A teenage asylum applicant from Massachusetts is being held at the Cumberland County Jail at the request of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, her former attorney said.
Zeneyda Barrera Hernandez, an 18-year-old resident of Lynn, Massachusetts, was being held by federal authorities without bail, according to the jail’s booking records. She was booked on Monday in Massachusetts by immigration officers and transferred out of state, despite being in the country legally, said Patrick Callahan, who briefly served as her attorney.
“She’s a young girl who’s a student, who works, never been in any trouble before,” Callahan said. “Her mother and her brother are really just torn to pieces over this.”
Barrera Hernandez and her family came to the United States from Nicaragua more than a year ago, he said.
The woman was arrested by officers with the Lynn Police Department early Monday after she allegedly got into a fight with her 12-year-old brother over a cellphone, Callahan said. When police arrived, the boy told them he was not injured, and officers observed no injuries, but they decided to arrest her anyway, he said.
Callahan said he and the local district attorney agreed that “it was a pretty low-level offense,” and they intended to place Barrera Hernandez into the county’s diversion program, which is open to first-time, nonviolent offenders.
“What that does is it stops the case. She wasn’t even going to be arraigned on it,” Callahan said.
Barrera Hernandez was released at around 11:30 a.m. Monday, but ICE agents were waiting for her in the lockup, Callahan said.
“I didn’t even get a chance to speak to her before she was taken away,” he said in a phone call Wednesday. “I was not aware that ICE was in the building looking for her until they had already taken her.”
Callahan said he was assigned the woman’s case after 10 a.m. Monday and only briefly spoke with her, communicating through an interpreter. He told her about the diversion program, and she agreed to participate, he said.
“I’m 100% certain that she would have been successful,” he said. “But ICE had different plans.”
Callahan said he only learned that Barrera Hernandez had been transferred to Maine when contacted by a reporter Wednesday morning. He had been searching — without any luck — for her name in the ICE detainee locator system, he said.
Some ICE detainees are kept in the Plymouth County Correctional Facility in Massachusetts. Callahan said he did not know why the woman was taken to Maine instead of being kept in-state.
Callahan said it was unclear what grounds the federal government has to hold Barrera Hernandez, who was granted a work permit and permission to stay in the country while her application for full asylum is being reviewed.
Barrera Hernandez’s detention comes as President Donald Trump has issued a series of executive orders aimed at curtailing illegal immigration and increasing deportations, creating fear and alarm in immigrant communities nationwide two weeks into his term. But ICE detainees have been held at the Cumberland County Jail for years, Sheriff Kevin Joyce said.
“Additionally, we have an ICE agent working in the jail for about 20 hours per week, to help process the detainees, help them understand the court process and when their impending court date is,” Joyce said. “The relationship (with ICE) is much like the (jail’s) relationship with other law enforcement agencies.”
Joyce referred questions about why Barrera Hernandez was transferred to Maine to ICE, saying he was “not privy to that information.”
“Zeneyda Barrera Hernandez is being held on an ICE hold. What occurred beforehand, that is a question for ICE,” Joyce said in an email Wednesday night.
ICE did not return emailed questions asking why Barrera Hernandez was detained, and a spokesperson for the Lynn Police Department did not return a call asking for details on the department’s relationship with immigration officials.
The jail began taking in federal inmates last year via a contract with the U.S. Marshals Service, resurrecting a practice that had been temporarily suspended in 2022. That contract reserves 86 beds for men and 10 for women. The contract is convenient for the federal government, due to the jail’s proximity to the federal court house in Portland, and it’s a strong source of revenue for the jail, Joyce told the Press Herald in August.
As of Wednesday morning, the jail held 57 ICE inmates, Joyce said.
Callahan said he provided Barrera Hernandez’s mother with the phone number for a local immigration attorney on Monday, but he was not sure whether they had connected.
Barrera Hernandez comes from a “very tight-knit” family, Callahan said.
“Her brother is really taking this very hard,” he said. “He’s putting a lot of guilt on himself over this, and it’s really not fair.”
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