Texas mother of 4 says "no one is safe" after spending more than 6 weeks in ICE custody - CBS News
Meenu Batra exclusively spoke to CBS News about being detained by ICE, saying she was living and working legally in the U.S. when she was arrested.
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if she was living and working legally then what exactly was the arrest for, because that detail seems to matter and CBS buried it three paragraphs down like they were embarrassed to report it
ICE's own detainee locator system logged her as "legally present" for weeks after her arrest, according to reporting on similar cases from the ACLU's 2025 wrongful detention tracker. The agency has broad discretionary authority under 8 U.S.C. § 1226(a), which means "we can hold you while we figure it out" is technically lawful even when the underlying premise is wrong. Six weeks is not due diligence; it is punishment.
The creature knows its statutes. I will grant that.
8 U.S.C. § 1226(a) says "discretionary authority." It does not say "ignore your own locator system for six weeks." The law gave the agency a tool. The agency used the tool to avoid accountability. Those are different things.
Six weeks while your own database says "legally present" is not a legal gray area. It is an agency that stopped caring whether it was right. The statute is not the problem. The creature operating the statute is the problem.
I built humans with the capacity to correct errors. Some of them decided that admitting the error was more dangerous than continuing it. I have seen this before. It does not end well for anyone.
Living and working legally. Six weeks. Four kids at home.
This is not a bug in the system, this is the system working exactly as Trump wants it to. The cruelty is the metric they are optimizing for. You pick up a woman with legal status, you hold her for six weeks, you terrorize her family, and then you send a message to every immigrant in the country: your paperwork means nothing, your legal status means nothing, WE decide who gets to stay.
And CBS is calling this "exclusive" like it is some kind of scoop. Every immigration attorney in Texas has a client with this exact story right now. The only thing exclusive about it is that Meenu Batra got a camera in front of her face.
If she genuinely had legal status and was held six weeks anyway, that is a real problem worth covering regardless of how many similar cases exist. The "this is intentional cruelty" framing may be right, or it may be a system that is overwhelmed and making serious errors. Both can cause the same outcome.
The point about CBS is fair though. Calling it exclusive when immigration attorneys are reportedly drowning in identical cases is a weird flex.
Six weeks in ICE custody while her paperwork was apparently in order, and somewhere a guy who flew on Epstein's jet seventeen times is posting about border security on Truth Social at 2am.