Wayne County farmworker Dolores Bustamante was released from ICE detention Wednesday, in response to a federal judge's order.
The 54-year-old grandmother and worker rights advocate was released at 7 p.m. from the Alleghany County Jail, supporters and jail officials confirmed.
Bustamante was detained last month during a scheduled check-in with ICE, and sent to a detention facility in Louisiana. She had been transferred back to Western New York and held in the jail for a Tuesday court hearing in Rochester. She has an appointment with ICE on Thursday morning in Buffalo for an "alternatives to detention" meeting regarding her supervised release. There was initial confusion about what that meeting entailed, but supporters said those concerns were allayed by early Thursday.
In court this week, her lawyers argued that ICE had failed to provide her with required notice and a hearing last month on why it decided to revoke her supervised release. The government was unable to produce any documentation of who made the decision to do so, and when.
U.S. District Court Judge Meredith Vacca on Wednesday afternoon ordered that Bustamante must be placed back on supervised release. And should ICE again seek to detain her, the judge wrote, it first must provide her written notice that it is revoking her release, with “an enumerated reason and by an individual with the proper authority,” court records state. Bustamante then must receive “an informal interview promptly after her return to custody, should that occur, to provide her an opportunity to respond to the reasons for revocation stated in the notification.”
Bustamante and her youngest daughter came to the United States from Mexico in 2003, fleeing domestic violence. She moved to New York in 2012, working on apple farms, and has been on supervised release since receiving a final order of removal in 2023. Her advocacy on behalf of undocumented farmworkers, along with her personal immigration battle, has garnered considerable media coverage over the years, including in the days leading up to her detention.
Messages left with the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Western District of New York and with ICE were not immediately returned.
