Ms. Bobreneva and Mr. Jindra waiting for her check-in with ICE in San Francisco.Credit...Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times
Brent Jindra, a tech salesman, voted for President Trump three times, drawn by his aggressive immigration agenda. He never imagined the crackdown would ensnare his own wife.
Last month, moments after the couple got off their flight in Burbank, Calif., a young man in a brown hooded sweatshirt stopped Galina Bobreneva.
“Congratulations, you’ve been chosen for secondary screening,” he told her, according to the couple’s recollection.
The man was a federal agent, and after questioning Ms. Bobreneva for about 15 minutes, he led her away in handcuffs to an unmarked vehicle.
“I’m only doing my job,” he said. “Everything will be OK.”
So began a 16-day ordeal: a night on the floor of a basement holding cell in downtown Los Angeles; two weeks in a Mojave Desert detention center and a frantic legal effort to win her release.
Freed on a $35,000 bond with an electronic monitor clamped to her ankle, she is now fighting to stay in the United States against federal charges of overstaying her visa.
Ms. Bobreneva, who is from Russia, has a pending green card application, and her lawyer asserts that she was never out of lawful status.
Her case represents a new front in President Trump’s mass deportation drive: arrests at airports of people whose visas have expired but who have active immigration cases and no criminal history.
Although green-card applicants with expired visas can be detained under federal law, previous administrations did not consider them to be in the country unlawfully. But as the Trump administration seeks to nearly double its daily arrests to 2,000 people, it is detaining and attempting to deport thousands of people who believed they were following the rules.
“The allure of the MAGA campaign was around illegal entries of criminals,” said Mr. Jindra, 48. “There was never a mandate for this president to turn the barrel of the gun and start going after people who legally entered.”
In response to questions about Ms. Bobreneva’s case, the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that she was “an illegal alien” targeted for arrest because “she overstayed her welcome in violation of our nation’s laws.”
“To be clear, work authorization or a pending application do NOT confer legal status in the United States,” the agency said in a statement.
Mr. Trump’s immigration agenda, which helped propel him to the White House for a second term, is becoming a vulnerability for the Republican Party ahead of the midterms as even some members of his base have begun condemning ICE’s hard-line tactics.
Mr. Jindra considered himself a MAGA patriot until his wife’s detention.
“She did not jump a wall, she did not swim a river,” he said. “She came in Trump’s beautiful, big front door.”
Ms. Bobreneva arrived on a tourist visa in late 2021, extended it twice following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and applied for asylum in 2022. She met Mr. Jindra in March 2025 and by December they were married.
