Fabian Schmidt had no control over the light.
It stayed on overhead from 6:30 in the morning until 11:30 at night. Which was a surprise for the 34-year-old New Hampshire resident because he always thought of prison as a dark place, like in the 1999 movie “The Green Mile.” His cell wasn’t fully dark at night either. Guards with flashlights regularly checked on everyone held at the Wyatt Detention Facility.
Schmidt was housed among other Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainees, apart from the larger inmate population held by the U.S. Marshals Service awaiting federal court proceedings. Yet he learned other ICE detainees faced serious charges, including murder, sexual assault, and drug dealing. The mission of the Wyatt — a quasi-public maximum security facility in Central Falls, Rhode Island’s smallest city — is to “protect the public from people who pose a threat to society.”
Schmidt never committed any violent crime.
Instead, he got off a plane at Boston’s Logan International Airport on March 7 on his return from a 10-day trip to visit family and friends in his native Germany. Schmidt obtained his green card as a teenager and became a U.S. permanent resident. But for some reason, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents pulled him aside.
They aggressively asked him about past misdemeanors from 10 years ago when he lived in California — including a charge of drug possession that had been adjudicated. They asked about his annual income, where his parents lived, and what they did for a living.
He was held for hours, which turned into days during which he was denied the chance to speak with a lawyer, his family, or the German Consulate. At one point, Schmidt said he was strip-searched and thrown into a cold shower. He was given only a thin mat to sleep on and fed a cold cup of noodles. He collapsed after developing flu-like symptoms and was transported to Mass General Hospital, where he was handcuffed to the bed.
After being discharged from the hospital, Schmidt was taken back to the airport. On March 11, four days after his return from Europe, CBP agents came to get him.
“That’s the first time I went to Rhode Island,” he recalled in a recent interview at a coffee shop near his home in Nashua. “In hand shackles, feet shackles, in the back of an SUV going like 80 miles an hour.”
He speaks softly, with a faint accent, sometimes pausing to note the surreal facts of the 58 days he spent inside the Wyatt.
In a statement, Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin told Rhode Island Current, “When an individual is found with drug-related charges and tries to re-enter the country, officers will take proper action. In this case, the conviction was dismissed, and the individual was released.”
In several posts on the platform X, McLaughlin has called clips from news reports on Schmidt’s treatment by CBP at Logan “blatantly false,” “straight-up false,” and “flat-out FALSE.”
Schmidt is readjusting to life back home. He said the ordeal cost him tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees, lost wages from his job as a master electrician, and expenses for food, clothing, and phone calls home to his worried girlfriend. He is considering filing a lawsuit, though he doesn’t have details to share about that yet.
“This whole experience feels like a movie,” he said.
Not knowing why
Schmidt’s story is one of dozens of accounts of hyper-aggressive immigration enforcement since the start of Donald Trump’s second term. There’s the Canadian woman with a U.S. work visa detained by ICE for two weeks who wrote she felt like she had been “kidnapped;” the visiting scholar at Georgetown University with an academic visa held without charges at an ICE detention facility in Texas; the pair of Georgia newlyweds separated after the bride, an asylum seeker from Colombia, was detained by ICE.
According to the Syracuse University-based public records database, Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), 19,125 people were booked into ICE detention in March, when Schmidt was first detained. His case drew headlines because it initially made no sense.
New Hampshire’s Democratic U.S. Sen. Maggie Hassan described the case as “very concerning,” while Massachusetts Democratic State Rep. Mike Connolly called Schmidt’s detention “outrageous” and “unlawful.” On X, a Canadian law professor’s post about Schmidt was shared more than 2,000 times.
His case also highlighted the Wyatt’s role at the center of a years-long political firestorm. Several public officials, including Rhode Island General Treasurer James Diossa, previously the mayor of Central Falls, have called for its closure. State lawmakers have introduced bills to close it down or, in the case of active bills in the House and Senate sessions, to stop ICE’s ability to do business with Wyatt for civil immigration violations. Community members regularly hold protests outside the Wyatt’s walls to draw attention to people detained inside. Since Trump’s inauguration, there have been at least six such rallies.
One, on March 18, was for Schmidt. Outside the Wyatt, people chanted his name and held signs that read “FREE FABIAN” and “DEFEND THE CONSTITUTION.”
Schmidt heard them from inside. It gave him a surge of adrenaline. And a realization.
“Whoa,” he recalled thinking at the time. “This is bigger than myself.”
Schmidt spent his childhood traveling with his mother and stepfather, who worked as a tech consultant. He has lived in Denmark, South Africa, and England; he can read and write in four languages. When he was 16, his stepfather’s work brought the family to Palo Alto, California. His stepfather’s visa was for people with extraordinary abilities in their field — often called a “genius visa” — and granted Schmidt legal entry as a dependent. Schmidt rode horses, played football, and embraced his new home.
In 2022, he moved to Nashua to be closer to his mother, who had moved there. After a stint as a bartender, he found work as an electrical project lead at two affiliated companies: Greenerd Press & Machine Co., in Nashua, and Diamond Casting, in Hollis.
Ian Wilson, a process engineer at Diamond Casting, called Schmidt a crucial member of the company. “He’s upstanding, friendly, gregarious, and very energetic,” he said.
While bartending, Schmidt met and fell in love with Bhavani Hodgkins, who is now his fiancée. (Schmidt has an 8-year-old daughter from a previous relationship who lives with her mother in California.) He and Hodgkins have a black Lab named Django.
“This is where I’m from,” he said. “I love this country.”
Low-quality food, high fees
The Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility opened in 1993 on the site of a former textile factory. At the time, it helped address a shortage in pre-trial federal jail space in New England. During the search for a suitable Rhode Island site, a few cities and towns opposed the facility. But long-struggling Central Falls saw an economic opportunity.
Shortly after the facility opened, then-Mayor Thomas Lazieh called the Wyatt “a win now and a much bigger win down the road.”
The ensuing years brought some payments from the detention center to the city; Central Falls received a total of $5.3 million in impact fees from Wyatt from 1994 through 2008, according to a 2012 joint legislative commission.
But Wyatt also brought escapes, lawsuits over detainee mistreatment, criminal charges against staff members and wardens, a receivership, and — most notably — the 2008 death of an ICE detainee involving medical neglect and mistreatment.
The death of that detainee, Hiu Lui “Jason” Ng, prompted ICE to withdraw from the Wyatt for a decade. In 2019, the agency returned, amid an outcry from community groups, the Rhode Island ACLU, and elected officials.
Today, the facility boasts a capacity of up to 730 adult male and 40 adult female detainees. According to a report in late March, the facility held 617 detainees for the U.S. Marshals Service (590 male, 27 female), and 116 detainees for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (112 male, 4 female). One of those male ICE detainees was Schmidt.
He was housed in 10-by-7-foot cells with thick, pneumatically locking steel doors. One cell looked out over Macomber Stadium, where Central Falls High School plays athletics.
The food was so bad, he said, he wouldn’t feed it to his dog. Breakfast was some kind of “oversalted…flour soup,” Schmidt said, along with a pinkish sausage of unknown origin, a dry piece of cornbread, and a serving of lukewarm milk. Lunch and dinner consisted of food that came from a can — chicken, green beans — and powdered potatoes that tasted like cardboard.
Schmidt’s account of the food provided at the Wyatt echoes a March report by the community organization Alliance to Mobilize Our Resistance (AMOR), which states, “In the first two weeks of March, AMOR received messages from 16 people detained by ICE who specified that they would not have enough to eat without help purchasing food from the Commissary.”
Schmidt was scared, sad, and depressed during his weeks at the Wyatt. He missed his daughter, his partner, his dog.
“Mentally, you have to learn how to block that out in prison or else you’ll ruin yourself,” he said. “You have to be able to be like, ‘OK, I’m not gonna miss my dog today.’”
In April, Hodgkins shared a note Schmidt wrote in a Facebook post: “Time moves differently in here. It drags, heavy and cruel…I haven’t seen the sky in weeks.”
After Schmidt was moved to the Wyatt, Hodgkins spent hours on the phone — with him, his family members, attorneys and others — trying to strategize how to secure his release and ensure his safety and comfort until then. She was forced to navigate the substantial financial burden of having a loved one detained at Wyatt.
To supplement the Wyatt’s food options, Schmidt needed to purchase food items from the commissary. He needed money to buy more toothpaste and soap because supplies issued to detainees didn’t last very long. Hodgkins created accounts so Schmidt could receive packages and communicate with her via phone or video chat.
“Every single thing that you do at the Wyatt Detention Facility requires (a) form of payment,” she said.
A receipt Hodgkins shared on Facebook shows, between March 12 and May 6, she spent more than $2,600 in deposits into the facility’s TouchPay system — deposits requiring fees ranging from around 6% of a deposit to more than 40%. In one instance, she was charged a $4.30 fee for a $10 deposit. The total fees, across 25 deposits, add up to more than $220.
Here, again, Hodgkins’ experiences aligned with conditions described in AMOR’s report, which says Wyatt contractors charge “exorbitant” rates for basic services, including phone calls, text messages, and food to supplement insufficient nutrition.
“In the first two weeks of March, 20 people detained reported to AMOR that calls were too expensive,” the report’s authors write. “During the same period, 43 individuals made new requests for Commissary help.”
As she navigated these new challenges, Hodgkins said she was dealing with waves of her own anger, anguish, and sadness. She was fearful for Fabian’s health and safety, that he would be deported, that they would lose the life they had built together.
Hodgkins rearranged her work schedule so she could make the 80-mile drive from Nashua to Central Falls in time to meet the facility’s strict rules that visitors arrive at least 30 minutes before visiting hours. During one visit, she saw an elderly woman with a walker turned away for arriving too late.
Hodgkins found the facility intimidating: a massive concrete building with small windows surrounded by tall razor wire fences. The “visits” were, in fact, a phone conversation with Schmidt while the two were separated by glass in a room lit by fluorescent lights. Once, when she washed her hands inside the facility, she noticed the water had a yellowish tinge.
“I really hope that no one has to go there to see their loved ones, because it’s truly horrible,” she said.
ICE did not respond to multiple requests for comment. When Rhode Island Current reached out to the Wyatt with detailed questions about the conditions both Hodgkins and Schmidt described, a spokesperson responded: “The Wyatt has no comment at this time.”
No problem with international travel in 2017
When protesters assembled outside the Wyatt on March 18 to call for Schmidt’s release, his lawyer, David Keller, said Schmidt’s past issues in California had been resolved and there hadn’t been any new official charges pressed against his client.
“Imagine yourself being charged with a crime, held, and not even knowing what the crime is,” he told reporters. “That’s essentially his situation.” (Keller was unavailable to comment for this story.)
About a week later, Schmidt finally learned the reason for his detention: a misdemeanor charge for drug possession from California that had already been resolved. Schmidt had pleaded no contest to the charge in 2015, despite disputing that the drugs were his; he was unaware that the controlled-substance conviction marked him in the immigration system as inadmissible. He said he was never notified of these implications of a no-contest plea, nor had he been stopped by CBP after an earlier international trip in 2017.
Once the immigration charges against Schmidt became clear, lawyers for Schmidt on both coasts swung into action. In California, a criminal attorney re-opened the drug case and was able to get it dismissed from the system. (Grounds for that dismissal: the substance Schmidt was charged with possessing had never been tested to confirm what it was.) In Boston, his immigration attorney worked to secure a hearing with an immigration judge.
The hearing finally happened on May 8. The judge dismissed Schmidt’s immigration case in minutes.
Time moves differently in here. It drags, heavy and cruel…I haven’t seen the sky in weeks.
Schmidt and Hodgkins finally reunited outside of ICE’s Boston field office in Burlington, Massachusetts. The days since then have been joyful. Shortly after his release, Schmidt proposed to Hodgkins. He has enjoyed regular walks with his dog, cooking dinner with Hodgkins and reconnecting with friends.
But the couple’s life together is much different from the way it used to be. Schmidt estimates his time in custody cost him at least $65,000, between legal fees, lost wages, and the many costs of his Wyatt detention. An online fundraiser by his mother raised over $34,000. A second fundraiser launched by Hodgkins “to help aid other legal immigrants with injustice,” is ongoing.
The emotional toll has also been steep. In the early days after his release, he couldn’t take a nap while home alone, afraid people might come for him while he was sleeping. Routine activities like a trip to the grocery store can now trigger waves of panic. He is wary about driving, fearful of being pulled over and detained again over a minor infraction.
“I have to be strong when he’s not, and I can’t show my fear as much because I don’t want him to get fearful,” Hodgkins said. “We’re going to spend the rest of our life healing from this trauma.”
The couple have embraced new roles as advocates for immigrants navigating an unforgiving system. They are calling for more transparency in the detention process, to spare others from the weeks of confusion they experienced. And they are speaking out against the heavy-handed response Schmidt faced for what was essentially a paperwork issue.
As dark as his experience was, Schmidt said he benefited from privileges many other ICE detainees lack. He’s a white man who speaks fluent English, with access to a top-notch legal team.
“I don’t even want to know what’s happening to other people,” he said.
Although the Wyatt holds immigration-related detainees, Hodgkins wants people to understand it is designed to hold criminals. She said the staff there had no interest in helping her with the logistics of visitation or keeping her partner comfortable and connected while inside.
“They’re not going to be nice to you,” she said. “They’re not going to be helpful to you.”
Schmidt went back to work in early June. When he was away, his projects were either put on hold, or his work had to be delegated to other people, Wilson, his coworker, said.
“I’m very relieved that he’s been released,” he said, “and very concerned for our judicial system.”
In a June 2 Facebook post, Hodgkins wrote about feeling anxious, even as Schmidt was excited about his first day back to work.
“No one prepares you for the fear and uncertainty that comes with being separated from a loved one under such traumatic circumstances,” she wrote.
“But today, we’re beginning to find our rhythm again.”
This story was originally published by the Rhode Island Current.
