Brent Jindra voted for Trump three times. Then ICE handcuffed his Russian wife at the airport in California and ended his support for the president.

In mid-July, officers from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained a Russian citizen, Galina Bobreneva, in California. She arrived in the country in late 2021 and, according to her lawyer, has been in the United States legally ever since. She is awaiting a green card based on her marriage to a U.S. citizen. ICE officers sent her to a detention center anyway, where she spent more than two weeks. She has since been released on bond and is waiting for the first hearing in her case. Meduza summarizes the key points from a New York Times report on what led to her detention and the conditions she was held in during those two weeks.

Bobreneva arrived in the United States on a tourist visa in late 2021. After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, she applied for asylum and extended her visa twice, according to The New York Times.

Bobreneva met Brent Jindra, a salesman and staunch supporter of Donald Trump, in March 2025. Jindra voted for Trump three times and praised the president’s hard-line immigration policy in particular.

The couple married that December. “It was your storybook romance,” Jindra said. Four months later, he petitioned to sponsor his wife for a marriage-based green card. Bobreneva was fingerprinted, and the couple received confirmation that the petition had been accepted.

In mid-July, the pair flew from San Francisco to Burbank, where Jindra planned to meet clients and Bobreneva to see friends. Afterward, they planned to head to the vineyards of Sonoma County to celebrate her 40th birthday.

At the Burbank airport, plainclothes officers approached them. “Congratulations, you’ve been chosen for secondary screening,” one of them said. He showed an ICE badge and led Bobreneva into a back room for questioning. Jindra called an immigration lawyer, but the agents refused to speak with him.

The questioning lasted about 15 minutes. The officers told Bobreneva her visa had expired. She tried to explain that she was in the middle of the green-card process and produced the paperwork. The officers handcuffed her anyway and drove her from the airport in an unmarked car.

Later, commenting on the detention, the Department of Homeland Security said Bobreneva had broken the law. The agency said that “work authorization or a pending application do NOT confer legal status in the United States.”

Federal law does allow the government to detain people who apply for a green card after their visas have expired, according to the Times. Previous administrations, however, did not consider such people to be in the country illegally.

Bobreneva was taken to an ICE facility, where, she said, she was put in a cold room with several other women. One of the detainees, she said, was an immigrant of about 70 with diabetes who was asking for insulin. But ICE officers ignored her requests.

About 18 hours later, Bobreneva was put in a restraint belt and shackled at the wrists and ankles, and driven with several other detainees to the detention center in Adelanto. “I felt like a piece of meat, not like a human,” she said.

The conditions there were appalling, Bobreneva said. The center had seven shower stalls for 120 people, and only four of them worked. Detainees were constantly short of drinking water. The sick were denied medical care until they needed hospitalization. Bobreneva also began losing sleep: the lights never went off, and the guards’ radios never went quiet.

ICE did not comment on her account. The Department of Homeland Security said the claims about horrific conditions at the facility were false.

Other Russian speakers were being held at the center, Bobreneva said — detainees from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Armenia. On her birthday, she managed to buy chocolate at the cafeteria and shared it with them.

Jindra visited his wife three times a week and pushed for her release. She was freed on July 29 on a $35,000 bond, fitted with an electronic ankle monitor, and ordered to report to the ICE office in San Francisco on August 5.

Her first court hearing has since been set for October 22. The case is expected to take several months.

Jindra, who once called himself a MAGA supporter, grew disillusioned with Trump after his wife was detained. “The allure of the MAGA campaign was around illegal entries of criminals,” he said. “There was never a mandate for this president to turn the barrel of the gun and start going after people who legally entered.”