This interpreter helped migrants navigate immigration court. Then she was detained by DHS

By Zoe Sottile, CNN

(CNN) — As a courtroom interpreter in Texas’ immigration system, it was Meenu Batra’s job to make sure migrants understood the proceedings of immigration court – the good and the bad.

In March, Batra was exposed to the other side of the immigration system when she was detained by the Department of Homeland Security after decades spent living and working in the United States.

Batra, a mother of four US citizens who transitioned to interpreting in other courtrooms after years spent in immigration court, was detained for more than six weeks – a harrowing experience from which she says she’s still recovering.

She came to the US in 1991, she said, a fragile 18-year-old traumatized by the killing of her parents in a spate of anti-Sikh violence in India. She rejoined her older siblings who were already in the US and applied for asylum.

Batra declined to give details about how she entered the US but was given a final order of removal by an immigration judge in 2000, under President Bill Clinton, according to DHS, her attorney and a judge’s ruling in her current case. But the same day, she was granted withholding of removal, a legal protection similar to asylum that says she cannot be deported to India. The government never appealed that decision, and she was released and spent the last 25 years without any formal interactions with immigration authorities, she says.

That’s until March 17, when she was detained at an airport while on her way to interpret Punjabi for a trial in Milwaukee.

DHS called Batra an “illegal alien” and said she was arrested during a “targeted enforcement operation.”

“We will continue to fight for the removal of illegal aliens who have no right to be in our country,” an agency spokesperson said in a statement when asked for comment about Batra.

The Trump administration has continually said officials are focused on deporting the “worst of the worst,” migrants with serious criminal records. But President Donald Trump’s sweeping deportation campaign has seen people with no or minor criminal records detained for weeks on end or deported, too. Many of them have spent years building lives, careers and families in the US, like Batra, whose attorney said has no criminal record.

Batra said her experience in detention has given her even more insight into the experience migrants face in the American court system. In detention, she said, she fought to help other detainees understand their legal rights and advocate for themselves.

Now she hopes her experience will help highlight the ordinary people detained by DHS – and “how we are denying the basic human rights to people who have been and who are part of this society and this country.”

“I’m just hoping that this brings some attention to those who don’t have a voice,” she said.

Hope for a better life

Batra came to the US like many immigrants do: hoping for a better life.

In 1984, Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by two Sikh bodyguards. The killing prompted organized pogroms against Sikhs across the country. Batra’s parents were among those killed, she says.

“I just became numb” after the killings, she said. When she came to the US, “I was leaving everything that was familiar to me, my friends. I didn’t get much chance to say goodbye to many of them.”

Batra spent a few years living on the East Coast before relocating to Texas in 2002. It was in the Lone Star State she first took advantage of her language skills and began working as an interpreter. She lived just 30 minutes from the US-Mexico border, where there were several DHS detention centers – and, she discovered, a need for interpreters of South Asian languages.

Her first experiences working in immigration court were disorienting enough that she considered quitting outright. “You have to go through security. It was always nerve-wracking,” she said. “And then you see the detainees coming. Sometimes they will be in chains. And you wonder, ‘Why are they in chains?’”

But she came to see the importance of making sure migrants were able to understand the proceedings and meaningfully participate in their own cases. “It was always satisfying when I was able to give them good news,” she said.

She became the only certified Hindi, Punjabi and Urdu courtroom interpreter in all of Texas, she said, and interpreted for countless immigration cases before transitioning to work in district and state courts just before Trump took office for his first term. Her work as an interpreter instilled a deep sense of respect for the American legal system, she said, a feeling that “there’s a right way to do things, and that’s exactly what I’ve been trying to do for 35 years.”

Falling ‘into a black hole’

When Batra was arrested at Valley International Airport in Harlingen, Texas, she said she felt like she was falling “into a black hole.”

“Fear” and “numbness” poured through her body as an officer asked her to step outside of the Transportation Security Administration line and later handcuffed her outside the airport.

And on her mind, too, was the Milwaukee jury trial for which she was hired to interpret: “It had never happened before that I was ever late for my work, and now I’m going to be a no-show,” she remembers thinking. The scarcity of certified interpreters of South Asian languages across the US often leads Batru to travel out of state for work.

Until she arrived at the detention center, she had kept a hope that “this was just a big mistake” – that officers would look at her Real ID and her work authorization documents and let her go.

Instead, she was processed at the El Valle Detention Center in Raymondville, Texas, where she would spend 45 “long, strange days.”

Batra’s attorney, Deepak Ahluwalia, said he believed she was targeted at the airport based on the flight’s manifesto. He cited a Reuters review of internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement data that found TSA shared over 31,000 traveler records with ICE for immigration enforcement, leading to over 800 arrests. DHS didn’t respond to questions from CNN about whether TSA shared her information with ICE but repeated Batra was targeted for being in the US “illegally,” putting the word in bold in its reply.

The process of being arrested, processed and detained was “humiliating,” Batra said.

“You just become smaller and smaller with each moment. Even way before I was in a cell, you start feeling imprisoned already.”

As a fluent English speaker who understood immigration laws from her years spent working as a courtroom interpreter, Batra said she saw herself as a person of “privilege” in the detention center, with a responsibility to help other detainees understand their rights and advocate for themselves. Some detainees had been behind bars for years, she said.

Because she was granted withholding of removal to India, Batra said, she was scared she would be deported to a conflict-ridden country to which she had no ties – like South Sudan or Congo, to which the US has deported people.

A federal judge ruled the administration’s practice of third-party deportations unlawful in February. The State Department, which negotiates agreements for countries to accept third-country deportees from the US, has broadly defended the practice, according to The Associated Press.

‘A new reality’

In the days after she was detained, Batra called her adult daughter – a challenging reversal of her usual role as a single mom who prided herself on providing support and stability for her children – who quickly hired an immigration lawyer to fight for her mother’s release. The legal team filed on March 26 a petition for habeas corpus, a form of relief whose use has skyrocketed in immigration cases since Trump took office again.

Federal judge Rolando Olvera granted Batra’s request for a temporary restraining order on April 30, ordering DHS to release her and not detain her again “until they have provided her with notice of the reasons for re-detention and an opportunity to respond.”

The judge wrote that Batra “was arrested and detained for no discernible reason, with no identified change in circumstance bearing on the likelihood of removal.”

Batra said she didn’t quite believe she was really free until her daughter was driving her away from the detention center. She broke down crying – the culmination of weeks spent away from her family.

The temporary restraining order preventing Batra from being detained is set to expire May 27. Ahluwalia, her attorney, says he expects the habeas petition will be ruled in their favor, keeping Batra out of detention.

But the ramifications of her detention are long-lasting. Batra said her daughter has struggled to sleep through the night in the days since her mother returned home. She jumps when a car passes on the street out of fear that “somebody is coming to get mom,” said Batra.

“It’s a new reality we’re living in,” she said. Living close to the border, DHS vehicles and officers are a frequent sight – and a potent reminder of Batra’s ordeal and her still uncertain future.

One of Batra’s sons joined the military months before her detention, which may provide a pathway for the interpreter to pursue a green card through the parole-in-place program, according to Ahluwalia.

Ahluwalia said he was “shocked” by the government’s efforts to detain and deport Batra. “I do believe that we need to bring, you know, compassion and the human element back to immigration enforcement,” he said. “Otherwise, we’re going to lose ourselves.”

Batra, meanwhile, said she has kept her faith in America’s ideals.

The country “is based on people who want to work hard, and that is a fundamental human right — that we can dream and make attempts to live a better life for ourselves,” she said.

“I believe we must stand up for those ideals, to protect those and to make sure that they are there for other generations that are coming.”

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