He Voted for Trump Three Times, Then ICE Took His Wife

Brent Jindra voted for Donald Trump three times and now lives, as he puts it, in fear. The 48-year-old technology salesman describes himself as a supporter of the MAGA movement and had welcomed its hard-line immigration policies. Now his own cause has caught up with him. In mid-July, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE, detained his wife, Galina Bobreneva, at Burbank Airport in California. “She did not jump a wall, she did not swim a river,” Jindra says. “She came in Trump’s beautiful, big front door.”

The couple had traveled from San Francisco when an officer in plain clothes stopped Bobreneva. “Congratulations, you’ve been chosen for secondary screening,” he reportedly told her. The congratulations were the last polite words. About 15 minutes later, she was in handcuffs and sitting in an unmarked vehicle that took her to a detention facility in downtown Los Angeles. In the space of 15 minutes, a traveler with papers became a prisoner with no address.

Bobreneva, 40, is a Russian citizen and came to the United States in 2021. After the war in Ukraine began, she extended her visa twice, applied for asylum in 2022, and also has a pending application for permanent residency. Her lawyer says she had maintained lawful status at all times. She had fled a war and taken every path the law showed her. Her country was at war, and her host country declared her papers worthless. Two extensions and an asylum application, properly filed and still in vain.

The Department of Homeland Security sees it differently. It called her an “illegal alien” and said she had overstayed her permitted stay in violation of the laws of the country. A work permit or a pending application, the agency said, does not confer lawful immigration status in the United States. So the agency declares a pending application worthless and turns waiting for a decision into an offense. The orderly path loses its meaning when it ends in the same cell.

Jindra had supported the policy because he wanted action against people he believed had entered the country illegally. He had not expected it to hit people who had come through legal channels. A citizen had to watch his wife being dragged away without knowing where they were taking her. His ID and his loyalty to the movement, none of it helped him in those 15 minutes. The policy he cheered does not distinguish between the stranger he feared and the woman he lives with.

The beautiful, big front door is Trump’s own phrase for the kind of orderly, legal immigration he says he wants. Bobreneva had used it, with a visa and an application. The state struck precisely at the counter of the legal route. The legal path relies on the word of the state, and that word did not hold. For its supporters, the hard-line policy lived on one single image, the stranger sneaking in. In that image, the enemy came over the wall and through the river, recognizable and from outside. Now that enemy has the face of his own wife, who stood at the counter with a valid visa. Belief in the machine holds as long as it only grabs the others.

Bobreneva verbrachte 16 Tage in Haft. Eine Nacht lag sie auf dem Boden einer Zelle im Keller eines Gebäudes in der Innenstadt von Los Angeles, danach war sie rund zwei Wochen in einem Einwanderungshaftzentrum in Adelanto untergebracht. Schließlich kam sie gegen eine Kaution von 35.000 Dollar frei, mit der Auflage, eine elektronische Fußfessel zu tragen. 16 Tage genügten, um aus einer Frau mit Asylantrag eine Frau mit Fußfessel zu machen. Der Boden im Keller und die zwei Wochen in Adelanto, all das für einen Aufenthalt, den ihr Anwalt rechtmäßig nennt.

She called the conditions horrendous. “I felt like a piece of meat, not like a human,” she says. She says she was deprived of sleep because the lights never went off and the guards’ radios made noise constantly. A place where the lights never go out knows no night and gives the body no rest. For around 120 women, only four showers were working, and clean drinking water was barely available. Medical care was denied. Four showers for 120 women is a calculation no one can make work. She remembers a pregnant woman with diabetes begging for insulin. What she describes belongs to the daily reality of a place where a human being is reduced to a number.

The Department of Homeland Security rejected that account. Any claim of substandard conditions in Adelanto is false, a spokesperson said. All detainees receive proper meals and water. Medical treatment is also provided, and they are able to communicate with relatives and attorneys.

Two voices stand against each other, the woman who spent 16 days inside and the agency that says everything is fine. The ankle monitor around her leg speaks for the first. Between the word of an agency and the body of a woman, the truth is ultimately carried by the one who lived it. Bobreneva is due to report to ICE in San Francisco on September 7, and her first court date is set for October 22. “We are living in fear in my own country,” Jindra says. It is the sentence of a man who wanted the hard line and believed it would only hit strangers. Now, in his own living room, he knows the feeling he once intended for others.

Some AfD voters may yet come to know that feeling too. A policy that promises to target only foreigners eventually looks for other targets, and the bill reaches far beyond immigration. When courts are bent or social benefits are cut, the weakest are hit first, and soon those who agreed with it are hit as well. Today’s foreigner becomes tomorrow’s retiree or commuter once the state has learned that cruelty pays. A movement that kicks downward eventually finds everyone down there.

A court had to order what should go without saying, clean water for people in state custody.

Adelanto did not earn its reputation with this case alone. Earlier this month, the family of 44-year-old Carlitos Ricardo Parias released a video showing worm-like creatures in a bottle of drinking water that had allegedly been given to detainees. Parias remains in federal custody and is awaiting deportation to Mexico. The video appeared just weeks after a federal judge ordered ICE to provide detainees with clean drinking water within 24 hours. Barely had the order been issued when the family’s video showed what was still swimming in the bottles. The order followed a class-action lawsuit alleging dangerous conditions, including too little food and poor drinking water. Medical care was also said to be inadequate. A court had to order what should go without saying, clean water for people in state custody.