A woman who has held United States permanent residency since 2013 has been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in North Carolina, and is being held at a detention centre in Georgia. Venkata Vasamsetty was taken in at a scheduled immigration appointment. The Indian Express reports that this happened some months after an immigration judge dismissed the deportation case the government had brought against her.
The government's case was that she had abandoned her permanent residency. She travelled to India in July 2022 to see her father, who was seriously ill. She caught Covid that November and was hospitalised there, which delayed her return. An absence of more than six months can raise the question of whether a permanent resident meant to give up residence in the United States, and that is the ground the government used. Her lawyer and her family dispute it, and say her employment, her home and her family kept her tied to the country throughout.
How long she has lived in the United States is one of the few things the two Indian papers do not agree on. The Indian Express says twenty-seven years; the Times of India says thirty. Neither shows how it counted. What both give is the same year for the green card, 2013.
The rest of the detail is domestic and specific. She teaches in the Wake County public school system in North Carolina and works with special-needs students. She owns a house there. Her two daughters are American citizens, and so are her grandchildren. One of the daughters is an immigration attorney licensed in Texas and New Jersey. The family says she has no criminal record of any kind, and it is now collecting signatures in a campaign for her release.
Why it is on the board
It was second on the Indian Express most-read list and also on the Times of India's when we collected, and it is the first Indian story to reach this board on two reading lists.
The two headlines are not carrying the same thing. The Times of India one adds a fact the Indian Express one leaves out — that one of her daughters is an immigration attorney.
확인: Indian Express · Times of India