Sarah Shaw thought she was being kidnapped. Border agents bundled the New Zealand mother and her six year old son into an unmarked white van at the Canadian border, confiscated her phone, and refused to explain what was happening. Three weeks later, she and Isaac would emerge from an immigration detention centre in Texas, 2,000 miles from their Washington home.
The July 2025 detention of Shaw and her son attracted international media coverage, not because she crossed the border illegally, but because she didn’t. A paperwork mistake during a routine trip to drop her older children at Vancouver airport triggered a detention that her lawyer calls “legally sanctioned kidnapping.”
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What Happened at the Border
On 24 July, Shaw drove from Everett to Vancouver International Airport. Her two older children, aged 11 and 9, were catching a direct flight to New Zealand to spend summer with their grandparents. Isaac came along for the quick cross-border trip.
Her father Rod Price, waiting in New Zealand, tracked their progress through text messages. The kids boarded. The plane took off. Then his phone rang.
“I got a frantic call to say that she’s being detained and ‘they’re about to take my phone off me’ and ‘they’re locking me up for the night,'” Price told Radio New Zealand.
At the Blaine, Washington checkpoint, US Customs and Border Protection agents flagged Shaw’s immigration documents. Her work authorisation was valid. Her advance parole, the separate permission needed to travel internationally during green card processing, had expired.
Officials detained Shaw on the spot. Isaac’s documents were in perfect order. He was detained anyway, with Shaw’s request to let friends collect her son refused.
The Paperwork That Changed Everything
Shaw, 33, works as a youth counsellor at Echo Glen Children’s Center, a state-run juvenile rehabilitation facility. She immigrated to the United States in 2021, married a US citizen, then left that marriage after domestic abuse. She filed an I-360 self-petition under the Violence Against Women Act in April 2022, which allows abuse survivors to apply for permanent residency independently of their abuser.
Her immigration status depended on a “combo card,” a single document containing two separate authorisations: permission to work and permission to travel abroad. When Shaw renewed her work permit in June, she received confirmation and assumed both permissions had extended.
They hadn’t. The travel authorisation requires separate renewal through Form I-131, a detail Shaw’s receipt notice didn’t make clear.
“She did not have a valid travel document, so she left the US to take her kids to the airport,” her lawyer Minda Thorward told Radio New Zealand. Thorward had advised Shaw to explain the situation at the border and request humanitarian parole, a discretionary option border officials routinely granted before the Trump administration.
Officials denied the request. The pair spent that first night on a mattress on the floor of a Border Patrol holding cell, a bright light burning overhead. Morning brought transport to the airport, then a flight to Texas.
23 Days in Dilley
The South Texas Family Residential Center sits 70 miles southwest of San Antonio. The Biden administration closed the facility in June 2024. The Trump administration reopened it in March 2025, contracting private operator CoreCivic to run what became America’s largest family detention centre.
The reopening came as ICE detention numbers climbed to historic levels. The detained population grew from 39,000 people in January 2025 to over 61,000 by August, the highest level since the agency’s creation in 2003. Dilley alone holds capacity for 2,400 people at $296 per person per day.
Mother and son shared a room with other detainees, sleeping in one of five bunk beds. Doors locked at 8pm, unlocking at 8am. Phone calls to Shaw’s lawyer cost $10 to $20 each. Bottled water at the commissary: $1.21. Most detainees spoke Spanish. The pair were among the only English speakers.
“There wasn’t really privacy, no space or time to decompress from the situation,” Shaw told the Seattle Times after her release. “If I needed to go to the bathroom, Isaac was there, yelling at me outside the stall. If I wanted to take a shower, he had to come with me, so we were completely joined at the hip.”
Multiple panic attacks kept Shaw awake. Staff offered anti-psychotic medication. She spent her limited commissary funds on ice cream and colouring pencils, trying to make detention feel less like the prison it resembled for Isaac, who lost his entire summer holiday locked inside.
Other families had been there 70 days or longer. Shaw’s friend Victoria Besancon, speaking to the Guardian, said conditions were “very similar to a prison” where detainees weren’t allowed to wear their own clothes.
The Fight for Release
The Washington Federation of State Employees, Shaw’s union representing 55,000 public workers, demanded her immediate release. Union president Mike Yestramski, a psychiatric social worker, said bluntly: “The trauma this has already caused for her and her son may never be healed.”
Besancon organised a GoFundMe campaign that raised over $60,000 for legal fees and Shaw’s rent whilst she remained detained and unable to work. Local Seattle media picked up the story. Then national outlets. Then international coverage from The Guardian, CNN, and New Zealand media.
The New Zealand embassy contacted US authorities. Shaw’s detention mirrored similar 2025 cases involving legal visa holders from Canada, Australia, Germany and the United Kingdom, all swept up in expanded immigration enforcement tracked by international news outlets including Newzire.
Attorney Thorward believes the media attention directly secured Shaw’s release. “I think the fact so many journalists are interested in this case is a really good thing,” she told Radio New Zealand. “We need to continue to shine a light on these abuses of discretion.”
Released but Restricted
After 23 days in custody, Shaw and Isaac were released on 15 August. Authorities dropped the pair in Laredo, Texas, requiring a two and a half hour Uber ride to San Antonio airport.
ICE agents kept Shaw’s driver’s licence, Washington state ID and passport. Authorities fitted her with an ankle monitor programmed to announce instructions in Spanish, a language she doesn’t speak. Travel beyond 21 metres from her home became impossible.
“I don’t have anyone to contact about the ankle monitor, because they didn’t give me any details for anything,” Shaw said in an interview days after returning home.
The two older children had flights booked to return from New Zealand in September. A master’s program in psychology at Northwest University awaited Shaw in August. Detention prevented that. She returned to work at Echo Glen whilst her immigration case, including scheduled removal proceedings, remains unresolved.
When Paperwork Becomes Detention
Detention of immigrants without criminal records increased sharply in 2025, with Shaw among those caught in the crackdown. Official ICE data analysed by CBS News documents a 2,000% increase in non-criminal detainees since January. By mid-August, nearly half of all people in immigration detention lacked criminal records, contradicting administration claims about targeting violent criminals.
Immigration lawyers now advise clients not to travel internationally during status adjustments, even for family emergencies, without approved advance parole documents physically in hand.
The difference between Shaw’s two pieces of paper, one current and one pending, cost her and Isaac 23 days of freedom. It left a six year old boy who spent his summer in a Texas detention centre because his mother made a paperwork mistake.
