Texas mother and courtroom interpreter detained by ICE at airport

Meenu Batra spent more than two decades working in U.S. courtrooms, yet ICE agents detained her at a Texas airport and told her she was in the country illegally. The collision between those two versions of her status now sits at the center of a federal case and a larger question about how old immigration records are being read.

Batra, 53, was stopped around 5 p.m. on March 17 after she passed through security at Harlingen International Airport in Harlingen, Texas, as she headed to Milwaukee for work. Batra says the agents were in plain clothes and did not display visible badges or uniforms. She says they told her she had a deportation order. Her attorneys say a New Jersey immigration judge granted her withholding of removal decades ago and that she regularly renewed work authorization tied to that protection. Batra said she believed she was legally in the United States and had her documents with her in her bag.

The government has taken a different position. The Department of Homeland Security has described Batra as an illegal alien and said employment authorization alone does not confer legal status. That dispute over what paperwork matters, and which record controls, is what has pushed her detention beyond a routine enforcement action and into a legal fight over due process for longtime residents whose status has been shaped by old immigration orders, repeated renewals and years of lawful work.

Batra has lived in the United States for about 35 years after immigrating from India to New Jersey. She settled in South Texas in 2002 and has lived in the Laguna Heights colonia near Brownsville ever since. Local reporting describes her as Texas’s only licensed Hindi, Punjabi and Urdu legal interpreter, a niche role that has made her language skills valuable in immigration court cases involving South Asian immigrants across the country.

She is also a single mother of four adult U.S. citizen children, including Jasper, who recently joined the U.S. Army. Her detention has left the family facing the possibility that a mother who spent years helping others navigate the courts is now trapped inside the immigration system herself.

The fight over her custody is now before federal court in Batra v. Venegas, filed March 26 in the Southern District of Texas. Court filings show a temporary restraining order was submitted on April 3, adding urgency to a case that has become about more than one woman’s arrest. It has become a test of how the government treats old immigration protections, how it verifies status at the airport gate, and what happens when a specialist interpreter is pulled out of service at a moment when courts rely on her most.