CHARLESTON, S.C. (WCIV) — On Mother’s Day 1991, longtime Hanahan resident Michael Chiaromonte returned to the United States after serving in the Gulf War. 35 years later, his wife Rosalba, a mother of four who immigrated to America in 1971, spent Mother’s Day in an ICE detention center 300 miles away.Rosalba “Rose” Chiaromonte came to the US from Fondi, Italy, a city nestled halfway between Rome and Naples, when she was just three years old. Over the last five decades, she gained legal permanent resident status, married Michael, and raised four children, one of which, as a US Marine, was awarded two Purple Hearts. Her husband lives with post-traumatic stress disorder and Gulf War illness, which the US Department of Veterans Affairs defines as a prominent condition that can contain multiple chronic symptoms including fatigue, headaches, joint pain, and more. Rosalba is his primary caretaker, or as Michael puts it, his “copilot.”He said that immigration officials sent his wife a letter that stated she needed to come in for an appointment as part of the renewal process for her green card, which he added was not supposed to expire until 2028. “We just thought maybe they were doing something because of everything that’s been going on in the country, that they wanted to get a head start because it’s usually a six month time frame,” he recalled.The Chiaromontes checked in and, after a lengthy wait, were eventually brought back. That was when they realized they weren’t there for the reasons stated in the letter they received the week prior, Michael said. In 2015, Rosalba was arrested for pointing and presenting a firearm. Reports claim she walked out on a bill at a Rivers Avenue Mexican restaurant, but in 2017 her case was disposed after she pleaded guilty, and she was sentenced to one year suspended to one year of probation. She completed her probation without incident. This charge from over 11 years ago is what caught the attention of ICE, Chiaromonte said. In the years following that incident in 2015, Rosalba also renewed her green card, her husband added. During that renewal process, as well as her applying for and receiving credentials to access Joint Base Charleston to take him to the doctor and even purchase him a weapon for his birthday, Michael said nothing came up regarding her criminal case.“They just take you away, you know?" Michael said. "And not even give me any type of explanation, and then to lead somebody on a goose chase like they did for me, it just doesn’t make any sense.”The Goose ChaseChiaromonte said that during the appointment, he was told the expungement paperwork from his wife’s court case was incorrectly notarized. He said that ICE instructed him to pick up the proper expungement paperwork from the Charleston courthouse downtown and his wife would be waiting for him in the lobby, but she couldn’t go with him. As a disabled veteran, Michael said he’s not supposed to drive.“They didn’t care,” he said. “It wasn’t their problem.”Chiaromonte parked on the battery and walked nearly a mile to the courthouse on Broad Street, where he was told he couldn’t be helped without his wife present. He called the ICE office and they told him there was a form that could be filled out and notarized that he could bring back. He returned to the courthouse, got the form, and he walked back to his car to travel to the Navy Federal Credit Union branch on Rivers Avenue, where he knows the staff, to have it notarized. On the way back to the courthouse to deliver the form, Chiaromonte said he received a call from ICE letting him know that he had until 1 p.m. to get the paperwork they required. It was 12:45 p.m. when he got the call.He drove back downtown, parked at the battery, and walked back to the courthouse. There, he said he delivered the form and was promptly given the paperwork by the clerks. He arrived back at the ICE office after it had closed, but they let him in anyway. He presented the paperwork and was told that it was not required because ICE already had it. Michael said that numerous documents the couple brought to the appointment were not returned to him, including the original letter they received about renewing Rosalba's green card.“At that time I was hysterical,” he said. “Come to find out, she was already gone.”Rosalba had been arrested and was in the process of being transported to the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, GA.Rosalba and Michael Chiaromonte. (Provided)“They’re trying to kill me”Since the beginning of President Donald Trump’s second term in office, Stewart houses roughly 2,000 detainees on any given day. It is run by the private prison company CoreCivic, and a Cuban man died by suspected suicide in custody there a week to the day before Rosalba Chiaromonte was detained in Charleston, according to WABE. He had been at the detention center since January and was the 18th person to die in ICE custody so far in 2026.“The place is not good,” Michael said. “The advocate wanted to close the place down years ago, that’s how bad it is. The water’s bad, it’s all kinds of stuff about the place. Why [are] they still using it? I don’t know, but all I want to say is I want her home and then we deal with it.”Rosalba is diabetic and through her extremely limited communications with her family has said she is being fed primarily bread and pasta - foods high in carbohydrates that cause high spikes in blood sugar. She’s also told them she isn’t getting the correct medications she needs, which has led to her becoming sick and vomiting every day. According to Michael, Rosalba told him that someone said if she wants better food “she has to convert to [Islam] because they do not like Catholics.” In a video taken showing the Chiaromontes on a video call with Rosalba, she can be seen crying as her family urges her to “hang in there” as they do “everything they can.”“They’re messing with my health,” Rosalba says in the video. “They’re trying to kill me, I’m telling you. You can ask anybody in here.”Aimee Deverall, a Bluffton immigration attorney and chair of the Lowcountry Immigration Coalition, explained that DHS is “flush with money” from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed in 2025, and those funds are largely going towards efforts to expand the department and its various agencies’ detention capacities across the country.“It seems like the sole consideration now is detention,” Deverall said. “Who can we detain and how can we maximize the amount of people that we’re detaining?’ And then kind of putting the burden on these noncitizens to try to find yourself an attorney and try to get out of this situation that [DHS is] putting you in.”Deverall said what her and other experienced attorneys who have worked for decades in immigration law have seen in Trump’s second term is unprecedented. “It’s just more brutal than anything we’ve ever seen before,” she said, citing ICE agents detaining those attending immigration hearings and check-ins, as well as at Citizenship and Immigration Services offices during interviews to acquire green cards. She also said the longstanding idea of “prosecutorial discretion” traditionally exercised by immigration officials has gone out the window.“There is no discretion anymore at the Department of Homeland Security,” she said. “Prosecutorial discretion has just always been a thing in the law that, you know, “We could choose to detain certain people but we’re going to exercise discretion. We’re not going to use our limited resources on focusing on people who are not violent, who are married to veterans or active duty service members, whatever the discretionary factors.’ That is gone.”Rosalba’s immigration lawyer, Ross Miller, said the cases he’s seen in the last year and a half have shifted from being proactive cases, like family-based petitions or employment-based applications, to defensive cases, meaning removal proceedings.“USCIS and ICE are working hand in hand now, so if ICE sees someone that they believe is deportable or has significant immigration issues, they’ll work with USCIS to try and get that person into the office under, I don’t want to say false pretenses, but, ‘Hey, we need you to come in here, we’ve got something we want to discuss about your green card renewal,’ and next thing you know, you’re in handcuffs,” Miller said.“They get away with this stuff,” Michael said. “Lure you in with a bait tactic and that’s it. They got you. Once they do that, they got you.”Agents in Charleston told Michael that his wife had been detained under a provision in the Immigration and Nationalization Act, specifically where it states that any alien, including lawful permanent residents, can be deported for various firearm-related offenses at any time after conviction despite green card status. Miller explained that the nature of Rosalba’s 2017 conviction renders her deportable and ineligible for an immigration bond, so she will remain in detention until she has a hearing.In the days following Rosalba’s detention, The New York Times reported on a new unit in the Department of Homeland Security that “revets” immigrants with permanent residency. The Times reported that a green card holder’s criminal record would typically be reviewed by Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) when the holder applied for renewal, but the new unit marks a more proactive approach from the Trump administration to seek out and deport certain green card holders. It is unclear if that unit is who identified Rosalba, but the Times found that over 500 green card holders were still under review out of the more than 2,800 cases the unit was reviewing as of May 7.Michael said that as someone who put his life on the line for his country, he’s “heartbroken” by the way he and his wife have been treated by ICE. He was first to acknowledge that his family is not the only one to have come into the agency’s crosshairs as it increasingly targets members of military families.In February, US Army veteran George Retes filed a lawsuit after he was detained and held for three days while on his way to work in California, according to the Guardian.Lawful permanent resident and US Army veteran Zahid Chaudhry was detained during an Aug. 2025 citizenship interview in Washington and held for over four months, Tacoma’s KING5 reported. In Texas, the wife of an active-duty soldier was arrested by ICE during a parole-in-place program interview that would have allowed her to stay in the country while her immigration case played out. Her arrest marked the second time a military spouse was detained by ICE that month, according to the BBC. “To know my country‘s doing this, I think they owe me for what I’ve done, not to mention my son,” Chiaromonte said. “It’s not right,” he continued. “Somebody else is going to have to go through this who might not have the resources I do, so that’s why I’m here. I’m not out for any self gain at all from this, I just want people to know.”Deverall said that since immigrant families often have very little power to fight back against the federal government seeking any possible excuse to deport them, the burden to influence policy and bring about change falls on citizens who can call their congressional representatives and organize in opposition to what she describes as a moral issue.“The level of detention that we have seen in this country against senior citizens, children, people with no criminal records, people who have been living in the country for decades, people who are the family members of veterans and service members, I mean, it’s immoral,” she said. “If you are an immigrant family, it’s extremely common that the person who’s getting detained is the family’s primary breadwinner,” she continued. “And you are looking at having to find resources not just to hire an attorney, there aren’t enough attorneys and all of us are overwhelmed, but to find an attorney, to pay thousands of dollars to an attorney, to have to fight back against this.”Michael said he’d reached out to his representatives in Congress, which includes Representative Nancy Mace.“Our office responded to Michael Chiaromonte within an hour and made clear intervening in criminal matters such as this is outside the scope of any congressional office,” Mace said in a statement to News 4. “His wife was convicted of a firearm offense. We stand with ICE and President Trump in removing criminals from our country."AftermathMichael and Rosalba’s adult children have all been affected by the absence of their mother and the chaotic uncertainty of her detention.Juliana, the Chiaromonte’s eldest daughter, had to tell her young son his “nonna” was out of town. “You can’t even tell your son where their grandparent is ‘cause you don’t even know,” she said.Their youngest son, Michael, Jr., was with his parents when his mom was taken into custody on May 5 and was indignant at the treatment he and his family received from ICE agents.“To send my sick father on a goose chase for four hours for documents that they already had, it’s kind of messed up,” he said. “And then to take our mother, without even telling us, when we get back after you just sent us on this goose chase. Put a pretty bad taste in my mouth for an ICE agent, to be honest. ‘Cause now I can’t, you can’t trust them. To me, I could never trust an ICE agent ever.”The Chiaromonte’s younger daughter, Brianna, couldn’t fight back her emotion while recalling how she felt when she found out her mother had been arrested.“I was devastated to hear they took my mom. I mean, it’s close to Mother’s Day, my dad fought for our country, my brother did too,” she said before the tears overwhelmed her.Rosalba Chiaromonte (left) with her children Michael Jr. (rear), Briana (right), and Juliana (front). (Provided)READ MORE | Charleston County says Homeland Security Grant is not tied to ICEDirect communication with her has been difficult. Michael said his wife is one of 100 women sharing a space at Stewart, and there are only five tablets available to use to communicate with those on the outside through a pay-to-talk service.“It’s very stressful. It’s very hard to concentrate during the day trying to figure out what’s going on,” said Juliana. “They don’t send you [any] updates of what’s going on with her, everything is just on the low,” Briana added.“I work on airplanes, so having the stress of my mother in the back of my head working on airplanes causes issues,” Michael, Jr. said. “Luckily, I’ve got a good employer, but I haven’t talked to my mother in a week.”Miller said Rosalba’s final hearing is being moved forward to June 5. If the immigration judge rules that deportation should proceed, ICE will carry out a removal order and remove her from the country pending an appeal if one is filed.“It’s almost like nobody’s safe,” Michael, Sr. said. “People need to know and people need to be safe and just keep their eyes out, I mean, you never know. I mean, you gonna come and bust down my door next? I don’t know.”News 4 approache