B.C. woman detained at U.S. border, sent to Arizona detention facility

A B.C. mom is pleading for help after her daughter was unexpectedly detained in the United States.

According to a Facebook post, Alexis Eagles said her 35-year-old daughter, Jasmine Mooney, entered the U.S. at the San Ysidro border crossing in Tijuana on March 3 with an invalid visa.

She was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and held at that location for three nights.

Eagles said her daughter was then transferred to the Otay Mesa Detention Centre in San Diego for another three nights.

She said that on March 9 an online tracking system indicated Mooney had been released.

“However, 24 hours later, there was no sign of her, no communication, and we were extremely worried,” Eagles wrote.

“We eventually learned that about 30 people, including Jasmine, were forcibly removed from their cells at 3 a.m. and transferred to the San Luis Detention Center in Arizona. They are housed together in a single concrete cell with no natural light, fluorescent lights that are never turned off, no mats, no blankets, and limited bathroom facilities.”

Mooney was profiled in B.C. Business magazine in 2019 for her work in the hospitality industry. According to the profile she moved from the Yukon to Vancouver in 2008 to study at BCIT, from where she went to acting school. 

Last September, Mooney was profiled on a YouTube channel talking about the Holy Water brand. In that interview she said that she had a three-year work visa in the U.S. and had moved to Los Angeles that summer.

Mooney’s business partner, Chicago-based BJ McCaslin, told Postmedia News on Wednesday that he did not know why she was detained or what the status was of her working visa.

Mooney had told him she encountered some issues at the border and might not be able to make health-product expo they planned to attend in Anaheim.

“It seems like a nightmare and living hell,” McCaslin said of Mooney’s incarceration. “I don’t know how someone in her position can be subject to this, and not released immediately once they found out the circumstances.”

McCaslin has been in touch with Mooney using an app that allows prisoners to communicate.

In text messages sent to McCaslin and shared with Postmedia, Mooney said she sought to reapply for a working visa and “got taken, no warning, by ICE and put in jail now one week, no idea what is happening.”

Mooney described the detention process as “inhumane.”

She said there were about 30 women huddled on mats in a concrete cell, inedible food, and fluorescent light “shining on you all day and night.”