In a recent interview with American Community Media, Sithy Yi spoke publicly for the first time, detailing the nearly two months she spent detained at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center following her arrest and wrongful detainment by ICE in January 2026, despite having a pending visa application and existing legal protections against deportation.
Reeves Immigration Law Group attorneys Kim Luu-Ng and Ben Loveman have represented Yi throughout her case and secured her release last month after the Petition for Writ of Habeas Corpus they filed against the U.S. Attorney General, DHS Secretary, and ICE senior officials was granted by the Central District of California.
Ms. Yi’s description of the conditions detainees are forced to endure at Adelanto is horrifying. Detainees slept in overcrowded rooms on thin mattresses in freezing temperatures. Walls leaked. Showers did not work. Spoiled food made detainees regularly sick. The facility, with a maximum capacity of 1,100, routinely held over 1,800 people.
Ms. Yi also suffered nightly nightmares of being returned to Cambodia. “I thought about the Khmer Rouge every night,” she tells American Community Media. “I was frightened. I was scared that I would have to go back to that place.” She alleges detainees who protested were taken to mental health facilities and returned visibly sedated. Kim Luu-Ng, who has represented Ms. Yi since 2016, has been unequivocal about what her client endured. “These are civil detainees. These are not criminal detainees. And there are laws in this country that are supposed to protect against this type of punitive and cruel treatment,” she told LAist last month.
Ben Loveman warns that she remains in real danger of being detained again. “Ms. Yi is at risk of re-detention if they decide they have secured a place to deport her to, or they can claim she violated her order of supervision again, or for no reason at all.” Per Ben, Ms. Yi’s pending U-visa application, which is available to victims of violence who have cooperated with law enforcement, is “a very long term back up plan,” with a backlog exceeding a decade and fully discretionary final adjudication. “We are exploring other options for more lasting protections,” he stresses.
Kim and Ben’s representation of Ms. Yi has been covered by LAist, LAist AirTalk, and American Community Media, LAist‘s Imperfect Paradise podcast, and most recently in American Community Media on the detainment conditions in the Adelanto ICE Processing Center.
