The family of the housekeeper who overstayed her visa and fainted when arrested by ICE agents is keeping vigil at Stanford Medical Center where she has been held since Monday, banned from visiting her and getting little information from doctors about her health.
Her father, Armando Rodriquez Garcia, took a bouquet of flowers up to the sixth floor Wednesday with a handwritten note to try to comfort her.
“Don’t worry, honey, we are with you,” he wrote in Spanish.
But with federal agents posted at her door, Stanford health care workers told him no gifts or flowers were allowed. They wouldn’t even allow the family priest or her lawyer in, they said. Aleyda “Yeny” Rodriquez, a 47-year-old mother of three with a chronic blood condition exacerbated by stress, was in federal custody.
Aleyda “Yeny” Rodriquez, in a photo from her family’s gofundme page, remains at Stanford Medical Center with ICE posted outside her door after being arrested in East Palo Alto with an expired visa. (Courtesy of Rodriguez family)
When and whether Rodriguez will be discharged from the hospital and where she would go remains uncertain. Stanford has been tightlipped about the case and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has provided no information to the family or the Mercury News.
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“Obviously, having ICE outside her room and not being able to see her family is what is causing her current medical condition,” said lawyer Michelle de Blank, who is aiding the family with health care matters. “I don’t understand. Everybody’s peaceful, everybody’s quiet, everybody’s following the rules. And all we want to do is see her, make sure she’s okay, help her calm down, figure out the next legal steps and move on.”
Her father from Mexico, who has been visiting his daughter and her family on a tourist visa over the past several weeks, said he wants to take his daughter back to Mexico himself. They had already planned that she would move back to Mexico months ago.
“I saw that she was tired here,” working hard as a housekeeper, he told the Mercury News in Spanish, through a relative who translated. “and I told her, ‘Honey, let’s just go.’”
She planned to take her youngest daughter, who is 11, to Mexico with them. Her two older daughters are adults. Her husband, Oscar, planned to join them in a year or so, he said.
With de Blank’s help, the family has been in touch with two local members of Congress, Sam Liccardo who represents Palo Alto and Kevin Mullin who represents East Palo Alto, where Rodriguez was arrested. Mullin said his office is “looking into the matter.”
“It was very concerning to hear about a mother of three needing to be hospitalized, and my heart goes out to her family who are concerned about her wellbeing,” Mullin said in a statement. “The Trump Administration’s approach to immigration has been inhumane, and unnecessarily cruel to hard-working families across America.”
Whether the Department of Homeland Security would consider allowing the woman to self deport is uncertain. In July, a man with a criminal record attempted to self deport — he had a one-way ticket to El Salvador — but was apprehended by federal agents at the jetway. In Oakland, he’s facing a federal criminal case for being in the country illegally.
Homeland Security Chief Kristi Noem has appeared in TV commercials encouraging immigrants to self-deport. “If you don’t, we will find you and we will deport you,” Noem said in one ad. Detainees are being held in federal detention centers across the country and some are taken to countries far from their native lands.
Rodriguez’s family says that her tourist visa expired two years ago, but that she has no criminal record — not even a speeding ticket — and don’t understand why she was targeted. Trump Administration border czar Thomas Homan said in November that immigration enforcement was “not going to be a massive sweep of neighborhoods” and “public safety threats and national security threats will be the priority.”
Administration officials since have made it clear they are intent on deporting millions of immigrants in the U.S. without permission. On Thursday, Homan told reporters “you’re going to see a ramp up of operations in New York; you’re going to see a ramp up of operations continue in L.A., Portland, Seattle, all these sanctuary cities that refuse to work with ICE.”
Rodriguez was the second family member arrested Monday. At about 7:15 a.m. Monday, her 29-year-old nephew, Dario Jasso, was arrested outside the East Palo Alto home he shares with his parents. He was getting into his vehicle to go to his construction job when he was apprehended. Family members said the men showed no identification and had no arrest warrant. Instead, they showed him a copy of his expired visa. Jasso contacted his family on Tuesday, saying he was held at a detention facility in Bakersfield.
Shortly thereafter, Rodriquez arrived at the same home to drop off her husband, Oscar Flores, a gardener going to work for the day with his brother-in-law. When ICE agents approached, he ran to a neighbor’s yard, he told the Mercury News earlier this week. The agent pursuing him stopped at the sidewalk when he set foot on private property. Federal agents are not allowed on private property without a warrant, but can make arrests in public spaces if they have probable cause to believe someone is not a U.S. Citizen, according to Milli Atkinson, director of the San Francisco Bar Association’s Immigrant Legal Defense Program.
Flores watched and videotaped his wife in the driver’s seat being pushed to the ground on her knees and handcuffed. She was screaming, the videotape showed, then passed out. The video captured him yelling at the federal agents, saying his wife was sick and could die, but they loaded her into a black van and drove off.
The family was able to visit her in her hospital room Monday, but has been banned ever since.
Stanford has declined to answer questions about what might happen next with Rodriguez, including whether doctors are concerned about discharging her with a chronic medical condition that flares up with stress if they believe she will be taken to a federal detention facility.
“Stanford Health Care, in accordance with our current policies and in compliance with federal agencies, is providing the needed care for this patient,” the hospital said in a statement.
The family says she has a condition called thrombocytopenia, a low platelet count that increases the risk of internal and external bleeding, and low blood pressure. The combination can be life threatening, the family says.
They set up a gofundme account Thursday to help pay for legal and medical bills.
“She needs her family by her side for support,” one of her daughters wrote on the website, “and we need legal help to fight for her rights and her safety.”
Bay Area News Group reporter Jakob Rodgers contributed to this story.