Connor Read has spent more than a month and a half in ICE detention after four agents arrested him in a green card interview room in Tampa on 3 June. The 29-year-old British-born man was later moved from Florida to Louisiana, leaving his wife, Jaelin, and their twin sons, Ryder and Ozzie, behind.
The reason people are searching his name now is simple: a routine step toward legal residency turned into detention and the threat of deportation. Read had been invited to the interview as part of an attempt by him and Jaelin to apply for a green card after they married in 2020, but he walked out in custody instead of with any progress on his case.
What followed was a rapid and unforgiving chain. He was taken to Pinellas county jail in Florida, where he spent eight days in a shared cell before being flown to an ICE detention centre in Louisiana. By the time of this report, he was still being held and was appealing against his final removal order, a process that can take up to six months before it is heard.
That legal picture is complicated by the record ICE has chosen to present. An ICE spokesperson described Read as a criminal illegal alien and said he had been ordered removed by an Orlando, Florida immigration judge in January 2011 after entering the United States on 21 November 2007 through Orlando international airport on an F-2 visa. The same account says his status depended on a parent’s student visa and that removal proceedings followed a violation of the terms of that visa.
But the case is not as tidy as the agency’s label suggests. Read has lived in the US since he was nine, attended American schools and, according to reporting, was granted Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals status at 16 before losing the ability to renew it at 22 after a narcotic charge. The Times also reported convictions for possession of narcotic equipment, possession of liquor and resisting an officer, facts that help explain why his immigration history has ended up tangled in both family life and criminal records.
For Jaelin, the fallout is immediate and personal. She is raising Ryder and Ozzie while Read sits in detention far from home, and he has said he feels he is being treated like a murderer. The next critical step is his appeal against the final removal order, and the uncertainty now is not whether he is fighting deportation, but how long the government will keep him waiting while his family absorbs the cost.
