An Indian-origin green card holder who has lived in the US for 27 years has been detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), months after an immigration judge dismissed a deportation case against her. Venkata Vasamsetty, a grandmother and special-needs educator in North Carolina, was detained last week during a scheduled inspection and is being held at the Irwin County Detention Center in Georgia, according to ICE’s Online Detainee Locator System. Her detention has been challenged in federal court by her legal team, which has filed an emergency habeas corpus petition.
Ms Vasamsetty has been a lawful permanent resident since 2013 and has no criminal history, according to her immigration attorney Zoe Wilson. Ms Wilson said Ms Vasamsetty had lived lawfully in the US for decades and maintained ties to the country through her family, employment, and home. The dispute began after she spent about seven months in India in 2022-23 caring for her ill parents.
Her return to the US was delayed after she contracted Covid-19 and was hospitalised for nearly two weeks and suffered further health problems. According to Ms Wilson, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has argued that her prolonged absence showed she had abandoned her US permanent residency. The attorney said in a post on LinkedIn: “She wasn't packing up her life in the United States.
She wasn’t moving back to India. She wasn’t leaving with the intention of giving up her green card. At the time she left, she was literally in the process of buying a home in North Carolina to be her primary residence.
Then, while she was in India, she completed that purchase. When she was finally well enough to travel, she returned home to the United States through Raleigh-Durham International Airport in February 2023. She had been outside the country for about seven months.” The immigration case against her was dismissed by an immigration judge on 19 May this year after DHS allegedly failed to meet a court deadline to submit evidence supporting its case.
Despite that dismissal, Ms Vasamsetty continued attending required ICE check-ins. At her 11 August check-in in Charlotte, she was detained and subsequently transferred to a detention facility in Georgia. Even though her case had already been terminated, she was scheduled for one at the Charlotte ICE office this past Tuesday, on August 11th, 2026.
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