Harjit Kau raises the Sikh community

The visiting room is at the Mesa Verde Ice Processing Center in Bakersfield, California, small, loud and crowded. When the Harjit Kaur family arrived to see it, they could barely hear it – and the first words they discovered destroyed them.

She said: “I prefer to die instead of being in this facility. God may take me now. ”She remembers her amazing daughter, Mangit Core.

Harit Core, 73, who applied for asylum in the United States, lived in California for more than three decades, by American immigration and customs officials (ICE) on September 8, causing shock and sympathy from the Sikh community throughout the state and abroad.

Her lawyer said that Hargate Core had raised many asylum calls over the years, which was rejected, with the last denial in 2012.

Since then, she was asked to inform the immigration authorities every six months. She was arrested in San Francisco when she went to register.

It comes amid a broader campaign by the Donald Trump administration on immigration, especially the alleged illegal immigrants in the United States.

The issue is a sensitive problem – the country is wrestling with how to deal with hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers who reach its borders every year. More than 3.7 million asylum cases suspended in the immigration courts. Increased budget for migration enforcement means that ICE is now the most funded federal law enforcement agency.

Trump said he wanted to deport the “worst for the worst”, but critics say immigrants who do not have criminal records follow legal procedures have been targeted as well.

“More than 70 % of the people who were arrested by ICE have no criminal conviction,” Senator in California Jesse Argoen said in a statement calling for the release of Hargate Cor. “Now, they literally follow quiet grandmothers. This shameful act harms our societies.”

American Congress member John Garhamde, who represents the California region where Hargate Core lives, has applied to ICE for release.

A spokesman said: “The decision of this administration to detain a 73 -year -old woman – a respected member of society. There is no criminal record that has been sincerely informed of the ice every six months for more than 13 years – is another example of the priorities in its place to enforce the Trump immigration.”

In an e -mail statement, Ice BBC told Harjit Kaur “has exhausted contracts of legal procedures” and that the immigration judge had ordered its removal in 2005.

She added: “Harjit Kaur submitted multiple appeals along the way to the Court of Appeal in the ninth circle and lost every time. Now that I have exhausted all legal treatments, ICE imposes American law and the orders of the judge; and no other US tax dollars will be lost.”

Hargate Core came to the United States in 1991 with her minor boy after her husband’s death, her lawyer Deepak Ahlia told the BBC. Her son -in -law Mangit Core said that the young widow wanted to protect her children from political turmoil in Punjab at that time and escape from her.

Over the next three decades, modest jobs have worked to raise her children, one of whom is now an American citizen. Its five grandchildren are also American citizens.

Hargate Core, who lives in the city of Hercules in the San Francisco Bay area, has been working as a sew in a valid store over the past two decades and paid its taxes. Asylum applicants throughout the United States are allowed to live, work and pay taxes legally once their demand is officially submitted.

Even after refusing to resume its final asylum in 2012, the job permit was renewed for her every year.

After rejection, her deportation seemed imminent, but she did not have the correct documents to travel to India.

Indian tasks in the United States are released in emergency certificates – a single -direction travel document – to Indians with an invalid situation to enable them to return. This will require verification of the origin of Harjit Kaur and its identity in Punjab through pictures, cross -selection with relatives, acquaintances, or finding old records, which will take at least a few weeks.

More than a decade since rejection, Harrett Core nor immigration officials in the United States have been able to obtain a travel permit for her. Mangit Core said they visited the Indian consulate in San Francisco in 2013 for this, but it did not succeed. Tell the Consul General in India in San Francisco K. Sri Reidi BBC that they have no record in Hargate Core applied for travel documents to India.

ICE has not answered a question about the reason for not obtaining a travel permit in the past 13 years.

Mr. Ahluwalia said he is following the Indian consulate of documents that “ICE has not been able to buy over the past 13 years.” The consulate says they “facilitate all the necessary consulate assistance.”

Meanwhile, the Harjit Kaur family says she was not wondering about her deportation and should not have been arrested.

“He gave us travel documents and she is ready to go,” said Mangit Cor. “She has even returned her bags in 2012.”

At the present time, their immediate interest is to get it out of the detention center.

“You can put a screen on the ankle on it. We can check for immigration when you want,” said Mangit Cor. “All you have to do is get it out of the facility and when travel documents are presented to us, they will be self -exported to India.”

Her lawyer said that when Hargate Core met on September 15, she was not provided with her usual medicines. He claimed that she was “dragged by the guards”, “he denied a chair or a bed” and was “forced to sit on the floor” for hours in the reservation cell, despite the double replacement of the knee.

He also claimed that she “explicitly refused water” and did not provide a vegetable meal for the first six days.

Ice did not answer specific questions about these allegations, but he previously told BBC Punjabi that “it is a long -term policy, as soon as someone comes to detention of ice, who are granted full health care.”

He added that the detainees can reach “medical dates and emergency care for 24 hours” and no one is forbidden to “basic care at any time during detention.”

Kulvinder Singh Pannu, Chairman of the Gurdwara Committee at the Sikh Center in the San Francisco Bay area, says Bibi Harjit (a respectable way to refer to the elderly Punjabi woman) is loved in the area.

“I have always helped people in our society with everything they had financially,” he said.

He said, referring to September 12, outside the Sikh temple in California: “A few hundred people themselves came to protest against their arrest,” in reference to September 12, outside the Sikh temple in California.

With the uncertainty, Harjit Kaur supporters plan to hold more protests, including in other American cities, where many said they did not hint their ordeal.

The single mother, Hargate Core has formed deep roots and relations in the United States over the past thirty years. Ahlia says that her parents and siblings in India were not alive.

“She does not have anyone, no house, no land to return to it.”

Follow BBC News India Instagramand YouTube, twitter and Facebook.