MASON, Ohio — Sunnatillo Zarshedov races his brother up the slide. He takes my phone and records a video. When he gets to the top, he screams.
At the bottom, I ask about his dad. The 9-year-old tells me they like to wrestle — and his dad always makes them laugh.
My next question is if he misses him.
“Yeah,” Sunnatillo said.
WATCH: In exclusive interview, we speak to Tri-State family facing deportation
Standing next to the slide, his mom swings his 2-year-old sister in the air. She’s gone up and down too many times to count, smiling each time.
“What you see here is a happy family on the outside,” said Charleston Wang, an immigration attorney representing the family. “But inside, they’re terribly hurt.”
For more than a month, Sunnatillo has been living without his father. Zarshed Mamatkulov was detained on Feb. 27, despite an ongoing appeal into his family’s asylum case — a case that reads like something out of a movie.
Extortion. Persecution. Death threats.
It's why the family says they fled Uzbekistan and ended up in this park in Warren County. And why they say they can't go back.
“Remaining in the United States is the only way for me and my family members to survive,” Mamatkulov said in a sworn affidavit as part of his asylum case.
But an immigration judge didn’t believe him, Wang said, and denied the family’s asylum claim. Wang filed an appeal with the Board of Immigration Appeals. The next day, Mamatkulov was detained by ICE.
Because of their appeal, Wang said, this was illegal.
“The government’s position is that they have unbridled power to detain. We disagree,” Wang said. “At a minimum, we believe the father should be entitled to bond.”
On Monday, I reached out to the Department of Homeland Security, ICE and the Justice Department. I haven't heard back yet.
This family’s story is part of a larger debate — and litigation — about whether ICE detainees should be allowed out of jail while they wait for court hearings. For years, they were, according to Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, a researcher for Migration Policy Institute.
“Typically, people who were detained could be released on bond unless they presented some sort of threat,” Putzel-Kavanaugh said. “That’s a pattern of this administration — taking existing law and interpreting it in a really different way.”
The Justice Department has said officials are just enforcing the law, but experts like Putzel-Kavanaugh say the law has never been enforced like this before. In the last month of the Biden administration, there were between 30,000 and 40,000 people in ICE detention, Putzel-Kavanaugh said.
In February, she said, there were about 70,000 people detained.
At a park near their home, I ask Aziza Melikova how the last few weeks have been.
“It was awful,” Melikova said through a translator. “Children — every night — asking when their father is coming home.”
When we first spoke, her husband was detained in the Butler County Jail. Since then, he's been moved to Michigan. Melikova tells me she never wants to go back to Uzbekistan. She says her mother has been wrongfully imprisoned and is still being mistreated there.
A tear rolls down her cheek, and she asks to stop the interview. After a few minutes, the translator tells me she was asking Melikova for good stories — for something positive she could tell me.
“Anything good," the translator said, "she forgot already."
