Chicago

By keeping an appointment in immigration court, Valentina Galvis wound up being arrested by ICE agents and trapped in a hotel-room limbo with no way to let her husband or lawyer know where she was. ICE wasn’t telling them. In fact, it was misleading them.

Her story began in 2022 when, after a brutal assault by members of a Colombian paramilitary gang, Galvis fled the country for the United States with her husband Camilo. Three years later, as she told a reporter for The Intercept, Galvis showed up, with her seven-month-old son Naythan, for a hearing in Chicago’s immigration court.

Her husband, now working as a long-haul truckdriver, had been granted political asylum, which made Galvis hopeful about her own prospects. But the judge wound up dismissing her case at the urging of federal prosecutors, and when she left the courtroom, plainclothes ICE agents were waiting to arrest her and begin the deportation process.

Galvis used her one allowed phone call to contact her husband, informing him that ICE would be flying her to a Texas detention facility – the only facility in the country, she had been told, set up to handle a parent with a small child. 

That wasn’t what actually happened, though. Galvis and her baby were turned over to representatives of a private company, MVM, which had contracted with ICE to transport and house detainees. MVM moved her to a hotel room near O’Hare Airport.

This time there were no phone privileges – her room didn’t even have a phone. Galvis had no way of reaching her husband or her lawyer, and they had no way of reaching her, or, for that matter, of determining where she was. ICE maintains a detainee-locator database, but, for no apparent reason, it had her listed as being held in Washington, DC.

The only people Galvis had contact with during this period were a pair of MVM employees named Lori and Alejandro. She got conflicting information from them: at one point, she told The Intercept, she was under the impression that she was about to be deported back to Colombia; later, her handlers spoke once again of sending her to Texas. 

On Day 5, Lori and Alejandro escorted her out of the hotel and into a car for what turned out to be a forty-minute drive. Since they wouldn’t say where they were headed, Galvis found herself frenetically worried that her son would be taken from her. “I don’t think I could have survived that,” she said.

Their destination turned out to be a Department of Homeland Security office in downtown Chicago. There, officials returned her possessions, including, to her relief, documents identifying her son as a U.S. citizen. She left with an electronic bracelet on her wrist and instructions to check in regularly. During her detention, her lawyer had succeeded in reviving her asylum case. She’ll be back in court in January.

Posted on August 9, 2025