New Rochelle woman home after detention as 'criminal alien,' still faces deportation


NEW ROCHELLE — Maria Renda returned home after a month's detention as a "criminal alien," still questioning how a 10-year-old misdemeanor could force her from the country where she's lived almost all of her 55 years.

Renda has held a green card since arriving from Italy as a baby. Immigration officials cited a 2001 conviction for drug possession in arresting her May 15. She was placed in deportation proceedings and held at the Hudson County (N.J.) jail.

Noncitizens with drug offenses, even those with many years of U.S. residency, are considered deportable and subject to "mandatory detention" without bail. Renda's attorney, Saul Brown, argued for her release on humanitarian grounds because she suffers from depression, bipolar disorder and lupus.

"I feel hurt that this country could do something like that to me," Renda said Thursday. "Where I was, it was hell."

A waiver for her release came Wednesday, the same day her situation was spotlighted in The Journal News and picked up by other news outlets. She was released that night.

Renda, known to friends and family as Roseanne, still faces deportation to Italy, though she has no ties there.

In a letter she plans to read to an immigration judge, she describes her struggle to overcome a cocaine habit that began in the late 1980s, following the death of her mother and the onset of depression. Her record includes a drug-related misdemeanor from 1985 and other misdemeanors for shoplifting and petty larceny. Renda said she rehabilitated herself with medication and therapy.

"Everybody has a past, but you can fix your life," she said.

Her next immigration court appearance is Tuesday.

Brown said he's confident she can avoid deportation, though he expects the process to take months. Renda had applied for U.S. citizenship but did not succeed, for reasons that are unclear.

She said she had no idea that her immigration status could be threatened, even when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents came to her apartment in a predawn operation.

"I didn't even know what 'ICE' meant," she said.

She said her detention was an emotional ordeal in which she lacked access to medication and was confined indoors, sleeping on a bunk bed. She was anguished over stories told by other detainees, some of whom were separated from their children.

Paul Renda, her brother, said the family received an education on the immigrant-detention system, "one that we didn't really want

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