did we get a call," he added. "It would be like great at least to actually know where he is instead of having to break our heads and try and find this out ourselves." 

The Suffolk County Police Department would not comment on Interiano's arrest by ICE and said officers responded because demonstrators had gathered outside the hospital.

Northwell Health, which runs Huntington Hospital, said it could not provide information about Interiano’s medical condition or injuries because of privacy laws.

Meanwhile, Interiano’s mother is an emotional wreck, Coreas said.

"She’s a whole mix of emotions," he said. "There's moments where she, you know, just breaks down."