A mistake by ICE put her husband in jail. She got him back 3 weeks later.

Yahoo

13 hours ago

In the early morning light outside O'Hare International Airport, Cynthia Myers was dressed like a bride.
Her long white dress seemed curiously out of place Friday on the curb outside Terminal 3, but Myers didn't seem to notice; the man in the slightly loose black suit had her full attention.
After three weeks in a Louisiana jail — because of an apparent error by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — Cheikh Fall had finally come home to his wife. On his overnight flights from Monroe, Louisiana, to Dallas and then Indianapolis, he wore the same suit he'd had on when immigration authorities wrongfully arrested him outside his asylum hearing in the Chicago Immigration Court on June 4.
It took more than $12,000 and 23 sleepless nights, but Myers got her husband back. She knew he would be wearing the suit so she dressed up like his newlywed bride to celebrate the reunion she gleefully dubbed their 'remarriage.'
Myers couldn't stop laughing.
'I'm so happy,' she said, over and over again.
For three weeks, she hadn't been. She and her children have become one of the thousands of families in the United States affected by the Trump administration's intensified deportation efforts.
Last week, ICE was holding close to 59,000 detainees nationwide, CBS reported, almost half of them with clean criminal records — stretching its system to 140% of capacity.
The day of Fall's routine asylum hearing, Myers was nervous. She said she was well aware of recent ICE activity and asked her husband if he thought it was the right move to go to an immigration hearing.
Fall was adamant that he attend, she said, and confident that he was not at risk of arrest. After all, he had never broken the law.
In fact, the June 4 hearing in Chicago's immigration court went well. The judge, encouraged by Fall's marriage to an American citizen, moved up Fall's asylum merits hearing — which will decide his refugee status — from 2029 to July 2026.
So when federal immigration authorities seized Fall as he and his wife walked out of the courtroom, Myers said confusion was the first feeling that hit her — not least because the agents were out of uniform. She tried to grab hold of her husband, but an agent told her to back away.
'Don't interfere with a federal crime,' she remembered him saying.
Myers, a mother of three and a full-time solar panel electrician who grew up navigating and surviving the state's foster care system, felt helpless.
'It's the uncertainty that's super devastating,' said Myers, 43, of the South Shore neighborhood.
In an online bond hearing Tuesday, Fall's lawyer, Carla Casas, convinced a judge that immigration agents were never supposed to arrest Fall. The judge ordered that he be released from Richwood Correctional Center on a $2,000 bond. The minimum for his release was $1,500.
Immigration experts said that procedural errors from ICE are not uncommon, but the sheer volume of recent arrests has amplified them. In March, the U.S. charged 4,550 defendants with criminal immigration charges, the immigration data center known as TRAC reported, indicating a 36.6% increase from February.
And while incidents of errors are increasing, the opportunity to catch them is becoming more limited, experts said.
'When you're trying to do anything on a massive scale, you're going to make mistakes,' Nicole Hallett, director and scholar at the Immigrants' Rights Clinic, said.
Casas said she sees plenty of immigration cases where ICE agents get things wrong on I-213 forms — or 'records of inadmissible aliens,' documents on which the the Department of Homeland Security bases deportations. But even she was surprised by the magnitude of the error that detained Fall: She said the basis of his arrest and three-week detention was his I-213, prepared by ICE, indicating his asylum case had been dismissed. It never had been.
'The shock is the fact that they got something so big so wrong,' Casas said.
A spokesperson for ICE said he could not immediately comment on the case.
Wednesday morning, Myers paid the bond and was trying to figure out how to get Fall out of jail. She called the correctional center and was told to fill out a form online and await an email response. After three weeks of waiting, she had to wait some more. He was finally released Thursday night.
'I've never been through anything like this,' Myers said. 'They don't give you any information … so I'm just at a loss.'
Myers said she's never been good at waiting around. She's the kind of woman who drives her three children around in an electrician's truck and clambers onto rooftops to repair solar panels singlehandedly.
She doesn't like to ask for help either, she said, and rarely needs to. Until she met her husband, Myers was good on her own.
But finding Fall, Myers said, was like 'finally finding a home.'
Myers doesn't usually go to the gym; her job at Windfree Solar keeps her active enough. Yet in October 2023, on one of the rare days Myers found herself at the Kenwood Planet Fitness, she met the man she would marry.
Fall was working as a bodyguard for a politician in Senegal when he was shot and kidnapped by his boss's political opponents. After narrowly escaping, Fall fled Senegal to seek asylum in the United States.
'He came to America because we're supposed to be a welcoming country,' Myers said.
In April 2023, Fall arrived in New York City, where he lived in a shelter for six months. In October of the same year, he moved to Chicago. Within a month of arriving, he saw Myers working out at the Planet Fitness and asked her to go on a date. They went to a popcorn shop down the street.
The couple were married Feb. 1, 2024. Her independence never waned, but Myers got used to having someone else to rely on. Fall worked as a security guard for Narrow Security and started his own small company, too. As Myers' partner, he lightened her load: Fall helped run errands, pick up her kids and pay bills. Her children love him — especially her two sons, 8 and 10, who — until June 4 — hung out and played video games with their stepfather all the time.
'He's literally the best person I know,' Myers said of her husband. 'He's selfless. He'll go out of his way to help people, even when he can barely help himself.'
Fall and Myers have spent most Friday nights since they got married preparing food for the homeless at a shelter in Indiana.
Before June 4, Myers said she almost never cried. But 12 days after Fall was taken from her, Myers' left eye was rubbed raw.
She was exhausted from a lack of sleep and had barely eaten in days. Her daughter, 17, started helping with her little brothers' meals. Though it was hard to focus, Myers said she stayed busy with work, needing her steady income now more than ever.
Windfree Solar took on some of Myers' financial burden, including Casas' $3,000 flat rate. Some of Myers' colleagues set up a GoFundMe for continuing legal fees and Fall's bond; the site had raised $1,336 as of Wednesday.
But even with all the help from her colleagues, Myers said she is floundering to find the rest of the money she needs for Fall's case. For an asylum lawyer, bond and myriad procedural fees from the last three weeks — with Casas' bill — it's a $12,000 ordeal, she said, and all to pay for someone else's error.
Fall's three weeks in custody meant sharing a room with approximately 50 other men in beige prison suits, he said. They were in one room where they not only slept but also ate and used the bathroom in it.
Fall suffers from asthma, and the lack of fresh air made it hard for him to breathe. He was let outside for just minutes a day.
'I need air,' he said on a phone call from Richwood Correctional Center two weeks ago. 'That's why I'm scared here.'
Still, like Myers, Fall knows how to endure. His job as a security guard often puts him in dangerous situations — he was stabbed in November while working security at a Walgreens.
Like many people arrested by ICE, Fall was held at the Broadview Detention Center in Illinois — where he slept on the floor for a night — before being transferred briefly to Texas and then Louisiana. Illinois' 2021 Way Forward Act means there are no detention centers in the state, which is why detainees are almost always transferred to neighboring states. Texas and Louisiana, however, aren't exactly close to Chicago.
According to Hallett, Chicago residents like Fall are being transferred so far out of state because the 5th Circuit — where Richwood Correctional Center is — has more immigrant detention facilities than most other parts of the country. Louisiana alone has 12 to Illinois' zero.
'ICE has very broad authority to move people wherever they want, whenever they want,' Hallett said.
Additionally, judges in the 5th Circuit tend to refuse relief more than judges in the 7th Circuit, which includes Illinois, according to TRAC data.
For a long time, Fall had no idea how long he would be in jail. Casas had to call the 5th Circuit court multiple times before Tuesday to remind them to put his case on the docket.
It was finally scheduled for June 24, but ICE did not make Fall's I-213 available until the morning of the hearing. Casas was left to speculate how the Department of Homeland Security would argue for Fall's deportation, until Tuesday, when she realized that the document included false information.
The judge presiding over the bond hearing, Allan John-Baptiste, ruled in Fall's favor, though he did not grant Casas' request for minimum bond.
John-Baptiste also rescheduled Fall's master asylum hearing from July 2026 to this coming November, and moved it from the Chicago Immigration Court to one in Jena, Louisiana. If Fall does not petition for his case to be moved back to Chicago, John-Baptiste will hear his asylum case, rather than Gina Reynolds, the judge who moved up his Chicago hearing. Between 2019 and 2024, Reynolds granted asylum to defendants far more frequently than John-Baptiste did, data shows.
In some ways, Fall is lucky — at least, compared with other detainees. Thousands of people arrested by ICE don't get an attorney, because unlike in criminal court, defendants don't have a right to appointed counsel. Many of them are given higher bonds that they can't afford to pay.
Some will unwittingly sign the self-deportation form that Myers warned her husband against. Most people don't have a Cynthia Myers on their side.
'I'm still sad, because other people are going through it,' Myers said Friday.
If it weren't for her, ICE's mistake might have led to a worse fate for Fall. Even now, the freshly reunited couple is wary this could happen again.