Diana Ball was supposed to get married on April 17, 2010. Instead of a wedding, Ball was trying to find and visit her fiancé, Noel, an Irishman who’d been in the U.S for years.
Noel had been sent an appointment to meet with Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Louisville, KY, four days earlier. When he showed up, four ICE agents put him in five-point chains. Over the 27 days that ICE held him, they moved him to seven different jails — places like Boone County, KY, Clay County, IN, Cook County, IL and Kenosha, WI. His first 24 hours in each of the seven places he was stripped, searched, de-loused and “put in the tank,” which means isolation — standard procedure for anyone booked, regardless of their charges. In this case, his issue was paperwork.
Diana describes the ordeal with characteristic directness: “They denied a bond for him. Right. So they were absolutely lying when they said you’ll be out in a few days. Because they were refusing a bond. They basically held him as if he were a violent criminal. Yet, his charge was overstaying, not having active documentation.”
Diana drove up to Cook County on the day he had a hearing, and the judge told the ICE lawyers he’d have had his papers within four days if ICE had left him alone.
Noel and Diana had met a couple of years earlier. Diana says it’s hard to say precisely where. He came into a coffeehouse where she worked after college and showed up at the church she attended.
“I was the only person in the shop who could understand the man,” Diana recounted. Noel grew up in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. She’d studied for a year in Galway, Ireland, during college, so they connected. Aside from a thick Irish brogue, Noel had a young daughter. He had just divorced, and Diana was careful: “I wasn’t about to jump into a relationship with someone who had a two-and-a-half-year-old and just divorced. So we were friends for a while. And then slowly became, you know, more than friends.”
“He was a family man,” Diana said. Their first date was taking his young daughter to feed the ducks. They took dates at McDonald’s, so his daughter could play.
After they married, Diana and Noel welcomed their daughter R. And in the midst of raising their two girls, Noel was accused of, but never arrested for, some heinous behaviors with another girl. He and his lawyer tried to close the case for seven years, but a mediator was appointed. In a small room with lawyers, Noel’s experiences from growing up in Northern Ireland triggered the sense that he’d not be allowed to leave the room until he pled to something. He agreed to a misdemeanor and time in jail. He was set to be released early for good behavior when an ICE agent visited him and let him know they might detain him. They held to their word.
At least the second time, Diana said, it seemed more humane. For most of Noel’s 24 months in ICE detention, they only moved him twice — first, to Clay County, IN, then to Boone County, KY — unlike what she felt was “intentional psychological torture” the first time.
With Noel’s detention, life was upended. Diana, an independent therapist, was now the family’s sole provider, and they’d lost Noel’s employer-based health insurance. Diana’s parents floated her money to keep up with insurance and pay bills. Healthcare professionals told Diana to keep R’s life as normal as possible, considering she had an autonomic disorder.
“We added it up. 35,000, right? I’m seeing extra clients. I’m exhausted and I don’t have my best friend, right?” Diana said about the isolation. “You know, you can’t really tell people because we live in Indiana. Even now, my husband’s deported, and you can see the look on their face. They don’t want to say it, but there’s a part of them that thinks, well, he must have deserved it. Right?”
Noel missed his eldest daughter’s high school graduation, wedding and birth of his first grandchild. Even now, he’s never held his grandchild.
Diana paused. “Nobody deserves that.”
When they moved into their house, they began marking lines of R’s growth in the kitchen. “Every once in a while, I’ll look at those lines and realize she’s grown six plus inches since she last hugged her dad. When he left, she was a child. She is very much a teenager now.” Diana recorded all the school plays, the performances, the swim meets, the band concerts, hoping Noel would receive justice and come home.After two years plus years, “It feels like a waste to be honest, because it doesn’t matter. He wasn’t there,” she said.
When asked if she had support throughout the ordeal, she praises friends who were there for every breakdown, all the tears. And yet, they still “argue that ICE is doing what they need to do, that the problem is illegal immigration. I got to the point this last month that I just was like, I can’t. Even people who knew the ins and outs, not just the surface level, texted me while I had tears streaming down my face on multiple occasions and still, still believe that.”
“They are ripping families apart.” A fact that not many people let sink in. Diana encounters misconceptions regularly. Recently, she spent a weekend with other therapists and faith-based people, and someone asked, “They’re deporting white Europeans now?” She’s heard what people say about Latino people, “brown and black people” from other nations. “They think they’re all criminals.”
Fifteen years into a marriage to an immigrant with a green card, a man who has spent over two years in detention, Diana knows differently. Daily 20-minute calls between her and Noel, between R and Noel, all monitored and recorded, eroded natural intimacy, but not her faith in her husband’s innocence and goodness.
Noel’s situation is fortunate compared to others because he’s a UK citizen.
He received his deportation orders in January, but needed to renew his British passport. One ICE agent kept insisting that Diana ask a family friend to falsify a document for UK paperwork. He knew it would create a legal bind for Noel and their friend, Diana said.
When Noel finally landed in London in the first week of October, his UK citizenship afforded him a needed privilege: An organization that helps UK citizens detained abroad is helping him repatriate. This support doesn’t exist for most of the deportees the U.S. is pushing out.
And Noel is finally opening up about the experience of being put in five-point chains, of detention, of helping the many others being chewed up in the system.
The final question is how to rebuild intimacy after years of short conversations, monitored by agents and guards, where cruelty was the point. Now they can’t touch each other, can only see each other on screens, and are only beginning to have the kinds of conversations that make a marriage strong.