By admin 
A 6-year-old girl and mother who recently moved to Charlotte have been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials in an asylum case involving a no-show judge and a “fake lawyer,” according to North Carolina immigrant advocates.
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The girl, Zoeh, is a Sugar Creek Charter School first-grader. She left Venezuela with her father and her mother, Ydienays Dariana Dominguez, and the family has lived in Charlotte while seeking asylum since 2024, according to the grassroots advocacy group Siembra NC.
Last week, immigration agents reportedly asked the mother to bring Zoeh to a routine check-in. They never returned. Now, the father says he doesn’t know where they are. He is holding a news conference in Charlotte on Thursday morning to try to bring the asylum case back in front of a judge.
“My wife and my daughter have been trying to do everything right,” said the father, a barber identified by the name Anderson, in a statement through Siembra NC. “They deserve the chance to have their case heard.”
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for more information.
Siembra NC said Wednesday that the family has been asking for asylum and following instructions. About a month ago, a judge never showed up to their scheduled virtual immigration court hearing, the group says. After that failed hearing came a removal order.
According to Siembra NC, the family recruited someone to help appeal the order while Zoeh and her mother, who works in a warehouse, continued going to routine check-ins. The person “claiming to be their legal representative” was scamming them and never filed the appeal, the group says. So at a recent check-in, ICE took Zoeh and her mother into custody.
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Anderson waited for his wife and child in the parking lot until an ICE officer called his cell. The pair were being transferred to Texas, the officer said, according to the group. As of Wednesday, Anderson didn’t know where they were.
“Zoeh should be wondering about her next art project, practicing writing her letters, and enjoying these first mornings of fall air on her way to school – not sitting in immigration detention because the entire system, from the fake lawyer and the absent judge to ICE’s unconscionable practice of arresting school-age children, failed her,” Andreina Malki, defense manager with Siembra NC, said in a statement.
The news conference with Anderson, Siembra NC representatives and other local leaders will be held at Eastway Park playground at 423 Eastway Drive on Thursday at 9 a.m.
The arrest comes as Charlotte approaches the one-year anniversary of Border Patrol’s “Operation Charlotte’s Web,” which saw an influx of agents to the city for a week in November. Several lawsuits and criminal cases stem from the weeklong enforcement action.
Several U.S. citizens were charged with assaulting agents in cases that were later dropped by the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Earlier this month, though, a jury delivered a split verdict for one of those cases, convicting one protester of assaulting an agent and acquitting another.
This story was originally published September 16, 2026 at 1:43 PM with the headline “Charlotte first-grader and mother detained by ICE after ‘fake lawyer’ misled family.”
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