By Zoe Sottile, CNN
(CNN) — As a courtroom interpreter in Texas’ immigration system, it was Meenu Batra’s job to make sure migrants understood the proceedings of immigration court – the good and the bad.
In March, Batra was exposed to the other side of the immigration system when she was detained by the Department of Homeland Security after decades spent living and working in the United States.
Batra, a mother of four US citizens who transitioned to interpreting in other courtrooms after years spent in immigration court, was detained for more than six weeks – a harrowing experience from which she says she’s still recovering.
She came to the US in 1991, she said, a fragile 18-year-old traumatized by the killing of her parents in a spate of anti-Sikh violence in India. She rejoined her older siblings who were already in the US and applied for asylum.
Batra declined to give details about how she entered the US but was given a final order of removal by an immigration judge in 2000, under President Bill Clinton, according to DHS, her attorney and a judge’s ruling in her current case. But the same day, she was granted withholding of removal, a legal protection similar to asylum that says she cannot be deported to India. The government never appealed that decision, and she was released and spent the last 25 years without any formal interactions with immigration authorities, she says.
That’s until March 17, when she was detained at an airport while on her way to interpret Punjabi for a trial in Milwaukee.
DHS called Batra an “illegal alien” and said she was arrested during a “targeted enforcement operation.”
“We will continue to fight for the removal of illegal aliens who have no right to be in our country,” an agency spokesperson said in a statement when asked for comment about Batra.
The Trump administration has continually said officials are focused on deporting the “worst of the worst,” migrants with serious criminal records. But President Donald Trump’s sweeping deportation campaign has seen people with no or minor criminal records detained for weeks on end or deported, too. Many of them have spent years building lives, careers and families in the US, like Batra, whose attorney said has no criminal record.
Batra said her experience in detention has given her even more insight into the experience migrants face in the American court system. In detention, she said, she fought to help other detainees understand their legal rights and advocate for themselves.
Now she hopes her experience will help highlight the ordinary people detained by DHS – and “how we are denying the basic human rights to people who have been and who are part of this society and this country.”
“I’m just hoping that this brings some attention to those who don’t have a voice,” she said.
Hope for a better life
Batra came to the US like many immigrants do: hoping for a better life.
In 1984, Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by two Sikh bodyguards. The killing prompted organized pogroms against Sikhs across the country. Batra’s parents were among those killed, she says.
“I just became numb” after the killings, she said. When she came to the US, “I was leaving everything that was familiar to me, my friends. I didn’t get much chance to say goodbye to many of them.”
Batra spent a few years living on the East Coast before relocating to Texas in 2002. It was in the Lone Star State she first took advantage of her language skills and began working as an interpreter. She lived just 30 minutes from the US-Mexico border, where there were several DHS detention centers – and, she discovered, a need for interpreters of South Asian languages.
Her first experiences working in immigration court were disorienting enough that she considered quitting outright. “You have to go throug