A green-card interview is supposed to be the last box a foreign spouse of a U.S. citizen checks on the way to permanent residency. Starting in November 2025, it became something else: a place where ICE waits.

One of those interviews unfolded at a federal building in San Francisco, where a Kenyan-born father — the full-time caregiver to his infant son — was taken into ICE custody and spent five months in a Mojave Desert detention center, his story told this week by KQED. His case is not an outlier. It fits a tactic that surfaced across the country the same month: agents detaining spouses of citizens right after routine adjustment-of-status interviews, citing an old visa overstay — even though Congress wrote a specific exception letting those very people get green cards despite one. The Bay Area is now on the map of where it's happening.

The image that lingers from KQED's account (external source, opens in a new tab) is a father and his baby pressing palms to opposite sides of a detention-center window — a ritual an Oakland family repeated across a year of long drives out to the desert. It is the human edge of a policy shift that immigration lawyers say broke decades of practice.

The father — KQED withheld his full name, calling him "Peter," because he fears retaliation against his case — came from Kenya on a student visa nearly 25 years ago, earned a degree at San Francisco State, and married Alexandra, an elementary-school teacher who is legally blind and cannot drive. He stayed home with their son while she worked. After they wed, she petitioned to sponsor his residency. At the November 2025 appointment in San Francisco, he was detained.

The timing is the story. That same month, immigration attorneys began documenting a new tactic: agents arresting spouses of U.S. citizens as they left their marriage-based interviews. By mid-December, San Diego on its own had produced dozens of documented arrests, NBC News reported (external source, opens in a new tab), with more surfacing in New York City, Cleveland and Utah. Attorneys called the departure from long-standing policy "unprecedented." Among the detained, the outlet found, were a British mother holding her infant, a Ukrainian refugee, and the wife of a Navy veteran.

What makes the arrests legally jarring is that the government's stated reason — a lapsed visa — is precisely the situation Congress anticipated and forgave. Immediate relatives of citizens, spouses included, can adjust status even after falling out of lawful status, a rule longtime attorneys say was never before turned against them. Julia Gelatt of the Migration Policy Institute told NBC News the provision was written as the lawful route for exactly these families — the sanctioned way of "doing things 'the right way.'" Because the paperwork can drag beyond a year, she added, applicants often lapse out of status while simply waiting in line.

Attorneys called the departure from long-standing policy "unprecedented."

The administration is unmoved. USCIS spokesman Matthew Tragesser told NBC News that arrests "may occur" at its offices and that a visa overstay is a violation "that can result in deportation."

For applicants, the cost is not only detention but a legal downgrade. Once ICE takes an applicant, the case drops into the immigration-court backlog, where a prosecutor argues against the very status the person was days from winning. "When people go in for a green card interview, it's because they've complied with everything else and they're at the end of the line," San Diego attorney Jan Joseph Bejar told NBC News.

The collateral damage lands on the U.S. citizens who cannot be deported: the children. More than 100,000 American-citizen kids have had a parent detained since the deportation campaign began, per a Brookings Institution analysis (external source, opens in a new tab) cited by KQED. Rahil Briggs, a pediatric psychiatrist and national director of the early-childhood program HealthySteps, told KQED that separation at that age carries consequences that are biological, developmental and cognitive — scarring a child too young to hold the memory.

Peter is home now, after five months. The appointment meant to end his family's waiting instead began it. And in a region that markets itself as a sanctuary, the place where it started was a federal office, at a meeting the government itself had scheduled.