She’s been in US for 50 years. Now Pierce County woman with green card detained by ICE

TACOMA – A Pierce County resident who works as a lab technician for the University of Washington and has lived in the United States for decades is detained at the federal immigration detention center in Tacoma.

Lewelyn Dixon, 64 of Edgewood, Washington, is a green card holder, an attorney representing her, Benjamin Osorio said Monday. A green card allows her to live and work permanently in the U.S. But after Dixon traveled to the Philippines with family and returned to Washington on Feb. 28, relatives said she was detained at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. Osorio said Dixon was detained because of a nonviolent criminal conviction from 2001.

Dixon immigrated to Hawaii from the Philippines at age 14 and moved to Washington in the 1990s, according to family members. She’s now in deportation proceedings, and her next court date is in July. Dixon isn’t eligible for bond to fight her immigration case from out of custody, according to Osorio, and in the meantime, he said Dixon is at risk of losing her job and her pension.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s online detainee locator system shows Dixon is in custody at the Northwest ICE Processing Center, a privately run detention facility that holds people who are suspected of being in the country illegally or are awaiting deportation.

A spokesperson for ICE declined to comment Monday on Dixon’s detention.

Dixon’s detainment initially confused her niece, Melania Madriaga, who said she wasn’t aware of Dixon’s prior conviction for bank embezzlement. She said she’d seen news stories related to President Donald Trump’s attempts to crack down on immigration enforcement but said she’d thought the focus of that was on undocumented immigrants and criminals who were a threat to their communities.

“Is my aunt a threat?” Madriaga, 59, said. “She can’t even hurt a fly. And we’ve got to prove that she’s not a threat? That’s crazy. It’s like she’s being retried again.”

Osorio advised that every green card holder who has “even a minor offense” on their record should speak to an immigration attorney before traveling and should apply to become a naturalized U.S. citizen if they are eligible.

The attorney explained that Dixon’s type of prior conviction is considered a “crime involving moral turpitude,” and a single offense of that type could make a green card holder inadmissible to the country.

Osorio said he hadn’t seen similar ICE detainments prior to Trump’s second term in office. Madriaga said Dixon traveled out of the country twice last year without issue.

Dixon is the only one in her family who isn’t a U.S. citizen, according to Madriaga. She said that’s because Dixon had promised Madriaga’s grandfather that she would keep her citizenship in the Philippines.

Their family has a house in the Philippines, and Madriaga said her grandfather wanted someone to go back and check on it. She said dual citizenship wasn’t allowed in the country until the early 2000s.

Madriaga said she hopes her aunt’s case raises awareness to the fact that even documented immigrants are a target for immigration enforcement. She also said she’d like to see changes to the immigration-court system to either expedite proceedings for documented immigrants such as Dixon so people don’t lose their jobs or expand bond eligibility so noncitizens don’t have to be detained while awaiting court hearings.

Some people might have accrued enough time off at their jobs to stay employed while they are detained, Madriaga said.

“But if they don’t have that much, and it’s going to be leave with no pay, the clock starts,” Madriaga said. “So there’s nothing protecting them.”

The University of Washington confirmed in an email Monday that Dixon has been employed at UW Medicine since 2015. A spokesperson said she did not have further information.

Madriaga said what her aunt did to be convicted of a crime was bad, and she “paid the price” for it. She also said Dixon didn’t commit more crimes afterward and has since made something out of herself.

According to court records, Dixon pleaded guilty to bank embezzlement in 2000 in U.S. District Court. The previous year, she’d been working as a vault teller and operations supervisor at the White Center Financial Center when she took $6,460 from the vault over several months.

In 2001, she was sentenced to 30 days in a halfway house and ordered to pay back what she’d taken as restitution, plus a $100 mandatory assessment. According to a July 2019 court filing, that money was later paid back.

Madriaga said Dixon worked hard in the years after her conviction to build a career where she could make a difference. She said before the coronavirus pandemic, Dixon processed drug tests, but during the pandemic and afterward she processed COVID-19 tests among other work.

“She actually did something to be positive in the community, and actually excel on it and continue on it,” Madriaga said. “And that needs to be looked at.”