A longtime Texas court interpreter and mother of four who was arrested in March by federal immigration officers, was released Thursday, her attorney confirmed to CBS News.
“We are overjoyed. It’s been a long six to seven weeks,” Meenu Batra’s attorney, Deepak Ahluwalia, told CBS News. “We knew that this moment would come. We were hoping it wouldn’t take as long.”
Batra, whose four adult children are U.S. citizens, was arrested March 17 by federal immigration officers at Valley International Airport in Harlingen, Texas, while on her way to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on a work trip.
Ahluwalia said that a federal district judge on Thursday ordered Batra’s immediate release. According to Ahluwalia, the judge stated that Batra’s due process rights were violated because she was arrested without prior notice, interview or a formal process
Ahluwalia said they are working on getting Batra a green card through her youngest son, Jasper, who is enlisted in the U.S. Army. Ahluwalia said they’ll ask to expedite the application and hope to get approved in the next four to six months.
“The fight is not over,” Ahluwalia told CBS News. “We’ve gotten Meenu out, but now it’s a matter of keeping her here, making sure that all forms of relief that she is eligible for are adjudicated while she’s sitting here and fighting any attempt to send her to a third country that she has no previous relationship or no association with, and we will fight to the end to that.”
Ahluwalia said Batra cannot be arrested again unless a formal notice is given and an interview is conducted in the presence of an attorney.
Batra was born in India. When she was a teenager, her parents were killed because of their Sikh religion. She fled to the U.S. roughly 35 years ago and applied for asylum.
In 2000, she was granted an immigration status known as “withholding of removal,” which differs from asylum. Batra has been a certified court interpreter for more than 20 years, and her language skills in Hindi, Punjabi and Urdu are requested nationwide.
Barta spoke to CBS News earlier this month while in detention at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s El Valle Detention Facility in Raymondville, Texas, saying her understanding of her immigration status was that “I am here, and I am legal and will not be removed, so I have nothing to worry about. And I can live and I can work. And that is all I wanted to do.”
CBS News has reached out to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for comment on the judge’s ruling. In a statement provided to CBS News earlier this month, DHS called Batra an “illegal alien,” adding that “employment authorization does not confer any type of legal status.”
Her children, Amrita, Lucas, Aaryan and Jasper previously told CBS News that it didn’t “feel right” to be at their home near Brownsville, Texas, without her.
“Family is very obviously over the moon in terms of her being released. I was speaking to her almost on the daily, and this has broken her. And you know her, her experience while in detention, the things that she had to see, the things that she suffered, the manner in which she was picked up obviously weighs a lot on a person and has really emotionally and mentally affected her, and so I can only hope that she can come out of what she had to experience for the last month and a half,” Ahluwalia told CBS News.