The story of the Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) detention of Lilian Calderon has been difficult to understand, and this information, as Caroline Goggin and Sarah Doiron report for WPRI doesn’t help much:

An affidavit submitted by ICE officials Wednesday listed three reasons for Calderon’s detainment:

• ICE beleived her 2002 order of removal rendered her a flight risk
• According to ICE, there was a “lack of child care issues” for her two young children
• ICE said there was the availability of bed space at their detention facility in Boston

I suppose there may be some private detail in one of the first bullets that would cast the story in a different light, but whatever it might be, it would have to overcome a policy preference not to punish people for trying to do the right thing.

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Of course, polarization of this issue probably contributes to our inability to formulate a more-reasonable set of laws.  Pro-immigration advocates have incentive not to act on areas of agreement because then they’d lose leverage for their more-radical agenda.  That leaves agents trying to enforce laws that could easily be tweaked to ensure that this sort of thing wouldn’t happen.