One in a series detailing how Trump's immigration policies are transforming America.
It was a Trump-era international love story: Boy meets girl. Boy falls in love. Girl gets detained by ICE.
But the detention of the Lithuania-born Tatjana Vesiolko is an unusual one, even in an era of increasingly strict immigration enforcement. She is entering her 11th month in an immigration lock-up. Al Dallasta, her American fiancé, can't understand why.
"She's essentially lost a year of her life for what?" Dallasta said of his partner – a billiards champ, slender with a chestnut bob who friends call "Tia" for short. "She's falling apart in there."
The day PresidentDonald Trumptook office on Jan. 20, he signedseven executive ordersthat set the stage for a surge in immigration enforcement across the country. Vesiolko was among the first to be swept up in the administration's mass deportation campaign.
The Trump administration is now detaining more immigrants than at any timesince World War II. As of Nov. 30, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement reported a record 65,735 people in immigration detention.
Deportation flights have become more frequent. But the proportion and number of people like Vesiolko, detained longer than six months, is climbing.
Two years ago, according toICE data, about 1,300 people or 4% of the detained population, had been held for more than 180 days. That number rose to 6,500 people, or 10% of the detained population, in November ‒ Vesiolko among them.
She entered on a visa waiver in 2009 and stayed, without permission. She has no criminal record, holds a valid Lithuanian passport and comes from a country that accepts its nationals. Immigration attorneys say there are no obvious barriers to her removal.
Provided with the details of her case, the Department of Homeland Security sent a statement: "The delay of her removal was because of the illegal alien's potential inclusion as a member of a class action lawsuit."
DHS didn't name the lawsuit or respond to USA TODAY's questions for clarification. Dallasta said Vesiolko was never told she might part of a lawsuit, nor was she given a chance to opt out.
Vesiolko's prolonged detention may also be "a symptom of ICE working in overdrive," said Jessica Vaughan, director of policy for the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for immigration restrictions.
"There is no question that ICE and its partners have been making more arrests than can be efficiently processed for removal," she said. "It sounds like a case of someone who slipped through the cracks."
Vesiolko, desperate to be out by Christmas, decided to share her story. She spoke to USA TODAY by phone: "Is this just a mean mistake?" she asked. "Have they lost my file?"
Boy meets girl
Before he met Vesiolko, Dallasta, born and raised in Philadelphia, believed a few things with certainty.
That the Eagles are the greatest team in the National Football League. That he would never live on the New Jersey side of the Pennsylvania state line. That he wouldn't likely travel abroad. He had no reason to.
He was a year out of a 14-year marriage that ended in divorce when he logged on to Facebook Dating in 2024.
He and Vesiolko exchanged messages for a few days until she fell silent. Assuming she was done with him, he sent a farewell message telling her she was beautiful and wishing her luck. They met that same night for a date at a Chickie & Pete's pub in New Jersey.
For the next six months, they were inseparable – until agents detained Vesiolko at the airport in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The couple was returning from their first vacation together. It was Valentine's Day.
He vividly recalls her being pulled aside at the airport: the shock, and the foregone conclusion, when a federal agent told him Vesiolko would be deported. They imagined she would be headed to Lithuania within days.
At home, without her, he broke down crying in the kitchen. She had left him a Valentine's card.
He read it alone.
"There are so many paths life can take," she wrote. "The fact that you and I found each other in a whole world of people is not a coincidence."
The cost of detention is counted in many ways
Vesiolko has now spent 311 days in custody.
The months have been hard on both of them. Vesiolko, 38, struggles to keep her spirits up; she was a runner and now gets precious little time outside. Dallasta, 43, battles anxiety, which has worsened with Vesiolko's detention. He recently resigned from his job as a safety associate for a major home improvement chain.
With no end in sight to his fiancé's detention, Dallasta tallied up the personal financial costs.
Some $22,000 in fees to immigration attorneys. Another $2,000 in commissary costs. Precisely $6,370 in phone calls to the detention center. His life savings.
Vesiolko counts the costs in holidays missed, dinners she didn't cook, trips they didn't take. And the guilt of what her detention has done to Dallasta.
Her detention is also costing American taxpayers.
The nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute calculates that immigration detentioncosts an average of $152 per detainee, per day. ICE data shows detainees with immigration violations and no criminal record are spending, on average, 48 days in detention.
Past presidential administrations had focused immigration enforcement on violent criminals. Though Trump promised to arrest "the worst of the worst," the mass deportation effort has put all immigrants here without legal documentation at risk for detention and deportation.
After her arrest in Puerto Rico, Vesiolko was sent to Richwood Correctional Center in northern Louisiana.
Over the ensuing months, she made bids to stay in the United States. Because she had entered on a waiver – and such visitors are held to a higher standard of conduct – she was ineligible for bond. ICE didn't respond to her request for humanitarian parole, Dallasta said.
One immigration judge denied her asylum claim, and another issued a final order of removal in June.
She didn't fight it. Dallasta mailed in her passport to ICE.
Dallasta planned to meet her in Lithuania. They imagined a new life in Europe, marrying and applying for Vesiolko to return to the United States as the spouse of an American.
"Before all this happened, I knew I wanted to be with her," Dallasta said.
This woman isn't fighting her deportation. Why is she still detained?
Hope and 'habeas'
Sunday, Dec. 21, marks 180 days from the day her final deportation order took effect. It's also the day the law cracks open a window to potential relief.
Immigration attorneys say Vesiolko could now file what's known as a "habeas" petition, a formal legal request asking a court to review the legality of her detention. She doesn't have a lawyer – they're both nearly out of money now – and she has pleaded with her deportation officer to let her buy her own ticket home.
"When people volunteer to pay their own ticket, and they don't have a crime, there's no reason they're not on that commercial airline," headed to their native country, saidCharles Kuck, an Atlanta-based immigration attorney who is not involved in her case.
Under the law, immigration detention operates outside the norms of criminal incarceration.
Immigrants can be detained, indefinitely, without charge. They may hire an attorney but don't have access to government-appointed representation. Once detained, immigrants are held without a sentence, without knowing when they might be released or deported. Immigration judges,which the Trump administrationhas started calling "deportation judges,"are hired and can be fired.
But habeas petitions are a long shot in Louisiana right now, said Nora Ahmed, legal director of the ACLU of Louisiana. Judges often allow the government to say, "We're working on it," and immigrants remain detained, sometimes for months longer.
Ahmed said detention is key to the Trump administration's messaging. "This is about, 'If you dare come, you better expect you will be subjected to punishment.'"
In response to a request about Vesiolko's extended detention, Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin told USA TODAY immigrants have the option to "self-deport."
The administration's self-deportation campaign,featuring $1,000 bonusesto immigrants who leave willingly, began in early March, after Vesiolko was detained.
'I have a life out of here'
Vesiolko arrived in America from Moscow with $100 in her pocket and the knowledge that her father – a veteran of Russia's armed forces who hated the United States – would never forgive her.
"When I came here, my father found out and I was scared to go back," she said. "He is a very radical Russian, against America. Everything about America triggers him. I had nowhere to go back."
She had grown up in Moscow, with her father, his family and her Lithuanian mother.
At age 21, after her parents' messy divorce, she fled to New Jersey, where a friend had relocated. She learned American English.
The years snowballed. Vesiolko worked as a housekeeper, under the table. (Homeland Security noted, "She freely admitted to being in the country illegally and never filing taxes.") She joined a local pool league, made friends and built an American life.
"Every bar with a pool table, people know me," she said.
When she met Dallasta for a first date, she asked him to meet her at a pub where she didn't think she'd run into people she knew.
"But right away, friends spotted me and said, 'Hey pool shark! Be careful with her!' It was a funny first date."
Now they talk five times a day on pricey detention center phone lines and via 30-cents-per-minute video calls.
She calls Dallasta "sweet cheeks." When he started calling her "freckles," she taught him the Russian. Now he says, 'Good night, moya venushka." My little freckle.
"He reminds me that I have a future," she said. "That I have a life out of here. He reminds me that I am loved."
The months have dragged on.
Vesiolko has watched other immigrant women come and go, be released or deported. Most of the ones detained long-term with her are there, she says, because they are fighting to stay in the United States. She isn't.
Without knowing how much longer she'll be inside, how much longer before she'll see Dallasta face to face, she holds on to an idea from her mother's Catholicism.
That the seemingly endless detention is a penance.
"If that's the price I pay for being with the love of my life, I can pay that price," she said. "Because I know, after this, I'm going to be so happy."
Lauren Villagran covers immigration for USA TODAY and can be reached at lvillagran@usatoday.com.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY:She wants to be deported before Christmas. ICE hasn't let her go.
