“These Are Abductions.” Newlywed Husband Says Wife Taken During Green Card Interview

By Nick Valencia | September 27, 2025

LOS ANGELES — On September 16, newlyweds Tucker and Barbara May walked into the downtown Los Angeles federal building believing they were there for her green card interview.

Married this spring, they had followed every rule, filed every form, and spent every dollar to prove their marriage was real.

But their interview was a trap.

“It was never going to be an interview,” he told Nick Valencia News. “It was always a setup.”

Not only was she lured there, her husband said, once inside ICE agents separated her from her lawyer with the excuse of a broken copier. Then, they put her in handcuffs.

“One officer smiled for a selfie with her as she cried,” he added.

By Saturday night, Tucker didn’t know where his wife was.

The Machinery of Obstruction

In the days since Barbara was taken, the system has set about grinding her down.

Initially, she was sent to Adelanto, the high-desert detention center infamous among immigration attorneys.

When Barbara protested that a habeas petition and a temporary restraining order had already been filed on her behalf, ICE agents reportedly laughed.

“‘We don’t care,’ they told her,” Tucker said.

When her lawyer overnighted documents needed to reopen her case, the facility withheld them until the very morning she was shipped out to an undisclosed location.

At every stage, the process her husband described has been calibrated not for justice but for delay—for erasing options, running out the clock, and breaking faith.

“These are abductions,” Tucker said flatly.

The Slippery Slope

Barbara’s supposed crime dates back to 2019, when she allegedly missed an immigration court hearing she says she never knew about. The government insists it sent a letter. No proof of delivery has been produced. No copy of the notice has been made available to her counsel. Yet that single missing piece of paper is being wielded as the justification for her disappearance.

The cruelty is not incidental. It’s baked into the business model. Private detention centers like Adelanto are rewarded not for efficiency or fairness, but for how long they can hold bodies inside.

A phone call home is not a right, but a revenue stream. A delay in legal mail is not a mistake, but an opportunity.

“If we allow this to happen right now to immigrants,” Tucker warned, “it’s only a matter of time before this administration finds other reasons to list other people as ‘undesirables’ and starts disappearing them as well.”

“We are on the slippery slope,” he added.

And, their story raises a question far bigger than immigration paperwork.

What happens when a democracy abandons the rule of law, and cruelty becomes the point?