In Trump’s Deportation Push, Lawyers Often Don’t Know Where Their Clients Have Gone

The administration is pulling immigrants off the street and into a network of detention centers and private prisons with speed that is frequently leaving their advocates in the dark.

President Donald Trump waves to supporters.

Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP

The Trump administration has in the last few weeks cemented a new hallmark of its immigration enforcement policy: Federal officers across the country have taken immigrants from airports, streets and their homes and routed them into a sprawling and far-flung detention system, often without even their own attorneys knowing where they’ve gone.

When customs officers at Boston’s Logan International Airport spotted the gooey sack of frog embryos in Kseniia Petrova’s luggage in February, they could have issued her a ticket and sent her on her way. At worst, it would have disappointed the scientist overseeing her research at Harvard Medical School and the friends she’d just made in Paris at the Institut Curie research center who’d given her the fertilized eggs. Instead, a Customs and Border Protection officer detained her and started Petrova on a journey that sent her to a small mountain town in Vermont, then 1,300 miles south to a privately-run prison in suburban Louisiana — one accused of mistreatment that led to the suicide of a Cuban asylum seeker trapped in solitary confinement there in 2019.

She’s now been behind bars for 44 days for not filling out customs paperwork correctly.

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