Abdellatif and Sandra Hafraoui are a New Jersey couple that backed President Donald Trump, and they estimate they've paid $50,000 in legal fees since ICE agents detained Abdellatif despite initially believing the Trump administration's immigration crackdown would only "focus on criminals."
In fact, Sandra is furious at the man she voted for three times and believes he is "ruining" their lives.
Abdellatif, a resident of Bayonne, was detained at Newark Liberty International Airport last August as he and his wife prepared to fly to Florida for a vacation. He moved to the U.S. from Morocco when he was 22 and has lived stateside for 38 years.
Sandra recalled three men in plain clothes and a woman wearing a lanyard with a badge approached them:
“They looked at him and said his ‘status is unclear.' You’re going with us.’ Then the lady pointed at me and said, ‘You don’t want to make a scene here.’”
Abdellatif, who is undocumented and could not vote for Trump—unlike his wife—spent 108 days in custody. During that time, he was transferred from New Jersey’s Delaney Hall Detention Facility to facilities in Louisiana and later Arizona before securing his release on a $15,000 bond.
He now wears a black ankle monitor, his Moroccan passport held by the government as his immigration case moves forward. Attorneys say his situation is not unusual: many detainees have deep roots in the U.S. but are swept up by years-old removal orders stemming from missed court appearances or paperwork mistakes. Like many of them, Abdellatif has no criminal record.
He says:
“I would like to go back to work, to feel normal again. To have my life back without all this fear and uncertainty.”
Before his detention, Abdellatif had spent nearly twenty years working as a concierge in a residential building in Midtown Manhattan. Earlier in his career, an employer had sponsored him, allowing him to hold valid work permits for several years. After he married Sandra in 2011, he continued renewing his authorization through a spousal petition while seeking permanent residency.
His legal troubles, however, traced back to an earlier attempt to regularize his status. More than a decade before the marriage, Abdellatif hired immigration attorney Earl Seth David to help him secure a green card. David never informed him of a scheduled immigration court appearance, and when Abdellatif failed to attend, a deportation order was issued in absentia.
The attorney was later prosecuted in federal court for orchestrating a broad immigration fraud scheme and ultimately received a five-year prison sentence.
Still unaware that he had missed the hearing, Abdellatif went on renewing his work permits and, after marrying Sandra, filed a spousal petition to adjust his status. Because the old deportation order remained on the books, ICE eventually acted to enforce it.
Sandra voted for Trump in three separate elections, trusting that immigration crackdowns would focus on people with criminal pasts, not men like the one she married.
When asked what she would say to Trump now, she said:
"To think we were MAGA! You said you were going after the worst of the worst, but instead you ruined our life."
Considering that more 70,000 people are in ICE detention nationwide—the overwhelming majority without criminal records—and that Trump was and remains very clear that anyone can be swept up in immigration raids, people were quick to point out that the couple had f**ked around and found out.
Did they think the leopards wouldn't eat their faces even while Trump promised the largest mass deportation campaign "anyone has ever seen"?
Abdellatif said that the day a New Jersey immigration judge overturned the prior deportation order was the same day he was placed on another charter flight, this one scheduled to deport him to Morocco. However, he was removed from the plane.
The couple have drained their savings to pay for the tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees and have since launched a GoFundMe fundraiser to help cover living costs. They say they still want to go on a beach vacation one day but that when that day comes, "we'll be driving right past the airport."
Sandra stressed that "we just want to be treated like people with rights," instead of, she said, "like problems to be managed."
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