Kansas woman went to KC for a green card interview. Now, she faces deportation
When Rosmery Alvarado, 42, arrived in Kansas City on Wednesday with her husband and daughter to attend a spousal interview for her green card application, everyone had a bad feeling.
Alvarado’s husband, Nixon Moran, 44, who was born in El Salvador, had been naturalized on March 19 after more than a decade of driving back and forth to long citizenship interviews. When Alvarado, who was born in Guatemala, applied for a green card as his spouse, she expected a similar wait but a familiar process.
Instead, Alvarado received a summons directly by mail, throwing her family into a panic as they scrambled to collect documents verifying the details of her life in Pittsburg, Kansas. And when Alvarado arrived at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) office in Kansas City, officers refused to confirm the purpose of her visit before she stepped inside, Alvarado’s daughter Carina Moran said.
Forty minutes later, Nixon Moran was walking out to meet Carina Moran alone, and Alvarado was on her way to a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center.
“My father was then approached by an ICE officer, and he was told, ‘We arrested your wife and she’s going to be deported,’” Carina Moran, 20, told The Star on Thursday.
“We didn’t get any kind of warning. They didn’t let us say goodbye.”
Before the interview
Nixon Moran told his daughter that two ICE agents arrested Alvarado immediately after their spousal interview, handcuffing her and moving her into a transport van.
The agents waited until Nixon had been asked to step out before detaining Alvarado, Carina Moran said Thursday.
“The officer had told them, ‘Everything’s looking good, you guys have all the information we needed,’” Carina Moran said. “Maybe within the minute that he stepped out, ICE officers came through the back part of the field office.”
A USCIS staff member allegedly told Carina and Nixon that they had no idea ICE was near the interview room and did not expect Alvarado to be detained at any point while on the premises.
However, Carina Moran says her family saw several red flags.
When Alvarado received her USCIS interview date directly in the mail, the family’s immigration lawyer was surprised, telling Carina and her father that attorneys are usually notified first about any progress in a green card application.
“The lawyer told us that they never got any notification of this interview, and that it was very odd that we were getting requested so soon and with very short notice,” Moran said.
Once staff refused to confirm the purpose of her visit, they told Alvarado that her application would be denied if she and Nixon did not enter the interview room, Moran said.
Despite her concerns, Alvarado and her family agreed that she had no choice but to attend the interview, Moran said. Failing to attend an appointment with USCIS can result in major delays in a green card application, USCIS and most immigration attorneys caution, if not outright denial.
The family also worried that ICE agents could follow Alvarado to Pittsburg if she didn’t follow through with the interview, Moran said.
“She had to make that choice herself if she wanted to go in and try and do the interview, or if we would just walk out and go home and risk ICE coming to get her at our home,” Moran said. “Or her potentially having to look behind her back every day and making sure that she didn’t get caught somewhere else.”
Green card petitioners have increasingly faced the risk of arrest by ICE agents when appearing at USCIS field offices over the past several months, a representative from King Law Group, a North Kansas City immigration law firm, told The Star on Friday.
“If [green card applicants] have a criminal record or are here illegally, and they have a notice to appear from the government, they are being apprehended at the interview,” the King Law representative said. “We have warned clients of this.”
King Law has also seen an uptick in people being detained when they go to USCIS field offices to submit their fingerprints for background checks during immigration applications, or when they attend scheduled check-in appointments with ICE personnel at Homeland Security offices.
As instructed, Alvarado came to her hearing with a completed I-130 form, Moran said, along with a birth certificate, family photos, testimonials from community members and other documents confirming a timeline of her relationships in the United States.
ICE agents did not take any of the documents along when they arrested Alvarado, Moran said. This is typical for ICE arrests made at USCIS offices, according to King Law.
However, Moran said she believes that ICE and the Department of Homeland Security intended to deport her mother from the moment her name crossed their radar.
“They made us believe that she was approved, that her petition was approved, and that she was going to get her green card, but that was never going to happen,” Carina Moran said. “It felt like we were a trial to them, to see if this would bring us so that she would turn herself in.”
The Star has reached out to ICE and USCIS, as well as to attorneys for Alvarado. ICE did not respond as of Friday afternoon, while USCIS declined to comment. Attorneys for Alvarado also declined to speak on the record, citing a policy of only discussing case details with clients.
Detention center concerns
As of Wednesday, Rosmery Alvarado is being held in the Chase County Detention Center in Cottonwood Falls, Kansas, according to detention center records. Other immigration detainees across the region have also been sent there in recent months, including 11 employees of El Potro Mexican Restaurant in Liberty who were detained during an ICE/Homeland Security action in February.
“My mom is not a criminal,” Carina Moran said. “She’s just my mom … and the fact that she’s being held in there with people who have committed crimes, it just doesn’t make me feel good about her being all alone.”
Upon her arrival in detention, Alvarado’s family found out two deportation orders were pending against her; one from earlier in the day, and one referencing charges from Alvarado failing to appear in court as a minor in the early 2000s.
Alvarado wasn’t aware the situation had led to a deportation order against her until 2021, when her record was flagged during Nixon Moran’s immigration proceedings, Carina Moran said. Alvarado’s family believed that the order would be on her record during her own green card petition process, but had previously been advised by attorneys that it would not have been grounds for deportation, Moran said.
Attorneys representing Alvarado have filed an appeal with the Board of Immigration Appeals to delay Alvarado’s deportation and end her detention, Moran said. The decision is pending, though the attorneys told Moran that if denied, Alvarado could spend up to two weeks in detention before being deported to Guatemala.
“We can’t visit her or anything. It’s very restricted,” Moran said. “Any contact that we’ve had with her has been amazing. It’s been good to hear her and to know that she is at least alive and well, but she’s not actually OK.”
Moran also spoke to her mother during the drive from Kansas City to Cottonwood Falls, when Alvarado convinced an ICE agent to let her use their phone. Moran, who has spent her life translating for her Spanish-speaking mother, was dismayed to find that the agents only spoke English and that her mother had not been given food or water, she said.
Upon arrival at the detention center, Alvarado continued to face difficult conditions, Moran said. The mother and daughter had one more conversation, during which Alvarado spoke of limited food, cold cells without blankets, and generally poor conditions.
“She told us that she was scared and that she probably cried to herself throughout the whole night, that it was cold,” Moran said.
Moran worries that Alvarado, a diabetic breast cancer survivor who suffers from high blood pressure and needs to eat and drink frequently, will have poor access to her medication in detention — or after deportation.
“She lives in a very poor part of Guatemala, and I just would hope that if she’s there, that we could provide medical assistance for her,” Moran said.
A family in crisis
After Rosmery Alvarado was detained, Carina and Nixon Moran had to break the news to Carina’s three siblings.
Carina’s oldest sister, 21, lives in North Carolina and has two children with one on the way. Carina’s two younger brothers, 16 and 18, live with their parents in Pittsburg, where Nixon works long hours as a welder and often comes home late and exhausted.
No one took the news well.
“I don’t think I was able to get a word out completely,” Carina Moran said. “[My brothers] didn’t know how to react, and all they could do was just cry. And it’s been the same thing for all of us.”
Moran and her siblings are extremely close to their mother, she said, and had looked forward to celebrating upcoming high school and college graduations with her.
“It feels really unfair that we get to be here at home and she’s not here,” Carina Moran said. “We just miss hearing her voice and seeing her face, and it just doesn’t feel the same. It feels empty.”
A fundraiser supporting the family, organized by Moran, had raised nearly $10,000 as of Friday afternoon.
If her mother is deported, Carina Moran is unsure who she will be able to rely on, she said. Alvarado left Guatemala as a teenager and married Nixon at 19. Though Alvarado’s parents and three of her siblings still live in Guatemala, Alvarado has neither visited nor spoken to any of them in more than 30 years, Moran said.
Alvarado’s lawyer notified her family Wednesday night that he had been told her petition for a green card had been approved. However, according to King Law Group, formal approval can only be granted through a physical notice mailed to the petitioner’s address.
This means that nothing said during Alvarado’s USCIS interview would prevent her from facing deportation, according to King Law.
“I just keep in my head playing back all the moments with my mom I’m going to miss,” Moran said. “I just want her to come back home and I want this to all just go away.
“I would let her talk to me for hours. I would let her talk to me about anything as long as she came back home and she was just here and everything would just be better. “
This story was originally published April 25, 2025 at 7:50 PM.
