‘It's A Miracle': Queens High Schooler Detained For Weeks In Louisiana After ICE Courthouse Arrest Reunites With Family

By Gwynne Hogan, The City

July 16, 2025, 10:27 a.m.

A 20-year-old high school student from Ecuador reunited with her family early Wednesday morning, after three weeks in ICE detention in Louisiana following her arrest after a routine immigration court appearance at 26 Federal Plaza.

Joselyn Chipantiza-Sisalema, 20, was greeted by a small group of supporters at the Port Authority bus terminal shortly after midnight, meeting her mother, father, and 6-year-old brother in an emotional embrace.

Her two parents, who’d been waiting for hours in the Port Authority basement with balloons and candy bars at the ready for her arrival, were overcome as Chipantiza-Sisalema emerged from the Greyhound. She rushed to her mother's arms, who rocked her back and forth in tears, hugged her father, before lifting her 6-year-old brother into her arms.

“I knew that God would help me be free again and see my family again,” she told THE CITY in Spanish. “That was the only thing that gave me strength to continue.”

Her release from ICE detention in Monroe, La., followed an order by Manhattan federal Judge Analisa Torres over the weekend. Attorneys with Make the Road New York sued on her behalf, arguing her detention violated her Fifth Amendment right to due process because she was taken without notice, and poses no flight risk or danger to the community. “The Court agrees,” Torres put simply in her ruling.

Chipantiza-Sisalema took an overnight bus from Louisiana, paid for by Mitlalli NYC, a small volunteer group made up of Mariposa Benitez and Melisa Velez, who first met Chipantiza-Sisalema’s mother outside the Manhattan courthouse at 26 Federal Plaza the day her daughter was arrested. Benitez and Velez bought her a bus ticket back to New York and found sympathetic friends in Atlanta to meet her on a layover and bring her food, after she was released from ICE custody with no food or money.

Joselyn Chipantiza-Sisalema outside the Port Authority bus terminal after her arrival, July 16, 2025. Credit: Gwynne Hogan/THE CITY

In a brief interview at the Port Authority, Chipantiza-Sisalema described a harrowing three weeks after her June 24 arrest.

Chipantiza-Sisalema said she spent 10 days inside 26 Federal Plaza in a small office with around 20 other women. In court filings, attorneys alleged she had no change of clothes, had to sleep sitting up or on the ground and was offered almost nothing to eat.

“We had to beg the people working there that they gave us something to eat, they didn’t even give us water. Sometimes a few cookies they’d throw in there. A human being doesn’t deserve to be treated that way,” she said. “It was a horrible thing I wouldn’t wish on anyone. They had us in there like animals.”

ICE officials have confirmed people sometimes spend days inside 26 Federal Plaza at what’s supposed to be a processing center with nowhere to sleep but the ground or benches. THE CITY and other media outlets have reported on overcrowding and limited access to food there, as ICE amps up arrests to record levels. The agency has dismissed mounting concerns from immigrants, advocates and elected officials about conditions inside the building. Under federal law, detention centers are subject to inspections on demand by members of Congress, but ICE maintains the office is merely a transit facility and has repeatedly barred representatives from inspecting the conditions. THE CITY has requested comment from an agency spokesperson.

Eventually,3 Chipantiza-Sisalema and the other women were shackled on their hands, feet and waists and loaded into a van, where she said she spent hours without air conditioning, waiting to board a plane.

“The pain, the heat inside, we were suffocating,” she said. The shackles weren’t removed until the next day when they finally arrived in Louisiana, where she was detained until her release Monday.

Joselyn Chipantiza-Sisalema embraces a relative at Port Authority, July 16, 2025. Credit: Gwynne Hogan/THE CITY

Chipantiza-Sisalema’s homecoming comes amid a flurry of favorable decisions on behalf of people taken in ICE courthouse raids in New York.

On Wednesday, New York Legal Assistance Group announced two other people taken in courthouse raids were ordered released by judges: Derlis Snaider Chusin Toaquiza, an 11th grader at Grover Cleveland High School in Ridgewood, Queens, and Edwin Velasquez Munoz, a 31-year-old Peruvian man with special needs.

Still, many others remain in custody, including Bronx high schooler Dylan Lopez Contreras, an Ecuadorian husband with a U.S. wife with a young baby, a gay man who escaped Guinea after being targeted for his sexuality, and a father with two U.S. citizen children who fled religious persecution in Indonesia.

As Chipantiza-Sisalema learned of her imminent release, she said she found it hard to believe.

“I didn’t know if it was true,” she said. Other women in detention were incredulous. “‘No one leaves from here,’” they told her. “‘They send you to your country.’”

Chipantiza-Sisalema said she’s eager to return to school in the fall and finish her GED program at RiseBoro Community Partnership in Ridgewood next year. She hopes to be able to join the U.S. Army and become a lawyer.

In the weeks without their daughter, both parents were wracked with fear and nerves. Some of what the family went through and what Chipantiza-Sisalema experienced in detention was reported on by the New York Daily News and Gothamist.

“It’s such a deep pain that I can’t compare with anything else. It broke everything, it brought the whole family down,” said her mother, Zoila Sisalema, 38, in Spanish. “We had to be strong, for my son,” who kept asking for his older sister. Sisalema told him his sister was working and would be back soon: “I had to stay on my feet for him.”

Chipantiza-Sisalema’s father, 40-year-old Marco Chipantiza, called the separation “difficult and uncomfortable,” though he added, in Spanish, “after the storm comes the calm.”

“Thanks to so many people who have supported us, and given my daughter the chance to come back to her studies, and to the family,” he said, adding, “It’s a miracle.”

This press release was produced by The City. The views expressed here are the author’s own.