He got green card approval after decades here. ICE then arrested him

Babblejit “Bubbly” Kaur and her husband, Amarjit Singh, celebrated their 41st wedding anniversary in Long Beach in late November. The two held a frosted cake in their hands and looked happy as their daughter, Joti, posed for pictures.

The couple endured a lot during those years, more than 30 of which were spent in the US, after fleeing religious persecution in India.

They arrived in 1994 with three young children and little money, facing a difficult asylum process. But the couple found their place, operated a popular Indian restaurant for decades, and saw their children through college.

This year was already difficult for the family. Singh was diagnosed with cancer and Kaur was fired from her job at Rite Aid, where she had worked for decades, after the company closed in October. But the family’s biggest challenge would come a few days after the couple’s anniversary, on December 1, when Kaur was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement during a fingerprinting appointment and eventually taken to the Adelanto ICE Processing Center.

Joti Kaur, the couple’s youngest daughter, fainted at work when she heard the news.

“I tell him, ‘Whenever you think about me, I’ve been thinking about you,'” he said from the courtyard of his apartment in Long Beach. “You’re the only thing I can think of, to get you out of there.”

Kaur had an approved green card, but the government had not yet issued it, said Harman Singh, her eldest son. The family’s lawyer filed a lawsuit earlier last week asking the court to review the legality of Kaur’s arrest.

Kaur and her husband owned a restaurant, Natraj Cuisine of India, for decades and became a familiar and beloved face in the coastal town. When she wasn’t working at Rite Aid, she greeted customers at Natraj, alongside her husband, who also ran the kitchen as needed. Community members came out in droves to support the family, creating a GoFundMe that raised more than $26,000 and a Change.org petition with more than 1,600 signatures.

Within days of his arrest, a popular Long Beach Facebook group posted the news and drew the attention of Congressman Robert Garcia, who represents the 42nd Congressional District, which includes Long Beach.

Garcia filed a petition with US Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that processes immigration applications, asking for the immediate issuance of Kaur’s green card given the urgency of her husband’s care. His office also sent requests to ICE and the Adelanto ICE Processing Center for his release.

The Congress said Kaur’s arrest is one of many cases across the country where “we encourage people to do things the right way and show up for election, and then we lock them up at times when we invite them.”

“The Long Beach community is outraged by this,” he said. “It’s crazy and it’s inhumane. It’s not the way to treat people.”

Kaur’s arrest was made by FBI agents, Laura Eimiller, the agency’s press coordinator confirmed to The Times, “as part of our ongoing assistance to ICE related to immigration enforcement.”

One of the Trump administration’s main immigration tactics in recent months has been to detain people during their nominations for asylum or visa processing and, in some cases, to deport them.

The absence of their mother has left an immeasurable gap in their family, said Harman Singh. They had to pick up where he left off, manage the bills and check out his father’s cancer treatment. In a way, he said, it was like mourning the death of a loved one, only “they’re still physically in the world, you can’t reach them.”

“This space, this space, is filled with America,” Harman Singh said. “This is not just our story.”

Babblejit Kaur and her two children have dinner together.

(Courtesy of Joti Kaur)

Kaur and Singh had been joined at the hip since they married in 1984, the same year violence against Sikhs, their religious community, broke out in India. The Indian state of Punjab was a Sikh kingdom before the British took over, and the community had been fighting for a separate Sikh state in the region.

In 1984, tensions intensified when a siege, ordered by Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi on Sikhism’s holiest site, ended. In revenge, two Sikh guards killed him. Hindu mobs then attacked, killing thousands of Sikhs, in what the California Legislature called genocide.

Large communities of Sikhs began to flee to India. Her parents watched as people around them – friends, cousins, neighbors – disappeared and were later found dead, Harman Singh said.

They left for the US ten years later. Now, their son said, they are facing the same persecution that their parents fled all those years ago.

“This was supposed to be a place where you have the freedom to live without fear … but it’s turning into a nightmare again,” Harman Singh said. “We are repeating what our parents fled.”

Today, the Sikh diaspora, who live mostly in the US, Canada and the United Kingdom, are still targeted. Canadian-Indian relations became strained after the assassination of Sikh leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar on Canadian soil in 2023. The Canadian government is suspicious The Indian government is responsible for the killings, which New Delhi has denied.

In August 2024, a truck transporting a Sikh political leader a fire broke out in Sacramento. In 2023, US officials announced that they had foiled an assassination attempt linked to the Indian government against a Sikh activist.

Natraj Cuisine of India on 2nd Street in Belmont Shore, Long Beach, was like a fourth child for Kaur and Singh.

Singh first worked as a waitress in the old Laguna Beach area before moving to Long Beach. Eventually, they became the face of the restaurant, often working more than 12-hour days. The couple managed the day-to-day operations of the restaurant until their departure in 2020.

The couple has been the face of Natraj Indian Cuisine in Long Beach for decades.

(Courtesy of Joti Kaur)

“The best way to describe a mother is, she will feed everyone in the room and the neighbors before she can feed herself,” said Joti Kaur. “That was their love language, they fed us, the community and anyone they could.”

Kaur worked at Natraj whenever she wasn’t shopping at Rite Aid and went to the restaurant on her lunch break.

The couple left the restaurant a few weeks before the COVID-19 hit in 2020. They have recently partnered with another restaurant, Royal Indian Curry House, which is under development.

“They were looking forward to helping with that and getting back to serving food, because that’s what they love to do,” said Joti Kaur.

Singh depends on his wife for almost everything, their children say. He took the lead in getting the family settled in the US, learned English, got a driver’s license and even figured out how to connect Harman Singh’s PlayStation.

When Singh was diagnosed with cancer, his wife took over again. The family looked to him whenever an important decision needed to be made.

On the day of his appointment, he felt something was wrong.

“He called me this morning and he was worried,” said Joti Kaur. “I wish I had been on the phone with him, he would have known that something was wrong.

Harman Singh, who now lives in Sacramento, was also on edge, having seen dozens of cases of immigrants arrested during government-imposed time limits.

Fingerprinting has become a common practice in the family, which has been entangled in a series of asylum programs since arriving at New York’s airport in 1994. The two older children, including Harman Singh, have since become naturalized citizens. Joti Kaur and her father have green cards. What was left waiting was Kaur.

The government already had Kaur’s fingerprints on file, which is why the family was shocked when they received the notice of this appointment.

“You have an emerging case and it’s like, if they don’t go, they’re in trouble. If they go, they’re in trouble,” said Harman Singh. “They set it up in such a way that they will get the result they want.”

Now, for the first time in decades, Kaur and Singh are being forced to sleep in separate beds, their children say, and they are not sleeping at all.

“That was really hard, just knowing that he was going to fight cancer, but my mother was by his side,” said Harman Singh. “Now there is loneliness for both of them, we can’t help ourselves, there is nothing we can do to fix that.”

The couple married in India, and later moved with their three children to the United States in 1994.

(Courtesy of Joti Kaur)

The lights at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center don’t go out, enough to keep most awake. The noises, often made by newly arrived inmates, however, keep Kaur awake, often after 2 am.

He’s lucky if he gets a few hours of sleep at night, his kids say.

Joti Kaur and her mother.

(Courtesy of Joti Kaur)

Guilt creeps into both children at all hours of the day. Joti Kaur often hears it late at night, when she curls up under the covers of her bed and is suddenly reminded of how cold her mother must be. Her brother hears it every time he puts on a jacket or turns on the hot water in the shower.

All the family dinners Joti Kaur missed or the phone calls she hung up on when her mother was at home added to the guilt.

“I wish I could go back to those dinners and spend that time, because now, I don’t know when the next dinner will be with him,” she said.

However, the light among the concerns of the community created by his mother in the detention center. He met women of all ages and from all walks of life, one being 85 years old.

When Harman Singh arrived in Adelanto to visit his mother for the first time in early December, he heard the women inside erupt in joy. The sound was strange in the cold place.

But that’s what women do to each other every time one of them is locked out, her mother told her.

“There’s a sense of camaraderie. They’re like, ‘We’re in this together,’ which I’m very grateful for,” said Harman Singh. “He has girls he talks to. He says, ‘If they weren’t there, I’d be depressed right now.’

His mother is in a relationship with two Indian women. The three often pray together, and divide whatever milk they get that day to make tea. One is still young, and has started calling Kaur mom.