His day started with selling a chicken coop. It ended in immigration detention

Sergey Kostenyuk and Mary Loisate have been together for more than 20 years.

Loisate was born in the U.S., but Kostenyuk is a legal permanent resident with a green card. He came to Spokane from Ukraine as a refugee more than 30 years ago, when he was a child.

Kostenyuk has been in the U.S. for so long that they didn’t think about his immigration status, and they never considered that he could be at risk for deportation.

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But as the Trump administration seeks to fulfill his campaign promise to deport millions of immigrants, people with all kinds of immigration statuses and visas are getting picked up. Immigration attorneys say that includes people like Kostenyuk, who have green cards.

ICE doesn’t release data about the immigration status of the people the agency picks up and deports, and an ICE spokesperson declined to say, so it’s impossible to say exactly how many more green-card holders have gotten caught in immigration proceedings in the last several months. But what is clear is that people with increasingly minor offenses — or no criminal record at all — are finding themselves in the crosshairs of the new administration’s immigration policies.

“Under this administration, it's not really about who has a serious, violent conviction,” said Amanda Ng, a supervising attorney with the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project who’s defending Kostenyuk. “They're not even looking at factors like danger. They're just picking people up and detaining them and then kind of figuring it out later.”

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Loisate and Kostenyuk live with their two sons on the outskirts of Spokane.

To make a living, they build and sell backyard sheds and chicken coops. Kostenyuk builds the sheds, and Loisate manages the business side. Their most popular model looks like a Western saloon. “Everybody loves them,” Loisate said. “We do tons of them in every size.”

In mid-February, Loisate and Kostenyuk were happy to meet with some folks who reached out on Facebook Marketplace, asking to see sample coops.

“We actually put our whole day around it, because that’s how we make our money,” Loisate said. “That’s how we live.”

When the people came by to see the coops, Kostenyuk went out to meet them. Then the exchange took an unexpected turn.

A man holding a picture of one of Kostenyuk’s custom-made coops stepped out of a car and told him, “This is not exactly what I want. I’m from immigration. I’m here to arrest you.”

Two more SUVs, both filled with immigration officers, arrived. Kostenyuk was handcuffed and put in one of the vehicles.

“Then they told me they had Sergey, that they were taking him downtown to fill out some paperwork, and that he'll call me in 45 minutes and tell me what's going on,” Loisate said. “And then they left.”

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It turned out that the people who had reached out to Loisate on Facebook weren’t prospective customers; they were agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“I mean, how sneaky,” Loisate said. “And just the way they laughed about it, or whatever. They didn't need to do all that — make a Facebook page and stuff. I don't know. It was sneaky.”

Attorney Amanda Ng said, “While I think it was cruel, it wasn’t technically unlawful.”

'Nothing but Trump flags everywhere'

Mary Loisate blames President Donald Trump for her partner Kostenyuk’s detention — and she said that’s ironic, because Kostenyuk is a big Trump supporter.

“You should see his garage,” Loisate said. “There’s nothing but Trump flags everywhere and posters everywhere. I took them all down out of the yard. I’m not happy about it at all. I was even trying to get his bumper sticker off.”

Among other things, Kostenyuk has always liked Trump’s immigration policies.

“He’s against people coming in illegally,” Loisate said. “He just thinks, like, if they’re coming over here illegally, they should be sent back. He’s been like, ‘Yeah, they should build that wall.’ He’s just like, ‘Look what happens,’ about the drug cartels and everything.”

Kostenyuk always said he didn’t come to the U.S. illegally; he came here as a refugee.

“I don’t think he thought he was included in all that,” Loisate said. “I didn’t think he was included in all that.”

ICE picked up Kostenyuk because of two convictions from 2018, when he pled guilty to felonies for stealing a television from his coworker’s roommate and a trailer full of tools and equipment from his boss, then pawning the stolen items.

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He was told to pay restitution and was sentenced to six days in jail — time he’d already served — and three years probation.

“He could have went to prison for a long time for it, but he did a first[-time] offenders program, so they kind of gave him a break on it,” Loisate said.

Kostenyuk didn’t know that, seven years later, those convictions would land him in immigration detention.

How legal permanent residents can get deported

Kostenyuk has been eligible for citizenship for decades, but he never got around to applying.

And two convictions for certain crimes — even if they’re in the same court case — can put any non-citizens at risk of deportation, even legal permanent residents like Kostenyuk. They’re called “crimes involving moral turpitude” and can range from things like theft and drug crimes to rape and murder.

There’s no statute of limitations on when ICE can come after someone who’s committed crimes like this: They can do so years after the fact.

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Kostenyuk could actually have applied for citizenship even after his convictions, as long as he waited at least five years. But he didn’t — he didn’t know he was at risk of deportation.

Benjamin Osorio, an immigration lawyer who has defended people in deportation proceedings across the country, agrees with Ng that more immigrants are getting picked up who wouldn’t have been prioritized under other administrations, including people with green cards.

“We're in sort of a maximum enforcement environment,” he said. “It’s very scary times in the United States for non-citizens.”

He added that he views it as an unjust consequence for people like Kostenyuk to be deported. He said crimes like theft, and convictions that carry no prison sentence, should not put people at risk of losing their jobs, their families, and the life they’ve built in the U.S.

“I mean, it's just crazy that we think about sending these people out,” he said. “The Supreme Court has described deportation as permanent, you know, exile and banishment. How many lives are affected if we take a father — a working father — away from his U.S. citizen spouse and U.S. citizen kids?”

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An ICE spokesperson declined to respond to that critique.

“I have responses that I could provide, but I am not inclined to answer questions to any form of critique, particularly from a biased party without law enforcement experience,” David Yost, the spokesperson, said in an email.

Osorio, the lawyer, said he’s advising green card holders to apply for citizenship, and to think carefully before traveling, even if they’ve done so without incident before.

Immigration detention in Tacoma

After ICE picked up Kostenyuk, it took Loisate days to figure out where they were taking him. She didn’t find out until the end of the three-day weekend that he was in immigration detention in Tacoma.

The following week, she and her sons — 18-year-old Jacob and 8-year-old Jaiden — drove five hours from their home on the outskirts of Spokane to be there for Kostenyuk’s first hearing.

“How I felt when we were coming up here was that we were coming here to get him,” Loisate said. “I even brought him clean clothes and everything.”

But the judge scheduled another hearing for Kostenyuk, to give him time to get a lawyer.

“She’s like, ‘If you dealt with this today, you’re gonna be deported,’” Loisate recalled of that first hearing. “That shocked all of us. We didn’t think it was as serious as it was until he went to court, and we were like, ‘He’s actually in here to be removed.’”

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After that, Loisate started processing what she would do if Kostenyuk got deported.

“We wouldn't take our kids out of America,” Loisate said. “They [Kostenyuk’s family] came here because they didn't want to be there [Ukraine]. We still have 10 years with Jaiden, raising him and stuff, and I don't want to do it by myself. But we wouldn't do it over there either, because, I mean, that's a terrible place.”

Loisate said a family friend reached out and offered their house if Kostenyuk got deported and needed a home back in Ukraine.

“I was just like, ‘I'm not telling him that,’” Loisate said. “I want him to come home. I don’t want him to go to Ukraine.”

Coping without Sergey

Loisate kept making the drive, back and forth over the mountains, whenever Kostenyuk had a court date.

After one of those hearings, she called him to check in.

“Just drive safely all the way home,” Kostenyuk told her. “And I love you. Tell Jaiden that I kiss him. And I miss him. Drive safe.”

In an interview outside the detention center, Loisate said the family was starting to fall apart without their dad.

“We've always been a two-parent household,” she said. “I'm a single mother all of a sudden. I mean, it's hard.”

Loisate said she sometimes felt like she was the one being punished, not Kostenyuk. She scrambled to take care of the kids and the house, and put money in Kostenyuk’s account in detention for food and phone calls.

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“I feel bad for him, but I'm the one who's stuck doing everything because he got took here,” she said. “And when I put money on his books, I was like, ‘OK, I'm sitting here trying to pay electricity bills, and he's eating candy.’”

Loisate said she was worried their 18-year-old son, Jacob, was depressed.

“He doesn’t want to leave his bedroom,” she said. “He had a 3.87 GPA, and now, he’s wanting to go to an alternative school. And he only has a couple months left, and now, he's just throwing it all the way. And I don't even have Sergey there to help me get him back in order.”

Her 8-year-old, Jaiden, was also struggling.

“Him and Sergey are really close,” Loisate said. “He cries all the time.”

Sergey’s last hearing

In late April, Loisate and her kids drove to Tacoma for yet another hearing, when Kostenyuk’s lawyer, Amanda Ng, planned to ask the judge to end the proceedings against him, saying he wasn't deportable.

“There are certain criminal convictions that make somebody deportable,” Ng said, “but the government still bears the burden of showing that any state conviction qualifies.”

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Ng argued in court that the crime Kostenyuk was convicted for in Washington didn’t meet the federal bar to deport someone.

“The main thing here is it wasn't a match,” Ng said. “He shouldn't have been in proceedings at all.”

The judge agreed, so Kostenyuk can stay in the U.S. He was released the next day.

“It's easy to believe like, ‘OK, permanent residents, they're getting out again,’” Ng said. “I think that's missing the bigger picture. The bigger picture here is that, with these new arrest quotas, it's kind of indiscriminate. I think Sergey was fortunate to get out, but there are many people who are still in detention and shouldn't be.”

Back home in Spokane

After Kostenyuk was released, his whole family drove back home to the outskirts of Spokane, arriving near midnight. The very next day, Kostenyuk built a chicken coop and delivered it to a customer.

That week, Loisate and Kostenyuk couldn’t stop smiling — a stark contrast to how the couple was doing when they were separated and Kostenyuk was detained.

“He would have to get off the phone a lot of times — he says because he didn’t want to break down or get too emotional,” Loisate said.

“Some people [in detention] are talking, talking, talking,” Kostenyuk said, “For me, once she calls or I call, it’s quick. Because I told her, ‘I don’t want to talk, because less talking is less thinking.’”

“It was his way to get through it,” Loisate explained.

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In the end, Kostenyuk spent more than two months in detention. He said it was horrible: The food was bad, and he was sick a lot. But the worst part was the boredom — and the uncertainty.

For about a month, the detainees didn’t have access to the yard; they were just in the detention center all day, day after day.

“He goes, ‘I even tried to play chess, and I just couldn’t get into it!’” Loisate said.

“I didn’t have patience to play games,” Kostenyuk explained. “I always started playing a game, and I was like, ‘No I can’t,’ [and I’d] start pacing.”

The hardest thing was not knowing how long he’d be there, he added.

“If you go to jail or prison or something, you know that you’re going to get out,” Kostenyuk said. “But up there, you don’t know. Because there’s some people, they’ve been sitting there for six years. Eventually, they’re going to get deported.”

Loisate said she expected Kostenyuk’s politics to change while he was in detention — but they didn’t. He’s still a big supporter of Trump and his immigration policies.

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However, Kostenyuk said he does think people should get out on bond or parole, and be able to keep living their lives as they fight their cases.

“There's a lot of bad people” in detention, he said, “but there's some people [who] are almost innocent. I'm not just talking about it myself.”

Loisate and Kostenyuk said they do plan to get their paperwork in order. They’ll finally get married, and Kostenyuk’s going to apply for citizenship.

EDITOR'S NOTE: The story was updated at 10 a.m. Friday, May 9 to correct Amanda Ng's title and to more clearly explain her legal argument and Sergey Kostenyuk's status during detention.