Delfino Nsuka was minutes from his home in Lewiston, his wife said, when immigration officials stopped his car last Thursday.
Jaylee Shropshire-Nsuka, who was on a phone call with her husband at the time, recorded what she could of the interaction.
“I just came from work, sir,” Nsuka can be heard saying in the recording after a man tells him to turn off his car. “I’m not in trouble, right?”
“No, no, you’re just turning off the vehicle,” the man said.
It’s not until after the man thanked Nsuka that he said, “you’re going to have to come with us” because he “did a check for immigration.”
Shropshire-Nsuka was in her own car and trying to get to her husband before they took him away.
“She’s literally on the way,” Nsuka said, according to a recording of the call.
“You can talk with her after,” the man said.
Shropshire-Nsuka said that she didn’t hear from her husband after he was arrested until later the next day. A locator run by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement showed on Wednesday that Nsuka is in the agency’s custody at the Plymouth County Correctional Facility in Massachusetts.
“At that point I hadn’t heard from him in almost two days, and I was obviously freaking out,” she told the Press Herald in a phone interview Tuesday. “Because, you know, they’ve sent people to Texas and Louisiana. You just have no idea what’s gonna happen, you know what I mean?”
She said he is currently scheduled to appear in immigration court in February.
Shropshire-Nsuka said her husband provided his work authorization papers. He is originally from Angola and has done “everything he is supposed to do” for his immigration case, she said.
Nsuka arrived in the United States in 2018 on a visa and had applied for asylum, according to his wife.
They met while attending high school in Lewiston. Shropshire-Nsuka said they got married last year and were preparing to adjust his immigration status accordingly.
She said her husband is not a criminal and has been a dedicated worker for the eight years that she’s known him.
“This is completely stressing our whole family out,” Shropshire-Nsuka said. “Also, you know, he’s the breadwinner at home. Our whole lives are going to be affected by this, and currently are being affected by this situation. Something needs to happen, because innocent people are being targeted.”
A GoFundMe page for Nsuka’s legal costs related to his immigration arrest had raised more than $3,400 as of Wednesday afternoon.
Nsuka is one of at least three people who have recently been detained by immigration officials and are married to a U.S. citizen, according to court records and interviews with their spouses.
That includes a Brazilian man who was detained by ICE in Portland on Jan. 20 and is still in federal custody. Another man married to a U.S. citizen was arrested by Border Patrol and ICE agents in Wiscasset on Jan. 14 while leaving his home, according to court records.
