Bride was overjoyed to marry love of her life... until ICE spotted her as she arrived in US Virgin Islands for HONEYMOON
A delighted newlywed arrived in the US Virgin Islands for a honeymoon with her handsome husband, only to be abruptly detained by ICE and taken into custody.
Ward Sakeik, from Arlington, Texas, remains in ICE detention after she was arrested in February when she and her new husband Taahir Shaikh were stopped by authorities on St Thomas
Shaikh said the couple had just arrived to begin their honeymoon when photographer wife was detained, despite having proof of a unique circumstance documents and a pending green card application.
'The past 12 months of my life has just been the highest of the highs and the lowest of the lows,' he told NBC5.
'You go from buying your first home, planning your dream wedding, attending that wedding, going on your honeymoon, to being separated for over 120 days.'
Sakeik was born in Saudi Arabia as a Palestinian refugee. She has been considered stateless her whole life because Saudi officials did not recognize her as a national.
She was eight when her family came to the US to apply for asylum, but when the asylum request was denied, the US couldn't deport them because they had no citizenship.
Instead, Sakeik's family were given an order of supervision and were required to check in with immigration officials annually, leaving her in a legal limbo that was only discovered when she went on her honeymoon.
Sakeik was born in Saudi Arabia as a Palestinian refugee, and has been stateless her whole life after US officials rejected her family's asylum application when she was eight but allowed them to stay in the country
Living her whole life as a stateless person living in the US, Shaikh said his wife has always complied with the annual immigration check-ups and never expected to be detained.
Shaikh said they believed the US Virgin Islands was a safe location for them to travel to celebrate their nuptials.
'We felt we did our due diligence, and we were very intentional. There's a reason we chose the U.S. Virgin Islands,' he said.
Sakeik, a graduate of UT Arlington and a wedding photographer, was taken to Texas after she was detained in the Caribbean.
She spent several months in the McAllen Detention Center in Texas, and is now in Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas.
As newlyweds, the couple said their first months as a married couple have been far from what they expected when they tied the knot at the start of the year.
Shaikh said they can only communicate through video calls and weekly visitations.
'She constantly says, 'When I get through this phase of my life, what am I not able to endure after this?'' he said.
According to the Center for Migration Studies, when a stateless person is detained they can be released from custody after 90 days.
But Sakeik has been held for over 120 days, and her new husband says he has received no communication from ICE officials.
Her green card application will also remain on hold while she is detained, and the couple say they are hiring immigration lawyers in hopes that she can be freed.
'I need people to realize that this is someone who has complied every year for 14 years and has always sought to be able to build lawful permanent residence,' Shaikh said.
'But when you're stateless, you don't have that luxury. Now that you're finally at the finish line, why would you take it away.'
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The Guardian
35 minutes ago
- The Guardian
‘There is no option of surrender': can Zohran Mamdani cause the greatest progressive upset in New York politics?
Zohran Kwame Mamdani is huddling with advisers surrounded by agitated protesters, New York police department (NYPD) officers and lines of metal barriers penning us in. An hour ago Brad Lander, the elected comptroller of New York who is running against Mamdani in the race to become the city's next mayor, was arrested by masked agents of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) as he accompanied an individual out of immigration court. Video shows the agents shoving Lander against a wall, handcuffing him, and scuffling him away. The incident has clearly rattled Mamdani. He looks tense, and when greeted by supporters his trademark beaming smile is replaced by a tight grin. Days earlier Mamdani cross-endorsed with fellow progressive Lander ahead of Tuesday's Democratic primary, which makes this personal. 'This is horrifying,' he says. Behind us looms the brutalist tower of the Federal Building, its tombstone-grey granite and glass exterior wrapped in fine mist. It is a setting out of a dystopian Gotham City. 'No peace, no justice,' the protesters chant. 'Ice out of the court, Ice out of the city.' 'This is an authoritarian regime that has dispatched masked men in unmarked cars to detain and disappear as many immigrants as they can find, and anyone standing in their way,' Mamdani says. 'Ice agents attempted to rough up Comptroller Lander and make an example of him – if that's what they are willing to do to an elected official, what will they do to an unknown immigrant?' There is a potent family link too. 'That's the very court I took my father to a few months ago for his citizenship interview,' he explains. 'I hugged him tightly, not knowing if I would see him at the end or if he too would be detained, as so many immigrants have been. I waited in a coffee shop for four and a half hours hoping he would come downstairs, and he did.' It is not impossible, given the state of the race, that in three days' time Mamdani, until recently a virtual unknown, will prevail in the primary ballot and take a giant leap towards becoming the next occupant of Gracie Mansion. Should he go on to win the general election in November, he would be propelled onto the front lines of the battle to protect New Yorkers from Donald Trump's mass deportations and other legally-dubious incursions. Could he handle it? 'I do believe that I could. I will unabashedly stand up for our sanctuary city policies which have kept New Yorkers safe, and use every tool at the city's disposal to protect our immigrants.' And then he adds: 'There is no option of surrender.' That Mamdani should be a serious contender for the leadership of America's largest city is both a sign of the times and of his individual capabilities. Polls show him within striking distance of the frontrunner Andrew Cuomo in what is now essentially a two-horse race, with Lander trailing a distant third. Mamdani came to the US aged seven from Uganda where he was born to parents of Indian descent. His father is a political scientist Mahmood Mamdani, and his mother, Mira Nair, is the Oscar-nominated director of Salaam Bombay! and Monsoon Wedding. He is a democratic socialist endorsed by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He has been outspoken on the Gaza war, which he views as a genocide, and is unrestrained in his criticism of Trump, whom he calls an authoritarian. He denounced Lander's arrest as 'fascism'. He is equally scathing about the establishment of the Democratic party, which he tells me has 'betrayed' the people of New York. And yet here he is, an unashamed progressive Muslim immigrant, snapping at the heels of the ultimate Democratic machine politician, the thrice-elected former governor of New York, Cuomo. The outcome of the ranked-choice vote could illuminate so much more than the future of New York, important though that is. There's age. Mamdani, if elected, would become at 33 the youngest mayor in a century; Cuomo, 67, would be its oldest in a first term. Could this election deliver a blow to what Ocasio-Cortez has called the 'gerontocracy' of American politics? There's Trump. Lander's arrest could be just the start – only a day before the comptroller was apprehended, the president announced he was prioritizing deportations from New York and other Democratic-run cities, putting whoever wins the mayoral race in the line of fire. And there's the Democratic party itself. Mamdani calls the election a referendum on the future of the party – and given the parlous state in which it currently finds itself, trapped in the headlights of a president who appears hell-bent on destroying American democracy as we know it, he may not be wrong. This is gearing up to be a seismic clash at a turning point for the country. No wonder Mamdani looks tense. Our interview was not meant to be like this. The plan was for us to meet in Mamdani's campaign office near Madison Square Park, but the shock of the Lander arrest sends him scrambling down to Federal Plaza, the Guardian in hot pursuit. It's a bit like a game of cat and mouse. We follow the candidate as he moves away from Federal Building, and takes off with his posse of campaign managers to find a quiet place to talk. He says we'll regroup at a sandwich bar nearby then abruptly changes the location, but amid the confusion he's always impeccably polite. 'Thank you for your understanding,' he says to me. We finally get to sit down in a Le Pain Quotidien around the corner from where Lander is being detained. Mamdani asks if I mind that he eats while we talk – it's mid-afternoon by now and it's his first meal of the day. When I express sympathy, he gives a maudlin smile and says: 'I chose this.' We begin by discussing his explosive rise, from a barely known member of the state assembly representing Queens into a political phenomenon. The previous Saturday, at a rally at Terminal 5, a music venue in Hell's Kitchen, Mamdani was introduced by Ocasio-Cortez, who likened how he has burst onto the scene to her own unlikely eruption as Bronx bartender turned congresswoman in 2018. Did Mamdani expect to be where he is now when he launched his run last October? From the start he believed in the possibility of his campaign, he says, but did not expect his numbers to surge until the end. 'Instead we've been firmly in second place for the last few months, and we've narrowed a 40-point gap with Cuomo down to single digits despite Republican billionaires spending close to $20m in attack ads against me.' That Mamdani has caught the imagination of young New Yorkers is self-evident at the Saturday night rally. The venue is packed with over 3,000 supporters, most in their 20s and 30s, waving placards saying 'A City We Can Afford'. Comedian the Kid Mero hosts, a marching band performs Empire State of Mind, and the DJ plays hope and change-themed tracks (the rally closes with Bob Dylan's The Times They Are A-Changin'). It all has the razzmatazz of a premature victory party. Mamdani commands the stage, displaying an ease with TikTokable soundbites and a beguiling charisma which are essential qualifications for high office these days. He echoes the lyrical rhetoric of Barack Obama: when he wins on 24 June, he orates, 'it will feel like the dawn of a new day, and when the sun finally climbs above the horizon that light will seem brighter than ever'. A key to his success among young voters – and in turn, the amassing of a vast army of 46,000 volunteers who have knocked on more than a million doors – has been his savvy use of social media. He has posted a stream of viral videos, shot on gritty New York streets, infused with the humor and pace that he first honed during his younger years when he was an aspiring rapper going by the name of Mr Cardamom. To publicise his plan to freeze the rents of all rent-stabilised apartments, Mamdani posted a TikTok video in which he dives fully clothed into the frigid waters off Coney Island. It was titled: 'I'm freezing … your rent.' When Cuomo entered the mayoral race, Mamdani filmed in front of Trump Tower to visually connect the two men as bullies accused of sexual misconduct – Trump was found liable for sexual abuse, Cuomo was forced to resign as governor in 2021 following reports that he sexually harassed female staff, which he denies. Such grabby stuff has spawned a whole cluster of fan-based Instagram groups. Among them: Hot Girls for Zohran and, not to be outdone, Hot Boys for Zohran. Fun this may be. But it's also serious politics. It's earned him the adoration of countless young voters at a time when social media is increasingly critical to winning elections – just ask Trump who, with his 106 million X followers and his Truth Social platform, literally owns political social media, leaving most Democratic leaders languishing in the wilderness. 'New Yorkers of all ages are engaging with the world around them through their phones,' Mamdani says. 'One reason we've been able to get so many to engage with us is that they've heard about our politics in places they typically would not.' He calls his social media strategy the 'politics of no translation'. What is that? 'It's when you speak directly to the crises that people are facing, with no intermediaries in between. We need a politics that is direct, that speaks to people's own lives. If I tell you that I'm going to freeze your rent, you know exactly what I mean.' Mamdani puts his spectacular popularity with young New Yorkers down to a hunger for a 'new kind of politics, one that puts working people at the heart of it and showcases a new generation of leadership'. There's maybe something else also at play: he has a magnetism that just seems to draw people towards him. The young waiter who takes his order of grilled chicken salad appears starstruck, and after we finish talking the waiter comes back to the table and engages Mamdani in intense conversation. The candidate obliges, despite his frantic schedule that will see him dashing between boroughs late into the night. I get flashes of that magnetism as we sit at our table. Like any politician, Mamdani has his talking points, but he drops his guard when I ask him what he remembers about arriving in New York as a kid. He leans towards me, and his face opens, and he seems transported. 'I remember going to Tower Records around 66th Street or so, and browsing all the different CDS, then stepping outside and buying my first bootleg copy of Eiffel 65, the euro pop group with the song Blue (Da Ba Dee). I remember playing soccer in Riverside Park, I remember falling in love with chess.' Reverie over, Mamdani the mayoral candidate is back, shoveling down food in between espousing political strategy. And this is when we get down to it, and the real challenge he faces. Because his appeal to young New Yorkers is not enough to win. To defeat Cuomo on Tuesday he has to reach beyond young voters. He has to get to the older African Americans and Hispanics in the outer boroughs who dependably turn out to vote, and thus often decide the outcome of New York Democratic primaries. Polls suggest that such voters are still favouring Cuomo as a safe pair of hands, though there has been a recent uptick among older Latinos. Mamdani is candid about how hard this has been. 'It was very difficult for us to get into these spaces to make our case,' he admits. 'Especially as we began with 1% name recognition. But things are shifting, now we're finding that we are double-booked for churches on a Sunday morning.' Paradoxically, the outer borough communities that he has to convert are home to the very same voters with whom Trump made astonishing inroads last November. It's the guilty secret of New York, which is so proud of its status as a liberal bastion: Trump enjoyed his biggest swing of any state in the country here – about 11.5% – and increased his vote by double digits in both the Bronx and Queens. 'It wasn't just the scale of the swing,' Mamdani says. 'It was that it took place far from the caricature of Trump voters, and into the heart of immigrant New York.' After Trump's victory, Mamdani had to turn the political impulse of lecturing into listening went on a listening tour to the outer boroughs. 'I went to Fordham Road in the Bronx and Hillside Avenue in Queens, and asked these New Yorkers, most of whom are Democrats, who they voted for and why. I learned that many did not vote, and many voted for Trump, and they did so because they remembered having more money in their pocket four years ago.' The plea he heard over and over again was for an economic agenda that would make people's tough lives easier. 'And that is how we have run this race,' he says. That's where his affordability ticket kicks in. Rents will be frozen in rent-stabilised apartments that house 2 million New Yorkers, two-thirds of whom are people of colour. Childcare will be provided at no cost, the minimum wage will be raised, city-run groceries will be opened offering cheaper healthy food, buses will be made fast and free. To pay for all that, taxes will be raised for corporations and for the top 1% of earners with incomes above $1m. When I ask him to imagine how he imagines New York would look after he had been in Gracie Mansion for two terms, he replies: 'It is a city that is more affordable, that works better, and where we have restored public excellence into public service.' Mamdani's affordability manifesto is a conscious blueprint for reconnecting working-class Americans, of all races, back to the Democratic party in the fight against Trump. It's also a damning indictment of where he believes the Democratic leadership has gone wrong. He goes so far as to use that word 'betrayal'. 'New Yorkers have been betrayed by the politics of our city,' he says. As evidence he points to Trump's deportations. We're still sitting in Le Pain Quotidien, Mamdani's salad now half-eaten and his tie off, and we are both painfully, though unspokenly, aware that Lander remains in custody as we speak (he was released a few hours later without charge). Up to 400,000 New Yorkers are at risk of Trump's deportations, he says, yet under the current Democratic mayor, Eric Adams, whose corruption charges were dropped by Trump in what was widely seen as a quid pro quo, the city has assisted fewer than 200 people facing imminent removal. Mamdani pledges that under his leadership, the city would provide legal representation for all immigrants in detention proceedings. That would boost their chances of going home to their families some elevenfold. His critique of the Democratic party doesn't end there. For him, Cuomo is the epitome of where the established party has gone off the rails. 'I believe we lost the presidential election because we had left the working class behind a long time ago. They were told time and time again that their leaders would fight for them, and those leaders, like Andrew Cuomo, sold them out.' He's in his flow now, his arms flapping in grand gestures of the sort that his staff have worked hard to get him to tone down. There's animation in his portrayal of Cuomo, containing a hefty dose of venom, and even disgust. 'We are considering electing a former governor who resigned in disgrace, one who cut Medicaid, stole hundreds of millions of dollars from the MTA [which runs the subway], hounded the more than a dozen women who credibly accused him of sexual harassment even suing them for their gynecological records. It begs the question: what high ground do we have in the Democratic party when we critique Donald Trump?' Towards the end of his Terminal 5 rally speech, Mamdani warned his supporters to expect a barrage of negative attack ads from Cuomo and his billionaire backers in the closing stage of the race. But it's not just the barrage of TV ads that are attacking Zohran. The most withering criticism has come from the New York Times editorial board, which went so far as to opine that he didn't deserve a spot on the ballot. Mamdani swats that one away with the curt remark: 'These are the opinions of about a dozen New Yorkers. They're entitled to them.' The paper described his proposals as unrealistic. That's paradoxical, he says. Working-class Americans are losing faith in the Democratic party, yet anyone who comes up with policies that address their daily struggles is castigated for being pie in the sky. 'If you want to fight for working people priced out of their own city, then you are told you are out of touch.' The Anti-Defamation League, the Holocaust Museum, and several Jewish leaders have also blast out to scorch him in the final stretch. Shortly after we meet, a podcast is posted by the Bulwark in which Mamdani was asked whether he felt uncomfortable about the use by some pro-Palestinians of the phrase 'globalize the intifada', which has been condemned by some Jews as a call to violence. He would not denounce the expression, saying it spoke to 'a desperate desire for equality and equal rights in standing up for Palestinian human rights'. The comment led to rapid backlash from some Jewish groups. That was just the latest in a pattern in which, stepping outside a campaign tightly focused on affordability, he has been prepared to speak out about the highly contentious issue of the Middle East. He has decried the humanitarian disaster in Gaza, and championed the cause of Mahmoud Khalil, the pro-Palestinian student activist at Columbia University who was released on Friday after more than three months detention on the orders of a federal judge. Given the nature of his economically-focused campaign, wouldn't it have been expedient to skirt around the issue of Gaza? . 'I have always been honest,' he says. 'I am honest because I believe it is incumbent upon us to have a new kind of politics, consistent with international law, and I believe there are far more New Yorkers looking for that consistency than one would imagine.' Mamdani has clearly been riled by the attacks made on him, which he calls Islamophobic. 'I have been smeared and slandered in clear racist language,' he says, pointing to mailers from a Cuomo-supporting super PAC which altered his face to be darker and his beard to be thicker (the super PAC denied any intentional manipulation). In the days after our interview, the NYPD's Hate Crimes Task Force announced they are investigating threats made against Mamdani, by an unidentified man who said he was a 'terrorist' who is 'not welcome in America'. None of this is new for him. He's had to deal with Islamophobia since 9/11, when he was nine and had been living in the city for just two years. He was spared the worst of the anti-Muslim fallout of the attacks, he says, partly thanks to a kind teacher who pulled him aside and told him to let her know if he was ever bullied. But 9/11 left its mark. 'Living in the shadows of that moment, it politicized my identity. It forced a nine-year-old boy to see himself the way the world was seeing him.' That young boy is now three days away from a vote in which he seeks to become the first Muslim mayor of New York City. As he finishes up his salad and downs a cup of hot water with honey and lemon, before rushing off to his next engagement, he looks a strange mix of bone tired and fired-up for the battle ahead.
Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
Rape charge against man staying in asylum hotel 'was kept secret to avoid stirring up community tensions'
Council chiefs have been accused of hushing up a rape charge against the inhabitant of an asylum hotel in order to avoid inflaming 'community tension'. The man was reportedly charged with rape and voyeurism following an attack on a woman on June 11, The Sun reported. He is believed to have been living at the Royal Beach Hotel in Southsea, which has functioned as an asylum hotel. However, the man appeared in front of Portsmouth magistrates' on June 16 and he was remanded in custody - so he is no longer living in the hotel. But there are now allegations that members of Portsmouth City Council sought to keep the nature of charged man's accommodation secret in order to avoid community unrest. Portsmouth City Council members were reportedly briefed in private about the charges against the man. However, it has been claimed that councillors were warned not to mention that the suspect lived in an asylum hotel. It was also reported that Portsmouth Independents Party leader Cllr George Madgwick was urged not to share 'privileged confidential information'. A young girl waves to security officers as a group of people thought to be migrants are brought in to Dover, Kent, from a Border Force vessel following a small boat incident in the Channel on June 20 Councillor Madgwick said: 'This is precisely why the public don't trust politicians and public bodies: things are hidden that should be disclosed. Anyone involved in any form of cover-up from disclosure to the public should question their role in a publicly funded position.' There are also two other cases in England, one in Manchester and one in London, in which the fact that suspects lived in asylum hotels was not disclosed. Shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick called the small-boat crossings 'a national security emergency'. 'Women in towns with asylum hotels shouldn't have to live in fear. The authorities must trust the public with the truth and act to protect them,' he said. A government spokesperson said: 'Sexual violence of all types is a despicable crime, causing the most unimaginable harm to victims and survivors. 'We recognise the immense bravery shown by them throughout their pursuit of justice, and protecting them remains central to our mission to halve violence against women and girls in a decade. 'We have already taken action to ban foreign nationals who commit sexual offences from being granted asylum, and will do everything in our power to pursue deportation from the UK so that these vile criminals are off our streets and paying the price for their crimes.'
The Independent
3 hours ago
- The Independent
Americans are witnessing immigration arrests firsthand. Many say they can't just watch
Barefoot and armed with only his iPhone, poet and podcast producer Adam Greenfield raced out of his San Diego home after his girlfriend alerted him to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) vehicles pulling up in their neighbourhood. Nursing a cold, Mr Greenfield joined a handful of neighbours recording masked agents raiding a popular Italian restaurant nearby, as they collectively yelled at officers to leave. Within an hour, the impromptu gathering swelled to nearly 75 people, many positioning themselves in front of the agents' vehicles. "I couldn't stay silent," Mr Greenfield said. "It was literally outside of my front door." The incident reflects a growing trend across the United States, where more citizens are witnessing immigration arrests unfold in public spaces – from shops and gyms to restaurants – as President Donald Trump's administration aggressively works to increase such detentions. This heightened visibility is prompting many Americans, including those who rarely engage in civil disobedience, to spontaneously record events on their phones and launch protests in response. Greenfield said on the evening of the May 30 raid, the crowd included grandparents, retired military members, hippies, and restaurant patrons arriving for date night. Authorities threw flash bangs to force the crowd back and then drove off with four detained workers, he said. 'To do this, at 5 o'clock, right at the dinner rush, right on a busy intersection with multiple restaurants, they were trying to make a statement,' Greenfield said. "But I don't know if their intended point is getting across the way they want it to. I think it is sparking more backlash.' Previously many arrests happened late at night or in the pre-dawn hours by agents waiting outside people's homes as they left for work or outside their work sites when they finished their day. When ICE raided another popular restaurant in San Diego in 2008, agents did it in the early morning without incident. White House border czar Tom Homan has said agents are being forced to do more arrests in communities because of sanctuary policies that limit cooperation with ICE in certain cities and states. ICE enforces immigration laws nationwide but seeks state and local help in alerting federal authorities of immigrants wanted for deportation and holding that person until federal officers take custody. Vice President JD Vance during a visit to Los Angeles on Friday said those policies have given agents 'a bit of a morale problem because they've had the local government in this community tell them that they're not allowed to do their job." 'When that Border Patrol agent goes out to do their job, they said within 15 minutes they have protesters, sometimes violent protesters who are in their face obstructing them,' he said. Melyssa Rivas had just arrived at her office in the Los Angeles suburb of Downey, California one morning last week when she heard the frightened screams of young women. She went outside to find the women confronting nearly a dozen masked federal agents who had surrounded a man kneeling on the pavement. 'It was like a scene out of a movie,' Rivas said. 'They all had their faces covered and were standing over this man who was clearly traumatized. And there are these young girls screaming at the top of their lungs.' As Rivas began recording the interaction, a growing group of neighbors shouted at the agents to leave the man alone. They eventually drove off in vehicles, without detaining him, video shows. Rivas spoke to the man afterward, who told her the agents had arrived at the car wash where he worked that morning, then pursued him as he fled on his bicycle. It was one of several recent workplace raids in the majority-Latino city. The same day, federal agents were seen at a Home Depot, a construction site and an LA Fitness gym. It wasn't immediately clear how many people had been detained. 'Everyone is just rattled,' said Alex Frayde, an employee at LA Fitness who said he saw the agents outside the gym and stood at the entrance, ready to turn them away as another employee warned customers about the sighting. In the end, the agents never came in. Arrests at immigration courts and other ICE buildings have also prompted emotional scenes as masked agents have turned up to detain people going to routine appointments and hearings. In the city of Spokane in rural eastern Washington state, hundreds of people rushed to protest outside an ICE building June 11 after former city councilor Ben Stuckart posted on Facebook. Stuckart wrote that he was a legal guardian of a Venezuelan asylum seeker who who went to check in at the ICE building only to be detained. His Venezuelan roommate was also detained. Both men had permission to live and work in the U.S. temporarily under humanitarian parole, Stuckart told The Associated Press. 'I am going to sit in front of the bus,' Stuckart wrote, referring to the van that was set to transport the two men to an ICE detention center in Tacoma. 'The Latino community needs the rest of our community now. Not tonight, not Saturday but right now!!!!' The city of roughly 230,000 is the seat of Spokane County, where just over half of voters cast ballots for Trump in the 2024 presidential election. Stuckart was touched to see his mother's caregiver among the demonstrators. 'She was just like, 'I'm here because I love your mom, and I love you, and if you or your friends need help, then I want to help,'' he said through tears. By evening, the Spokane Police Department sent over 180 officers, with some using pepper balls, to disperse protesters. Over 30 people were arrested, including Stuckart who blocked the transport van with others. He was later released. Aysha Mercer, a stay-at-home mother of three, said she is 'not political in any way, shape or form." But many children in her Spokane neighborhood -- who play in her yard and jump on her trampoline -- come from immigrant families, and the thought of them being affected by deportations was 'unacceptable," she said. She said she wasn't able to go to Stuckart's protest. But she marched for the first time in her life on June 14, joining millions in 'No Kings' protests across the country. 'I don't think I've ever felt as strongly as I do right this here second,' she said.
