Newlywed detained by ICE freed after 141 days and two deportation attempts

Ward Sakeik, 22 and Taahir Shaikh, 28. Photo / Ward Sakeik and Taahir Shaikh

For five months, locked inside an immigration detention centre in Texas, Ward Sakeik barely saw the sky. Days blurred under fluorescent lights.

Then, on Tuesday night local time, an officer told her to pack.

Sakeik, 22, got into her husband’s car and rolled down the window. Wind hit her face. Trees flickered past. She looked up and whispered: “The moon”.

It was the first time she’d seen it since February, when immigration agents pulled her aside at the airport on her way home from her honeymoon in the US Virgin Islands.

Sakeik, who is of Palestinian descent but legally stateless, had married Taahir Shaikh, 28, a United States citizen, just 10 days earlier.

In the weeks that followed, the Trump Administration had twice tried to deport Sakeik, who has lived in the US since she was a young child.

The first time, officers told her she was being sent to the Israel border – just as Israel launched airstrikes on Iran last month. A federal judge intervened, barring her removal.

Even then, Sakeik and her lawyer said, immigration authorities tried again on Monday. Her sudden release the next day stunned Sakeik, her family and her legal team.

“I absolutely didn’t believe them at first,” Sakeik said in an interview with the Washington Post.

“I was like, ‘Let me rub my eyes. I think I’m dreaming or something.’ You just don’t know how much you’re blessed until it’s all taken away.”

Ward Sakeik, 22, Taahir Shaikh, 28 were engaged in 2004. Photo / Ward Sakeik and Taahir Shaikh

In a statement, Department of Homeland Security assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin said Sakeik had been set free “following her American husband and her filing the appropriate legal applications for her to remain in the country and become a legal permanent resident”.

Maria Kari, one of Sakeik’s lawyers, called that claim “factually inaccurate”.

Shaikh filed an I-130 petition – the first step in sponsoring a spouse for a green card – four days after his wife was detained in February. The petition was approved on June 27, and lawyers alerted the Government, Kari said, yet immigration officials tried to deport her again just three days later.

Though Sakeik was ultimately released, advocates and immigration experts say her case underscores their growing concerns about the Trump Administration’s willingness to defy court orders and bypass due process.

In March, immigration authorities illegally deported Kilmar Abrego García to a prison in El Salvador despite a judge’s order blocking the move. They then resisted efforts to bring him back despite a Supreme Court order that the Government facilitate his return.

Both cases, experts warn, reflect a shift towards aggressive enforcement – targeting even those with deep US ties or no criminal record – as the Administration races to fulfil its promise of mass deportations.

“This is what happens when you forcibly remove all discretion from a system where the laws are so poorly written and have been held together with duct tape and superglue,” said Rekha Sharma-Crawford, a Kansas City-based immigration lawyer not involved in Sakeik’s case.

Under normal circumstances, Sakeik – a woman with no criminal record, who is married to a US citizen, and has been in the US since she was 8 – would not be a target for deportation, said Ohio State University law professor César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández.

“But clearly ICE’s priorities have changed radically over the past six months.”

Sakeik has lived her whole life in legal limbo.

She was born to Palestinian refugees in Saudi Arabia, a country that does not grant citizenship by birth – rendering her stateless.

Her family entered the US with tourist visas and sought asylum, she said.

Their petition was denied, but because no other country would take them, they were permitted to remain under an “order of supervision”.

That allows people with final deportation orders to continue living and working in the US as long as they check in regularly with immigration officials and stay out of legal trouble.

Over the years, immigration officers at the Dallas office came to know her, Sakeik said – congratulating her when she graduated from the University of Texas at Arlington, and opened a photography business.

Three years ago, that business led her to Shaikh, who hired Sakeik to take his professional headshots.

“That 45-minute photo shoot ended up being a seven-hour date,” Shaikh said, and in 2024, the couple got engaged beneath a garland of roses. In February, they got married.

Their nightmare began as they were separated coming back from their honeymoon.

A Customs and Border Protection officer at the St Thomas Airport stopped Sakeik after asking about her immigration status.

Her husband was told that they’d still be on the same flight to Miami, except that she’d be surrounded by immigration agents.

“We’re not going to allow you both to speak,” he remembers them saying. “You cannot look at each other, or she’s going to suffer the consequences.”

Sakeik was held at the Broward Transitional Centre in Florida for about three weeks, then transferred to El Valle Detention Centre in Texas – which she described as “the warehouses in the rodeo, where they keep the chicken and the horses”.

She was crammed into a dusty, dirty and windowless room with nearly 100 women, who were allowed outside for one hour a day. Some days, officers offered detainees US$1000 to sign their deportation orders, Sakeik said.

In June, guards yanked Sakeik awake and told her to pack. She was sent to Prairieland Detention Centre in Texas; hours later she was suddenly told that she would be deported to Israel’s border.

When Sakeik asked where she was being taken, a guard replied: “Palestine”, she recalled.

On the bus to the airport, she panicked.

“I kept thinking, ‘What document am I even living under?’” she said. “If I get to the Israeli border without one, I’m going to get arrested.”

The June 12 flight never left. An immigration officer cited the Israel-Iran conflict as a reason, Sakeik said. Hours after she was returned to Prairieland, Israel launched an attack against Iran and closed its airspace.

On June 22, US District Judge Ed Kinkeade barred the Government from deporting Sakeik or removing her from the Texas district where she was being held as her legal case played out.

Federal law prevents the Government from deporting somebody “where there is a likelihood of persecution on account of their race, nationality, race, religion, membership in a particular social group or political opinion”, said García Hernández, adding that Sakeik could make the case that she could face harm in Israel.

For a moment, Sakeik felt safe. Eight days later, though, she was woken before dawn and told to pack. She showed officers a copy of the judge’s ruling, which they ignored. Panicking, she called her husband and lawyers.

They in turn contacted Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the US Attorney’s office. According to court records, ICE officers told Sakeik’s lawyer that she would be placed on a flight. After two hours of waiting in fear, she was led back to her dorm.

“If my lawyer hadn’t got involved, they wouldn’t have listened to me,” she said. “They wouldn’t have cared about the judge’s order.”

A day later, Sakeik was free. She hugged her husband. She saw the moon. She showered alone for the first time in months.

“Now imagine what happens to people who don’t have a lawyer,” she said.