She’s Had a Green Card for 13 Years. ICE Didn’t Care and Detained Her Anyway

In enforcing its platform of immigration cruelty, the Trump administration frequently relies upon legal loopholes and technicalities to force situations where it is able to embrace the most dim view of human nature, to seek out the the most painful possible outcomes. As it so often observes in callously calculated, unemotional press statements, etc., documents such as a work permit, driver’s license or pending asylum case do not technically confer Lawful Permanent Resident status on an immigrant who is not a U.S. citizen. But do you know what document does confer the right to continue living in the United States, absent a criminal record? That would be a green card. But the Trump administration is so zealously blinded by its own ICE quotas, it doesn’t even care if its dragnet for “illegals” scoops up Lawful Permanent Residents as well. And once it arbitrarily decides it wants to deport someone, our government will obsessively, illegally follow through even after a judge dismisses the entire case. That’s what is currently happening in the case of 60-year-old Indian grandmother Venkata Vasamsetty, whose case has got to be one of the most egregious instances of ICE detention I have ever encountered.

Venkata Narsamamba Vasamsetty is, as previously implied, a green card holder and has been a Lawful Permanent Resident for 13 years with no criminal record. She lives in North Carolina, where her family has resided for more than 27 years at this point. Her two children and two grandchildren in the U.S. are all citizens. Despite this, she was arrested and detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on Aug. 11, 2026 during the course of a routine immigration check-in, and was told then that she would be processed for deportation because she didn’t possess a valid green card. According to ICE’s Online Detainee Locator System, she’s being held in Georgia’s notorious Irwin County Detention Center. An emergency habeas corpus petition has already been filed on her behalf by her legal representation.

Venkata Vasamsetty has been illegally detained by ICE. She is being denied food and insulin, and shouldn’t even be in custody to begin with.

As a substitute teacher in Cary, she is a hardworking member of our community. We will keep working for her release.

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— Representative Deborah Ross (@ross.house.gov) 3:36 PM · Aug 21, 2026

What, you will obviously wonder, was the government’s argument here for why Venkata Vasamsetty is fair game for deportation? And as it turns out, the entire thing stems from a trip that Vasamsetty took to her native India in 2022, to care for her own ailing, terminally ill parents. Toward the end of that trip, as she was preparing to return to the United States, Vasamsetty fell seriously ill with COVID-19 and ended up being hospitalized for weeks, suffering various complications. Because she was medically unable to travel, she missed her return flight to the United States and had to travel back later. A trip that was meant to be less than six months thus became seven months, taking Vasamsetty past the 180-day mark that DHS allows for time abroad for Lawful Permanent Residents. In response to this, DHS argued that the absence breaching this time period demonstrated that Vasamsetty had “abandoned her U.S. permanent residency,” and it subsequently started legal removal proceedings against her. It should be noted that this DHS action would have taken place during the Biden administration.

This particular nightmare for Vasamsetty and her family appeared to be over as of May of this year, however, when a federal immigration judge dismissed the entire case due to DHS failing to meet court deadlines to submit evidence supporting its case. Nevertheless, the law-abiding Vasamsetty continued to appear at regularly scheduled check-ins, only to finally be arrested at one this month despite the fact that her case had been dismissed. Add this to the list of instances of ICE simply ignoring the rulings of judges.

Moreover, the government’s implication here simply reeks of absurdity, to the point that no one clearly even wanted to try to argue it in court–that’s why the case got dismissed in the first place. In order to legally deport Vasamsetty, the government would have to argue that this 60-year-old grandmother had been choosing to abandon the entire life she had built for herself for 27 years in the U.S., including her own children and grandchildren, just because she visited her dying parents in India and happened to get sick there herself before returning. The government would be forced to ignore myriad details showing that Vasamsetty clearly intended to return to her home in the U.S., including the fact that she completed the purchase of a new house in North Carolina during the trip!

As Vasamsetty’s immigration attorney Zoe Wilson put it in a post online:

“She wasn’t packing up her life in the United States. She wasn’t moving back to India. She wasn’t leaving with the intention of giving up her green card. At the time she left, she was literally in the process of buying a home in North Carolina to be her primary residence. Then, while she was in India, she completed that purchase. After she was discharged, there were other medical issues that further delayed her ability to make a long international trip. When she was finally well enough to travel, she returned home to the United States through Raleigh-Durham International Airport in February 2023. She had been outside the country for about seven months.”

This entire case is, to put it in a single word, a travesty. It could not possibly be more obvious why Venkata Vasamsetty was forced to spend more than 180 days outside of the country–because she medically had absolutely no choice in the matter. It could not be more obvious that Vasamsetty intended to return, to be with her daughters and grandchildren, and live in the new freakin’ house she had just bought. Cases like this should require about 10 seconds, total, of consideration from DHS before the most clear exception of all time is granted. A child could instantly understand the entire dynamic of what happened her. The only reason that this sequence of events would ever lead to a deportation case against Venkata Vasamsetty is if it’s taking place in a fiercely racist, fiercely xenophobic country that has committed itself on a policy level to punishing literally anyone where it has an even semi-plausible case to do so. And even then, this is the kind of case that you would expect to instantly die the second it gets a little media reporting, and an actual human being at DHS calculates that the unprecedentedly terrible optics are not worth the “victory” of deporting a single, law-abiding grandmother. Who, by the way, has advanced diabetes and is currently suffering substandard care in ICE detention according to her lawyers.

A Grandmother was detained by ICE goons despite having a valid Green Card and living in the US for decades. They made a frivolous attempt to nullify her status which was rubuked by a judge.

But the sadistic fascist ICE goons ignored the ruling and detained her anyways.

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— ICE Goons Tracker (@icegoons.bsky.social) 1:57 PM · Aug 23, 2026

But even beyond all that, ICE clearly acted here in flagrant disregard for the orders of an immigration judge! They detained this woman pursuant to an immigration case that no longer exists. She’s a green card holder! If that does not confer Lawful Permanent Resident status on her, then absolutely no one in the U.S. actually has this status. If the judiciary doesn’t force ICE to release this woman immediately, it will be surrendering whatever little authority it still possesses.

A petition demanding the release of Vasamsetty summarizes this sentiment: “The legal dismissal of her immigration case should have ensured her freedom, yet this oversight persists. It’s crucial to address this grave error immediately, not just for Venkata, but for the principles of justice and humanity. We are calling on ICE to release Venkata Vasamsetty, respecting the lawful ruling and allowing her to return to her vital roles in her family and our community.”