Challenges in finding the people who paid to release detainees and long delays are affecting impoverished families who expected to get their bond money back, advocates say.
María Sosa stands with her husband, José Alberto, at their apartment in Panorama City, a Los Angeles neighborhood. Sosa waited months to receive the bond money she posted for her husband. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is holding on to more than $200 million in bond money that belongs to immigrants who have been in the agency’s custody, cash that has yet to be returned to thousands of immigrant families or the U.S.
Numerous immigration attorneys said the system for reclaiming the funds is mystifying and nearly impossible to navigate without a lawyer or English-language proficiency, and some who pay the bonds are unlikely to see the money again. As bond amounts remain on the rise, lawyers said thousands of people are putting their life savings in ICE’s hands to secure an immigrant’s temporary freedom without any idea of when or if they’ll see the money again.
So they started pooling money: Three thousand from an aunt. Four thousand from a cousin. Eight thousand from Rojas’s closest friend. Sums that drove each into debt.A Guatemalan migrant and his 10-year-old son look at the Miami cityscape outside an immigration courthouse in January. Some immigrants who are required to pay bond have to make difficult decisions about posting the cash payments, knowing they might not see the money back for years.
Mendez said many immigrants don’t know that once the bond is posted, only the person who posted the bond can get it back. “One friend who I owe money won’t even speak to me, because he doesn’t trust me anymore,” El Verengue said, whose application for asylum is pending. “ICE does not notify the alien for whom the bond was executed, because its contract is with the obligor,” ICE said in a statement.
Bonds can be breached for reasons such as failure to show up in court or failure to turn the immigrant over to authorities if ICE asks the obligor to do so. But there can also be mistakes. Mendez recalled a case in which ICE breached her client’s bond for failure to show up to be deported — but her client was still appealing the removal order, and ICE had apparently missed that information, according to 2015 correspondence with ICE she provided to The Post.
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