Round Lake mother released from ICE detention after 15 months, reunites with daughters: ‘She’s safe now’
A Round Lake mother and green card holder who has been in ICE custody for more than a year in Kentucky is on her way home after a federal judge ruled Friday that her time spent in detention “had become unreasonably prolonged and violated her due process rights.”
U.S. District Judge Angelica Powers of the Memphis Immigration Court in Memphis, Tennessee, released Beata Siemionkowicz on bond, allowing the 57-year-old Polish citizen to return to the Chicago area and reunite with her daughters, Gabi, 22, and Claudia, 26.
Her daughters drove to Kentucky early Monday to pick up their mother from Campbell County Detention Center, where she’d been detained since August 2025. Then they sat in the detention center’s parking lot for more than 24 hours, waiting for the moment their mom would walk out the front door.
“It’s just a weird feeling, an eerie feeling sitting here and waiting for these people to release her, even though we did everything right,” Claudia Siemionkowicz said, sitting in the jail parking lot.
Just before 12:30 p.m. Central Time, Beata Siemionkowicz walked into her daughters’ embrace outside of the Campbell County Detention Facility for the first time in more than a year. Claudia told the Tribune that the first thing she wants to tell her mom is that she is safe. Free.
“She’s safe now; everything is going to be OK,” the 26-year-old said. “We are going to fight her case from the outside of these walls. We are taking her home to be comfortable, to make her feel like herself again.
Siemionkowicz’s ordeal began the afternoon of Aug. 2, 2025, when two masked ICE agents in civilian clothes arrested her while she was gardening in her daughter’s backyard in Des Plaines.
Agents arrested Siemionkowicz for her criminal record of misdemeanor retail theft from a Jewel store in September 2005 and Kohl’s in October 2011, according to an ICE spokesperson. The agency also claimed she forged documents to obtain immigration benefits in 2001, before her green card status.
According to her daughters and Lake County court records, Siemionkowicz paid her dues years ago through fines and a period of supervised release. The sisters say their mom stole kids’ clothes for them during an especially hard time after her divorce.
That long-ago Chicagoland criminal record, which ICE considers crimes involving “moral turpitude,” is what classified Siemionkowicz as a mandatory detainee, a group of immigrants who are not legally entitled to a bond hearing, according to records.
Powers ruled Friday, however, that Siemionkowicz’s misdemeanors, now more than a decade old, were not substantial enough evidence that she is a danger to society or someone who should remain detained pending removal from the United States.
Siemionkowicz had entered the United States legally in 1995, moving to Illinois from her hometown of Bialystok, Poland, according to court records. She has been a permanent resident with a green card since 2003 and, as a divorced, single mom of two, built her life in Round Lake as a commercial cleaner and later a hospice caregiver.
The green card holder still faces deportation to Poland, as ordered on Dec. 9, 2025. But bond allows Siemionkowicz to fight her immigration legal battle from home with her family.
“I am relieved to hear that Beata Siemionkowicz has been released from the Campbell County ICE detention facility. It is a victory for the community each time we end the inhumane detention of our neighbors,” U.S. Rep. Delia Ramirez told the Tribune. “No one should face the inhumane conditions inside ICE detention facilities.”
Conditions inside the Campbell County Detention Center had made national headlines in August when Ramirez, from Illinois’ 3rd Congressional District, and other Democrats cited concerns about the “inhumane conditions” of the northern Kentucky facility following a congressional oversight visit the month before.
Gabi Siemionkowicz told the Tribune that her mother was moved in September to a different, more secure medical wing within the Campbell County Detention Center where the conditions were “way worse” than her previous cell.
Claudia Siemionkowicz said that she and her sister felt “anxious” waiting for their mother outside the detention center as the area was “not welcoming, to say the least.”
“We knew there would be a positive outcome; God knows how long it would take,” Claudia said. “We didn’t think it would take this long for sure, but we knew she would be able to get out.”
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