Neville Hewitt, No. 43 on the NFL’s Houston Texans, was preparing for last Saturday’s playoff against the Baltimore Ravens when he received a two- word Instagram message from his mother.
“Call Ben.”
Benjamin Osorio is the immigration lawyer who is representing Hewitt’s mother, 47-year-old Deon Jones. She came to America from Jamaica when she was 12, but was ordered deported in 2014 after serving nine years in a Georgia state prison on a drug charge. She otherwise had never received so much as a speeding ticket.
Osorio had convinced the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit to grant her a new immigration hearing, and she was flying from Jamaica to Atlanta even as Hewitt was getting ready for the big game.
The lawyer told The Daily Beast that a federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer led him to believe Jones would likely be released with an ankle monitor, allowing a reunion with her son. Jones would not make it to the playoff game, but the family hoped she would be able to see her linebacker son play pro ball for the first time next season.
“She would love to be going crazy in the stands,” Hewitt, 30, told The Daily Beast.
Neville Hewitt has been dreaming of a day when his mother can cheer him on from the stands.
But if there’s anything certain about the immigration process in America right now, it’s that things rarely go according to plan. Jones was about to experience the chaos and miscommunication that has left so many immigrants in limbo.
“This is what's going on here in our country. And a lot of us, we are just not aware that this is actually taking place,” Hewitt said. “It’s been going on for years.”
When Jones’ plane landed, a voice called her name over the intercom and instructed the other passengers to remain seated. An ICE officer came aboard and escorted her in handcuffs and a waist chain to a car outside the terminal.
Alarmed, she began to message Hewitt, but her phone was confiscated after she managed to send just those two ominous words.
Her younger son, 28-year-old Horace, was at the airport to meet Jones, toting a jacket to keep her warm. She sat chilled in the car while he talked to Hewitt on the phone. Hewitt also spoke briefly to Osorio.
“He just told me what happened and he was gonna try to find out some information,” Hewitt recalled. “He was headed to the game at that point.”
Jones received no immediate explanation.
“I don’t care where you from or who you are, it’ll drive you crazy to know that you’re locked up and you don't have an idea of why, and what’s going on with you,” Hewitt later said. “You have no explanation. It’s mind-blowing.”
ICE and the U.S. State Department did not respond to a request for comment.
The chain of events that brought Jones to this confusing moment began unfolding in 2008 when she was arrested on a state drug trafficking charge after a car stop led to the discovery of 40 grams of cocaine and some marijuana in the trunk of a car in which she was a passenger.
At the time, Hewitt was 14 and just starting with the football team at Rockdale High School in Conyers, Georgia, and he only learned of the arrest when he did not see her after a game. He visited her in jail, where a partition prevented him from hugging her.
“It is heartbreaking,” he recalled.
During Jones’ incarceration, Hewitt and Horace lived in her house with her boyfriend, who failed to pay the water and electric bills. Hewitt showered at school and subsisted on the breakfast and lunch provided there.
“What I got at school is what I ate,” he recalled.
His high school coach helped him secure a scholarship to Georgia Military College.
“Guaranteed three meals a day,” Hewitt remembered.
He then transferred to Marshall University where he was football team captain. His mother missed seeing him become the first person in the family to graduate college.
“I kind of knew that she wouldn't be able to make it, so I was mentally prepared,” he recalled. “But the beauty of it all was I went to college and graduated and my brother went to college and graduated.”
Deon Jones and her grandson in Jamaica.
In 2017, Jones was up for parole, but immigration authorities put a hold on her. She spent a year and a half in the Irwin County Detention Center—a facility closed to women after a gynecologist there was found to have performed unnecessary hysterectomies and other procedures. Jones told her family that conditions there were so stressful she stopped eating and began losing her hair. She finally could endure no more and agreed to be deported.
Back in Jamaica, she missed all her son’s NFL games with the Miami Dolphins and then the New York Jets and now the Houston Texans. He flew to see her in Jamaica when he was able, and he built her a nice house. She even had a small farm. But then Hewitt would return to where she could no longer go.
In the meantime, she appealed the deportation order. Though she was initially rebuffed, Osorio kept at it, successfully arguing to an appeals court that what Georgia deemed drug trafficking in her case was not an “aggravated felony” by federal standards, and should not have mandated her deportation.
To get a new hearing, Jones had to appear in person. But she feared being put back in immigration detention. Under immigration law, a deportee with a drug conviction is automatically remanded if they return to the U.S., even on appeal. But ICE is empowered to intercede.
“ICE could say, ‘All right, cut her loose,’” Osorio noted.
Osorio says that an ICE officer led him to believe that Jones would probably be placed on house arrest with an ankle monitor.
“They indicated to us that everything was set up for an approval on the alternatives to detention and that they were just waiting for the supervisor to sign off on it,” he said.
Still, he was worried. What he calls “my spider sense” tingled when an ICE officer said he would meet Jones’ plane. But he hoped that “maybe he’s just gonna help try to facilitate her through.”
The family and Osorio had coordinated the return flight with the U.S. consulate in Jamaica, which asked them to buy a non-refundable plane ticket four to six weeks before departure. They had to rebook twice when they were unable to get a necessary interview at the consulate. They did not imagine that the U.S. government would do all that only for things to turn out as they did.
“You don’t have somebody get on a plane to go sit in jail,” Hewitt noted. “Nobody’s going to go for that.”
The involvement of American authorities gave the family hope Jones would not be detained in Atlanta, and Hewitt says his mother would never have gotten on the plane if she thought there was a significant chance she would be.
On Saturday, Hewitt was in Baltimore for the playoff game. He made a tackle but the Texans lost to the Ravens, 34-10. He was able to speak to his mother, and she sought to console him.
“I was like, ‘I’m okay. This stuff they got you going through is not,’” he recalled.
Jones is now being held at the Stewart Detention Center, two hours outside of Atlanta.
“It’s like we're reliving something that we had already passed,” Hewitt said.
“We were already past this point and it’s like all of a sudden, out of nowhere, we’re back at square one.”
“Where she’s at is worse than prison,” Osorio said. “When you are detained by immigration, you eat and pretty much just sleep. There isn’t much you can do. You’re just sitting there with your thoughts.”
Osorio added, “It’s tough to see her having to go through that again and just trying to mentally keep it together.”
Hewitt repeatedly tried to call Stewart about visitation, but nobody answered. He finally went online and saw that visitors are allowed to see a prisoner once a week for one hour. He said on Thursday that he had still not been able to see her.
“She didn’t do anything to deserve this right now,” he said.
Osorio says she can expect to briefly appear before a judge in February but may not get a hearing for several months. If she wins, the government will likely appeal, which could drag it out several months or more.
“I’m nervous that she's gonna give it all up and go back, and then that’s it,”
Osorio said. “Because she was incarcerated for so long and then now had been free for a couple years, and then to go back to a detention setting, I understand it’s probably not a great place for her mentally.”
If Jones can hold on and prevail in court, Osorio figures she has a good chance of getting a green card and being able to come and go from Jamaica to Texas.
And then she will be able to go crazy in the stands.
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