The East Palo Alto housekeeper with a chronic health condition who fainted while being arrested by ICE agents early this week has been discharged from Stanford Medical Center to a federal detention facility in Bakersfield, U.S. Rep. Sam Liccardo said Saturday.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents had been posted at her hospital room since she was arrested with an expired visa Monday, and prohibited her family from visiting most of the week, even forbidding flowers with a notecard from her father. The agency did not respond to a request for comment Saturday morning, or earlier inquiries during the week.
Aleyda “Yeny” Rodriguez, 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)
Aleyda “Yeny” Rodriguez, 47, has a blood disorder exacerbated by stress that causes her to faint, her family has said. They declined to comment Saturday.
Stanford wouldn’t disclose Rodriguez’s health condition when she was discharged, but said in a statement that “throughout the patient’s stay at Stanford Health Care, our clinicians provided all necessary care.”
Liccardo, a Democrat who represents much of Santa Clara and parts of San Mateo county and was participating in a Half Moon Bay beach cleanup Saturday, said he has been in touch with federal officials about her case. They told him that Rodriguez will have access to her phone Saturday to contact family.
“Yeny’s arrest, which may have been perfectly legal under existing laws, exemplifies the devastation and trauma that this deeply misguided and cruel immigration policy is wreaking throughout our country,” Liccardo said in an interview Saturday. “We need to persuade more Americans and the other half of Congress of the extraordinarily important role that millions of our neighbors like her play in our families and our communities.”
Rodriguez was arrested Monday morning while dropping off her husband at her brother’s East Palo Alto house to start his day as a gardener. Her husband, Oscar Flores, managed to run to a neighbor’s house, where ICE agents stopped their pursuit because without a warrant they are prohibited from stepping onto private property, immigration lawyers say. Their nephew, Dario Jasso, had been arrested earlier that morning while getting into his vehicle to head to his construction job.
Jasso, 29, had contacted his family earlier this week to say he was being held at the Mesa Verde ICE Processing Center, where his aunt now is being held. Flores videotaped the arrest of his wife, who was heard screaming while agents handcuffed her behind her back while on her knees. She fainted on the way to the ICE van, while her husband yelled in Spanish, “she’s sick! If she dies it’s your fault.”
Flores is in hiding, but told the Mercury News earlier this week that he and his wife had 10-year tourist visas that expired two years ago. They had no other criminal record, he said, not even a speeding ticket.
“I certainly heard that the target of her arrest was somebody else in the family,” Liccardo said, “and so we’re still trying to understand this and get more information.”
Rodriguez’s father, Armando Rodriguez Garcia, had told the Mercury News that he traveled from Mexico to California on a tourist visa several weeks ago intending to take his daughter back to Mexico with him because she was “tired here.” He said he hoped he could take her home instead of having her experience the stresses of ICE custody, which were life threatening. The trauma of the arrest itself, he said, led to her weeklong hospital stay.
The Trump Administration had once said its priority was arresting immigrants with criminal records, but has since expanded its operations over the past several months, hiring scores of agents to arrest those with expired visas. Federal agents only need probable cause to believe someone is in the U.S. illegally to make an arrest on public property.
Liccardo said that he said he and fellow Democrats are working with organizations “to see how we can start to rally employers in red states and red districts as we start to see the impacts of these immigration policies on our agricultural industry, on health care, on elder care, on tech, construction and many industries where we know immigrants are critical to the substance of our economy.”
He added that they are “working to essentially find allies who can communicate with Republicans who suffer from wobbly knees, if they can stiffen their spines.”