My Husband Told the Sheriff to Report Me to ICE
Across the U.S., heightened immigration enforcement has plunged domestic-violence victims who don’t have legal status into profound fear and isolation. “Calling the police could lead to their own deportation and separation from their children,” says Casey Swegman, the director of public policy at Tahirih Justice Center, a nonprofit serving immigrant victims of gender-based violence. Cooperation between some local police precincts and ICE is adding to Tahirih’s clients’ confusion. “Some immigrant survivors have the impression now that a police officer could decide that checking on her immigration status is more important than securing her safety,” Swegman says. “If you are in a life-threatening situation with an abuser and you don’t think that you can call the police, who else — in our society — are you able to call?”
One of Tahirih’s clients, Lydia, emigrated from Canada to the United States with her two young children and married Keith, a U.S. citizen, in 2019. Over the next six years, Lydia says Keith became increasingly controlling and violent: isolating her from friends and family, breaking her belongings and damaging their home, and sexually assaulting her and distributing videos of those assaults. All the while, Lydia says Keith refused to provide the documents she needed for a green card without which she couldn’t work legally or support her children on her own. Below, Lydia explains how Keith weaponized her immigration status and what happened after she finally filed a protective order this August.
I met Keith online, in a fitness group for weight loss. I had gotten out of my marriage to my first husband two years prior, and Keith was exiting his second marriage. We talked for ten months before we met in person. When I saw him in the airport waiting for me, I was like, Oh, butterflies. We spent days together and going back home to Canada, I bawled my eyes out. I was like, “I don’t want to leave!” I was in love.
That was June 2019. By October, he proposed to me. He would drive up to New York, and I would drive across the border. We’d spend weekends together. My kids came down with me. During Thanksgiving, he was just like, “I want to marry you now. I don’t want to not be with you anymore.” So we got married a couple days later, and from then on I was here. I never left. We did make a phone call to a lawyer service that said, “You can stay. You just can’t leave the country and you can’t work. You need to file an adjustment of status.” I enrolled my kids in school four days after we got married once I knew I could stay.
Keith was my best friend, like the person I’ve waited for my whole life. He was everything to me. Things started to change within days of getting married. The way he talked to me, the way he treated me — it was not how it was before. I found evidence on his phone of him being inappropriate with multiple women. He started trying to take things away from me. He had a car for me to drive, which he voluntarily repossessed, leaving me without a car. He tried to have me forcibly removed from our apartment.
We were out one night having a great night, and then it was time to pay. It was like a switch flipped, and he was just angry. He was like, “You’re gonna pay. Go get money now.” I had to walk down to the end of a plaza and get cash out of an ATM, because my Canadian debit cards don’t work in every store here. When I went to pay, he stood there, grabbing my arm and squeezing it down low where no one could see. I said, “I’m not going home with you,” and I walked out of the place. He grabbed me and slammed my head off a brick wall. I was crying and I took off from him. He chased me down the street, got me in a headlock, and dragged me down the road all the way home.
In the beginning, I felt like my legal status was gonna come. Then COVID hit, and that was what he used as an excuse: “We can’t proceed with your final immigration status because of COVID.” So now I’m in this country with him, with no friends, no family. I’m locked down in our home with my kids, without a car, with no access to anything. Then he lost his job. He was like, “Now I can’t file for your permanent residency because I can’t show I can support you.” He was off work April, May, and June, so we were home together all that time, constantly fighting. I had a little bit of savings in my bank account, so I was pretty much floating us for months. Then all my money was gone. I couldn’t get a legal job.
He would say that he was gonna have me deported. I thought they were empty threats. I felt like he was doing it just to bully me, like, You’re gonna behave the way I want you to, or you can leave.
I had my cell phone from Canada, and he used to say to me, “When are you gonna get rid of that? You’re American now.” I was American only when it was convenient for him. My phone plan was Canadian-U.S. long-distance approved, so all my family could still call me. I think he wanted me to have a phone under him so that he could monitor my call logs. One day, he walked in the house with a brand-new cell phone. He said, “You’re American now. Here you go.” No one called me on it except for him. I still kept my other phone. I had it for probably three weeks. I remember waking up and my Canadian phone was laying on the floor by the corner of the bed, smashed. It looked like someone took a hammer to it. I lost all my kids’ photos and files. I was so devastated.
My first husband and I were married for nine years, and he was abusive in every way you could ever imagine: dragging me by my hair to a knife drawer, beating me in front of my kids. Keith was very good to my kids. He wouldn’t be violent to me in front of them. He used to be saved as “Best Dad Ever” in my youngest kid’s phone. But over time, Keith actually ended up being worse than my first husband.
My first husband never secluded me from people. Keith has kept me from my family for six years. He has ruined friendships. He has tried to control me in every sense. Keith knew what I went through, promised to be different, and ended up doing almost the exact same things to me that my first husband did, then also the immigration abuse. I had moments this past year when I felt like I didn’t want to live anymore, and I’ve never felt like that before.
There was always an excuse for not filing for my permanent status. Keith did not file his taxes for five years, because that was an essential piece to getting my final status and also necessary for me to get a driver’s license here. He wouldn’t provide me the documents — kept it all under lock and key. When he was really angry, he’d always say, “Go back to Canada, you effing cunt.” He would say that he was gonna have me deported. I thought they were empty threats. I felt like he was doing it just to bully me, like, You’re gonna behave the way I want you to, or you can leave. Otherwise, it was always: “If I file for your permanent status, you’re just gonna leave me.” He would tell me, “If you ever leave me and I ever see you with another guy, I’m gonna kill him and I’m gonna kill you too.”
All those years, I looked into ways to get out of the marriage and stay in the U.S. I wanted to be able to take care of myself here. I have a home and I have established a life for my children. The only option I ever found was a U visa, where I would have to pursue criminal charges against Keith. I was terrified, like, If I do that, then what happens to me? I don’t know if I can take care of myself without his financial contribution to our life and that stability. Am I gonna be homeless? People kept suggesting that I should file an order of protection, and I kept saying, “I’m not ready.” I wanted to figure out how to leave without him knowing.
In March of this year, the switch flipped for me. I was like, I’m done. I don’t want to be with you anymore and I don’t love you anymore. I started spending time with friends and living my own life. And the more I did that, the more jealous and toxic and violent he got. In May or June I put my situation into ChatGPT, and it came back telling me that there was a path to possibly getting my permanent residency without having to file an order of protection and pursue Keith legally for the abuse. I wasn’t sure it would even work. Finally filing my adjustment of status after all this time — it’s like, It’s been so long. How do I explain? It almost felt safer not to even file.
This Fourth of July, I was laying up in my bedroom. I had such severe anxiety whenever I was home. I hated living in my body. I felt like I wanted to unzip my skin and crawl out. The anxiety was bringing dark thoughts into my head. I kept telling Keith, “You make me not want to be here anymore. I’m so miserable. Why are you doing this to me?” Keith had one of those switch-blade pocket knives. He came up and grabbed me and he held the knife to my throat. He said, “You’re so effin’ depressed, you want to die? Here, end it!” Then he grabbed my hand with the knife in his and held it to his throat. He was like, “Or end me!”
Then, in August, our neighbors got involved in an argument between us, and Keith called the police. When they arrived, I showed them a video of an incident when he kicked open my locked bedroom doors and came after me. I described his abuse, and they said, “We’ve seen this a million times before, and it doesn’t end well. We recommend you file an order of protection immediately.” I ended up filing that night within an hour. He was removed from our home a day and a half later.
When the police came and served Keith the order of protection, he told the sheriffs that I am an illegal immigrant and to report me to ICE. I was not home at the time, but my children were, and I was watching via the security camera. The officer was like, “Well, what do you mean, she’s illegal? She didn’t come here on a visa?” Keith kept saying, “No, she’s not here with anything legally.” Then the sheriff said, “Oh, maybe we will have to report her to ICE.”
To be honest, I never thought that Keith would say something like that and put me and my kids in that kind of jeopardy. He was always a decent stepfather. So when I heard that threat, I was in a panic. Before this year I wouldn’t have feared deportation at all. I’m Canadian — we’re a sister country. I’m basically American. But now I see articles all the time: This Canadian has been deported, and this one’s banned entry, and this one’s being held in detention. I’m thinking, Are my kids gonna get yanked out of school? If someone knocks at my door now, I always look out the window first to check for Keith, for the police, for ICE.
In the month after he was removed, Keith terminated my lease to my house, tried to convince my landlord not to sign a new lease with me, and put my car up for voluntary repossession even though it was awarded to me in the protective order. He closed our joint bank account without my knowledge. He canceled my cable, my internet, my cell phone, my utilities.
The electric account was opened by me, using my Canadian passport. So when I got notice that he was terminating that, I called and tried to explain, “This is a domestic-violence situation. I have kids. I’m the main account holder. Don’t shut it off.” They said to me, “He’s the American. You’re not. He takes precedence over you.” I was beside myself, bawling my eyes out. It’s abundantly clear that now it’s like, If you’re not from here, you don’t belong here.
I started offering house-cleaning services in late 2022, and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since. I can’t go out and just get a second job. I don’t qualify for food stamps or any assistance. It’s on me to take care of my kids and me in a place where I don’t have many options. I have nothing to go back to in Canada. I don’t have a home there. No one in my family would take me in — there would be no space. I don’t have first and last month’s rent for a new place. Once you’ve been out of Canada for seven months, you lose your health insurance, and you also don’t qualify for any government assistance. It’s not like I can send my kids to be with their dad, either, because he was horribly abusive.
If I don’t follow through and get my status here and I were to leave, that would make me an overstay. Are me and my children going to be banned from ever coming back here? They are now 14 and 12. What happens when they grow up and have families of their own, and their spouses and children want to go to Disneyland? I need to see things through. My kids have school, and sports, and friends, and I’ve made friends. We have a life here. And it’s far away from my first ex-husband.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. Names have been changed.