Faith leaders and advocates gathered outside 26 Federal Plaza on Saturday morning to denounce the Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainment of a young college student from South Korea and a Peruvian immigrant, who were both arrested by agents as they left their routine court hearings Thursday.
Gabriela Lopez said her best friend, 20-year-old Yeonsoo Go, had some anxiety ahead of her Thursday morning court hearing, having read about mass ICE arrests at city immigration courthouses amid the Trump administration’s ramped-up deportation campaign.
“We’ve talked about it, and she has been a little nervous. And reasonably so,” Lopez, 19 said. “I spoke to her the night before over text and I was, like, ‘You’re gonna be fine. Everything’s gonna be fine.’ Everything is not fine.”
At the hearing, an immigration judge gave Go another court date because her lawyer didn’t show, but agents grabbed her anyway, according to Go’s boyfriend, Leo Cho.
“Right after she got it rescheduled, right outside was ICE. They took her,” Cho,18, told the Daily News. “She was with her mom, too, so her mom was there for the whole thing.”
Go immigrated from Seoul with her mother, an Episcopal priest, on a religious visa roughly four years ago, and was in the process of switching to a student visa. After finishing her freshman year at Purdue University, where she is studying to become a pharmacist, Go was back home in Scarsdale, Westchester County, with her mother for the summer.
Go has been held on the 10th floor of 26 Federal Plaza since, and complained to her mother on the phone that they “barely let her have her glasses,” Lopez said. She also hasn’t been given a change of clothes.
“Her mom is really in denial, she’s heartbroken,” Cho said. “She called me later that day and she was breaking down. I can’t imagine how mentally tough that is on a mother.”
Lopez described her pal as an extremely bright young woman with a heart of gold.
“I know if she was here today she’d probably be very upset that I’m crying,” Lopez said, a tear rolling down her cheek. “It’s honestly very, very devastating to lose someone so important to me. It’s not fair that you should go to a court hearing and then you step out … and you’re detained. It’s not right.”
Go’s mother, who was too bereft to speak to the media Saturday, was able to tell Go on the phone that they’d be rallying to demand her release Saturday morning.
“She knows we’re here, and that means the world,” one speaker told the roughly 75 supporters who showed.
A 59-year-old Peruvian asylum seeker named Ketty was also arrested by federal agents as she left a routine asylum hearing Thursday.
The woman’s priest, Este Gardner, said Ketty worked at her family’s very successful bakery in Peru, until “organized thugs” threatened them with violence and even death, if they didn’t pay them a large sum of money, forcing them to scatter and flee the country.
“Ketty is a kind, gentle, funny, very hardworking person in so many of the ministries in our church community,” Gardner, 75, said. “Everyone is devastated.”
After crossing the border alone and arriving in New York three years ago, Ketty applied for asylum.
“Every single thing they asked her to do, she did,” Gardner said. “She filled out all the paperwork, she was extremely careful to follow every directive that she got.”
Ketty’s next court date was set for October, but she received a call last week and someone told her to come Thursday instead.
“She was very excited. ‘It’s really moving along,’ she thought,” Gardner said. “She went to the hearing and afterwards she was detained, with so many others.”
New York Immigration Coalition President Murad Awawdeh decried the two women’s arrests, saying they are part of a larger “system of injustice.”
“They are showing up, following the rules of the letter of the law,” Awawdeh said. “And what is this telling people? That if you go to your court hearing, you may not make it out, but if you miss it, you definitely will be deported? This is not a system of justice. This is a system of injustice. We are calling for people’s rights to be upheld. We are calling for due process to be respected and upheld.”
ICE and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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