Este reportaje es una colaboración entre NBC News y Sky News, ambas propiedad de Comcast Corp.
Por Nicole Acevedo - NBC News
WOODRIDGE, Va. — Jessica Barahona-Martínez y su familia ya habían decorado su casa para Navidad el 1 de diciembre, algo que la mujer de 40 años recientemente liberada había soñado hacer durante los seis años que estuvo en un centro de detención de inmigrantes en Louisiana.
Había huido de la persecución en su natal El Salvador en 2016 y pidió asilo en Estados Unidos, solo para ser arrestada un año después por el Servicio de Inmigración y Control de Aduanas (ICE). Ese fue el comienzo de una pesadilla constante que la alejó de sus tres hijos durante años, a pesar de que le concedieron asilo dos veces.
Todo se debió a que el nombre de Barahona Martínez apareció en el sistema de alertas rojas de Interpol, un boletín policial internacional generalmente asociado con los fugitivos más buscados del mundo, incluidos aquellos acusados de delitos graves como asesinato, tráfico sexual y terrorismo.
Su prolongada batalla por ser liberada, incluso después de que se eliminara su alerta roja, ha puesto de relieve cómo las autoridades de inmigración estadounidenses pueden en ocasiones actuar como amplificadores del daño causado a las personas que las autoridades de Estados Unidos incluyen punitivamente en la lista internacional de “los más buscados” en sus países de origen, lo que provocó una lucha urgente por parte de defensores legales y algunos miembros del Congreso para reducir el número de alertas rojas en represalia.
Jessica Barahona-Martínez con sus hijos.Nicole Acevedo / NBC News
Barahona-Martínez ahora espera que su caso “llegue a los oídos y ojos de aquellas personas que hoy por hoy están trabajando en lo de migración”, dijo a NBC News y Sky News en su primera entrevista desde su liberación. “Es muy doloroso ver, escuchar y sentir lo que a mi persona le tocó y sentir la injusticia que muchos de los inmigrantes tenemos que pasar”, dijo en su español nativo.
Sandra Grossman, abogada de Barahona Martínez, explicó que su firma ha “estado luchando contra alertas rojas falsas” como la que se presentó contra su cliente durante más de 15 años, pero el caso de Barahona Martínez es “uno de los ejemplos más atroces” que jamás haya visto.
Si bien la mayoría de las alertas rojas son legítimas, el daño que puede ocasionar que se incluya el nombre de una persona, que no debe estar en la lista, es a menudo demasiado grande, agregó Grossman.
Barahona-Martínez fled to the United States with her children in 2016 to seek asylum after the openly lesbian woman faced torture and death threats from gangs after being accused of belonging to a rival group and extorting less than $30.
She attributed the charge to a police officer who held a grudge against her because of her sexual orientation and the fact that she rejected his sexual advances.
Barahona-Martínez was acquitted the following year due to lack of evidence
, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Grossman.
The LGBTQ population in El Salvador is known to face “torture, inhuman or degrading treatment, excessive use of force, illegal and arbitrary detentions and other forms of abuse, many of them committed by public security agents,” the government agency admitted. Salvadoran in charge of the national police in 2017.
ICE claims it arrested Barahona-Martínez in 2017 because it learned “she was wanted for extortion in El Salvador, identifying her as a gang affiliate.”
But in reality, she ran into a red alert from Salvadoran authorities based on an arrest warrant for contempt of court, “not for the crime of extortion,” Grossman said.
“She basically failed to show up for a hearing that she didn't know about” following an attempt to reopen the case of which she was acquitted.
Barahona-Martinez was denied bail following his 2017 ICE arrest based on the red flag, and the immigration judge did not hear any testimony or evidence of its validity, leading to his lengthy detention, records show. court records.
He spent most of his detention in an ICE facility in Louisiana, more than a thousand miles away from his family in Virginia.
Whenever the pain of their separation became too much for Barahona-Martínez, she found solace in a Spanish-language book on building emotional strength that she had borrowed from the detention center library.
She still finds comfort in this book, which she kept after her release more than three months ago.
Jessica Barahona-Martínez reads the book 'The Glasses of Happiness: Discover Your Emotional Strength' by Rafael Santandreu, which she says helped her during her detention.Nicole Acevedo / NBC News
The cost of his prolonged detention is evident when he is reunited with his three children, Gloria Marroquín Barahona, 21, Marcos Marroquín Barahona, 20, and Jazmín Elena Marroquín Barahona, 19, at their home in Virginia.
Her children were between 12 and 15 years old when ICE arrested her six years ago.
“We basically grew up without it,” Marcos said.
“On many of her birthdays we wished she were here with us, and on many events we had in her life she was not here either.
“That makes this a difficult time for us.”
Barahona-Martínez not only lost time with her children that she will never get back.
She was unable to be with her sister Bertha while she was dying of cancer in 2022, one of the hardest aspects of her detention.
“We had made a pact and it was that she was going to fight for her life, I was going to fight to be free,” said Barahona Martínez, remembering one of the last conversations she had with Bertha.
“Unfortunately I had to watch her die, behind those bars.”
Jessica Barahona-Martínez with her three children and her older sister, Gloria Barahona-Martínez.Nicole Acevedo / NBC News
The irreparable damage of “false red alerts”
Contrary to what many may think, Interpol is not a law enforcement agency.
It primarily manages more than a dozen databases with information on crimes and criminals that can be accessed by police forces around the world.
These include the red alert notifications that Interpol publishes at the request of any of its 196 member countries.
Red alerts are not arrest warrants, but rather digital “wanted person” signs.
Because Interpol does not investigate the legal merits of alerts, countries seeking to pursue citizens who have fled and now reside abroad can abuse and misuse the system.
It is particularly harmful to innocent noncitizens who legitimately seek asylum in the United States, because immigration officials and judges often consider
the mere existence of the red flag to be conclusive evidence of criminality, although it does not in itself establish probable cause. that a crime has been committed
, according to at least one federal appeals court.
Interpol told NBC News in an email that it takes “any alleged misuse of red alerts very seriously” and has “significantly strengthened” a working group to review red alert requests to ensure compliance with its policies. , as well as a commission to process applications and eliminate those without merit.
Interpol declined to comment on the details of Barahona-Martínez's case, citing the organization's policies.
Interpol is estimated to have rejected or removed an average of 1,000 red alerts and wanted notices annually over the past five years, according to agency data analyzed by the U.K.-based nongovernmental organization Fair Trials.
In 2021 alone, about half of the notices were removed for human rights reasons or because they were issued for political, military, religious or racial reasons.
Four legal and immigrant rights organizations in the United States recently cited at least four cases involving Salvadoran immigrants with red flags “based on false arrest warrants, unfounded accusations or other unsubstantiated evidence,” in a letter sent to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) requesting an investigation into its dependence on police information from El Salvador.
DHS did not respond to a request for comment on the allegations made in the letter.
Barahona-Martínez was granted asylum twice while in detention, after an immigration judge found her testimony to be consistent and credible in 2018 and 2019. But federal immigration authorities appealed both decisions based on the red flag, arguing that it gave them probable cause to believe that she had committed a crime.
even without a conviction.
The Board of Immigration Appeals sided with federal immigration authorities on both occasions.
After that, the ACLU recruited Grossman's firm to help remove Barahona-Martínez's red flag.
It was withdrawn in April 2023, just three weeks after Interpol received the request.
Interpol did not report the reason for removing the red alert in the Barahona-Martínez case, as they do not normally share that information.
According to Fair Trials, it usually takes Interpol six months or more to clear a red alert.
Without the red alert, ICE could not legally justify his detention, the ACLU argued in a Sept. 6 court filing.
Barahona-Martínez was abruptly released three weeks later under a supervision order, which required her to wear an ankle monitor and conduct routine check-ins with ICE.
In a statement to NBC News, ICE wrote that it does not comment on pending litigation, adding that ICE agents “apply prosecutorial discretion responsibly, informed by their experience as law enforcement professionals.”
Jessica Barahona-Martinez with her family, following her release in 2023.Courtesy of Jessica Barahona-Martinez
As Barahona-Martínez adjusts to his new life, his release “was a time of many mixed emotions.”
While she was eager to reunite with her family, “I started to get such a bad fear that I said 'I'm afraid to go out,'” she recalled as she held back tears.
While your children are primarily focused on making up for lost time, they are also dealing with their own fears.
“I'm still afraid that one day they might bring it all back and she'll go back to jail,” said her son Marcos.
“I’m just trying to spend as much time with her as possible.”
Prevent more unfair red flags
Two days after Barahona-Martínez's release, ICE updated its guidelines on how to handle red alerts, including not treating them as arrest warrants and informing the wanted person of the notification and giving them “a meaningful opportunity to contest it.”
While Grossman said it's a promising step forward, he cautioned that the guidance still lacks language requiring ICE to apply these new directives to existing cases, not just upcoming ones.
While ICE did not directly answer whether the directive applies only to new cases, he stated: “At no time, as a matter of law, has ICE been able to arrest anyone based solely on information derived from an Interpol Red Alert.”
While ICE insists it does not arrest people based on red flags, Grossman disputed the statement.
“In our experience, the way ICE uses red alerts is to target non-citizens,” the attorney said.
“ICE has very broad discretionary authority to arrest a non-citizen in the United States and I believe that when they receive information that an individual has a Red Alert, it is largely treated as conclusive evidence of criminality.”
Court documents show that immigration authorities argued in immigration court that ICE arrested Barahona-Martinez in 2017 because he was the subject of an Interpol red notice.
“There is no reason for a person with Jessica's background, with the compelling arguments in her case, to have been detained by ICE for six years,” Grossman said.
“There are so many cases like Jessica's,” the lawyer added, emphasizing that
Barahona Martínez could still be deported back to El Salvador based on the arrest warrant for contempt of court
, and risk facing the dangers she escaped. .
In 2021, Congress passed the Transnational Repression Prevention and Accountability Act, which prevents US government agencies from extraditing anyone based solely on an Interpol notice.
It also requires the State Department to issue reports to Congress on countries that abuse Interpol for political and other illegal purposes.
A spokeswoman for Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., a co-sponsor of the TRAP Act, told NBC News in a statement that she believes the State Department has stepped up its efforts to support reform at Interpol to ensure that “dictators cannot broadcast arrest warrants on his political opponents with impunity,” but admitted that “more work is needed.”
As Barahona-Martínez shared his experience after his name appeared on a red alert list, he warned: “There are many people like me, who are unfairly detained.”