A Canadian woman was put in chains and detained by ICE in an “inhumane” facility after trying to get her new visa, it was revealed Wednesday.
Jasmine Mooney, 35, was working in Los Angeles for the health tonic beverage company she co-founded. But her visa was revoked while she was visiting home in Vancouver, British Columbia. She learned that she had lost legal status when she attempted to board a flight in Vancouver and was refused entry to the U.S. Vancouver has U.S. border agents stationed at the airport.
“They told me I was unprofessional because I didn’t have a proper letterhead on my paperwork,” Mooney told KGTV. She was told to to go to a U.S. consulate to apply for legal status to work in the country again.
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Desperate to return to LA, she decided to try her luck at getting a new visa at a southern border crossing. So on Monday she traveled to San Ysidro, the U.S.-Mexico border crossing near San Diego county, armed with her new job offer and visa paperwork. San Ysidro is where she had been granted her first visa and where her first attorney told her to go.
Immigration lawyer Len Saunders told CityNews Vancouver the crossing had been used for years successfully but he advised her against it.
“Jasmine mentioned she was going to San Ysidro," Saunders said. “I said, ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea with this new administration and the political climate... I just have a bad feeling from when the new administration took over.’”
At San Ysidro, instead of telling Mooney to leave, Customs and Border Patrol officers refused to let her turn back to Mexico and detained her. She said she was kept in a cold room by the Customs and Border Protection (CBP). She was then arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) who threw her into San Diego’s Otay Mesa Detention Center.
“I was put in a cell, and I had to sleep on a mat with no blanket, no pillow, with an aluminum foil wrapped over my body like a dead body for two and a half days,” she told San Diego’s KGTV.
She also told KGTV that the food was awful. Brian Todd, a spokesperson for the private company that owns the facility, said nutritious food options are reviewed and approved on a regular basis.
“I can confirm that any claim that foil blankets are used at our Otay Mesa Detention Center is absolutely false,” Todd told the Daily Beast in an email. “It is important to know our immigration facilities provide a safe, humane and appropriate environment for the individuals in our care.”
Todd added that the center operates with a “significant amount of oversight and accountability” and adhere to ICE standards. It is also monitored by ICE on a daily basis.
“Our immigration facilities are also audited regularly and without notice several times a year, and we’re routinely visited by elected officials, attorneys, families and volunteers,” he told the Beast.
In the middle of the night on March 9, Mooney and 30 other women were transferred from the San Diego facility to a detention center in San Luis, Arizona. Conditions were not any better, said Mooney. In fact, the Canadian entrepreneur said she’s never in her life seen anything so inhumane.
“We were up for 24 hours wrapped in chains,” she added.
Mooney was on a NAFTA professional visa, or a nonimmigrant visa that allows Canadian professionals to work in the United States’ business sector.
She said she is now stuck inside the Arizona detention center and fighting every day to leave.
“Every single guard that sees me is like ‘What are you doing here? I don’t understand—you’re Canadian. How are you here?" she said.
She said she’s appalled by the way the center treats the immigrants.
Her close friend, Brittany Kors of Vancouver, said she feels “helpless.”
“We don’t know what the next steps are,” she said. “We don’t even know the reason why they are holding her there.”
CBP did not mention the reason Mooney was detained. KGTV reported that it may have been due to her Holy! Water beverages, which sometimes contain Delta-9 “full spectrum hemp.” Products with hemp and Delta 9-THC are legal if they contain no more than 0.3 percent THC.
The Canadian government said it knows about Mooney’s detention and is working to get more information from officials in Arizona. “Every country or territory decides who can enter or exit through its borders,” Global Affairs Canada spokeswoman Brittany Fletcher told KGTV.
The detention of Mooney comes as in President Donald Trump mounts a large-scale immigration crackdown and efforts to “seal the border.” The Daily Beast has reached out to ICE for comment.
