'I don’t know what to tell him': Child awaits father detained by ICE
MCALLEN, Texas (ValleyCentral) — A McAllen family is searching for answers after a local engineer was detained by federal immigration authorities just before boarding a flight.
Dr. Ranjana Sarma says her husband, Shriram Krishnan, was stopped by agents at McAllen International Airport on Wednesday while preparing to travel to Seattle to meet his newborn nephew. Instead, he was taken into custody and is now being held at a U.S. Border Patrol processing facility.
“He knew his dad was traveling, so last night he was asking me, ‘Has daddy reached Seattle? ‘ and I talked to him and told him that his flight was delayed, and I told him that he would come for him this evening, and I don’t know what to tell him,” Sarma said.
According to Sarma, her husband remains detained at the U.S. Border Patrol Central Processing Center in McAllen. She says he spoke with her early Thursday morning and is worried about his family, including their 8-year-old son, who has not yet been told what happened.
Sarma says the situation unfolded suddenly.
“Out of the blue, I get a call at around one o’clock while I was at work at the clinic,” Sarma said. “I was just devastated, crying and today I thought I was more calm, but anytime I start talking about it or thinking about it. I’m still coming into terms that he might be in detention.”
Instead of seeing patients, Sarma spent Thursday meeting with an immigration attorney, trying to understand why her husband was taken into custody.
She says Krishnan has lived in the United States since 2003 and has no criminal history. He is an engineer with two master’s degrees and has had a pending green card application since 2014.
“We always pay our taxes, in fact even yesterday my husband cut a big five-figure check to the IRS before he went to the airport,” Sarma said.
She added that the family has not had issues with immigration authorities in more than a decade.
“We even carried it when we crossed the checkpoint at Falfurrias, about a month ago in early March, and we didn’t have any issues. He didn’t have any issues at that time, so I don’t know what changed,” she said.
As she prepares to speak with their son, Sarma says the situation has left her overwhelmed.
“He is going to want to know where daddy is and we don’t want him to be scared or expose to something like this. For what? To us, we haven’t done anything wrong, so it’s very upsetting,” she said.
Immigration attorney Wendoli Rodriguez says a legal technicality may be behind the detention, explaining that a work permit does not necessarily grant legal status.
“That work permit alone does not give you status to be here. So now the protocol and the policy that ICE is following is that when you show your work permit, but they confirm that you are without legal status, they proceed to detain you. This is something that we have never seen before in the numbers that we’re seeing it now,” Rodriguez said.