An Australian-born mother of two young children faces deportation from the US to New Zealand after spending a horror two months locked up in a New York immigration detention facility.
Dalila Yeend, 35, moved to the US from New Zealand as a 17-year-old and despite several attempts, failed to secure permanent status to live in the US.
On May 29, she was driving her US-born children, 11-year-old daughter Savannah and nine-year-old son Taquan, who has special needs, to get dinner in their home city of Troy, New York, when she rolled through a stop sign.
Yeend was pulled over by police, handed off to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, and held in custody with the threat of deportation to New Zealand without her children until her sudden release on parole last Thursday.
ICE dropped her off at a service station near the detention centre and her mother, Monique de Latour, and children drove five hours to Batavia, New York, to pick her up.
"I've cried a lot in the past few days," Yeend told New York's Times Union newspaper.
"It's been a lot, being away from them."
Yeend arrived in the US 18 years ago on a New Zealand passport with her mother, who was dating soul musician Gil Scott-Heron.
A trial has been scheduled for September 27.
A Go Fund Me page to raise $US12,000 ($A16,000) for legal costs had received $US9800 in donations to date.
Yeend said her main priority was to be with her children.
"I don't have any memory of New Zealand," she told the newspaper.
"I've been in America longer than I was there."
