This is what an ICE arrest in Boston immigration court looks like

Kary Diaz Martinez, a woman from the Dominican Republic who is seeking asylum, was handcuffed to the stretcher as she was taken from the JFK Federal Building on June 3 by Boston EMS and put into a waiting ambulance. The woman suffered a medical incident after she was approached by the ICE agents inside. John Tlumacki/Globe Staff

The woman recoiled and burrowed into her husband’s chest. She began to sob quietly, her body trembling, knees buckling. Her arms hung limp by her side as her husband held her upright.

This is how one ICE arrest unfolded in Boston’s immigration court last week, as immigration agents have ramped up enforcement actions across Massachusetts.

ICE agents in plainclothes with handcuffs peeking out of their back pockets had waited outside the courtroom on the third floor of the John F. Kennedy Federal Building while the woman, Kary Diaz Martinez, finished her immigration court hearing. The judge set a court date for next year.

As Diaz Martinez left the courtroom, the five officers approached. Most of the other petitioners — men, women, families with children — had walked in and out of their hearings without issue that day. She was not so lucky. The agents told her she was being arrested.

As agents arrested the mother of two, she had a medical episode. (Video taken by Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio/Globe staff. Edited by Jenna Perlman/Globe staff)

She pleaded not to be separated from her husband, Wiliz de Leon, whom she had just married the previous Saturday. And she had two children, 10 and 7 years old, who were back in the Dominican Republic.

A lawyer standing nearby interjected.

“You don’t have to take her into custody,” Sarah Sherman-Stokes, a clinical associate professor of law and associate director of the Immigrants’ Rights and Human Trafficking Clinic at Boston University School of Law, told the ICE officials. Sherman-Stokes was there to observe immigration proceedings last Tuesday and had been with Diaz Martinez and de Leon in the courtroom.

“We’re doing our job,” one of the agents said.

Diaz Martinez, 29, had been in the US for a little over a year, after crossing the southern border unlawfully and being apprehended by immigration officials. She was fleeing domestic violence in her home country, Sherman-Stokes said, and is seeking asylum.

Diaz Martinez‘s arrest was the result of a new immigration enforcement tactic that has played out across the nation: ICE arrests at immigration courthouses, under the Trump administration’s expanded use of a policy known as “expedited removal,” which allows authorities to deport some recent immigrants without a court hearing.

Department of Homeland Security lawyers have paired this tactic with a new legal strategy: pressing immigration court judges to dismiss pending cases or issue deportation orders against petitioners who have been in the country for less than two years, at their initial hearings. Dismissals and deportation orders leave immigrants more vulnerable to deportation.

In Massachusetts, the immigration court arrests began in the last two weeks. Last Tuesday, at least three people were arrested at the Boston court, including a man who said he was a political torture survivor from Angola, according to Sherman-Stokes.

Wiliz de Leon left the John F. Kennedy Federal Building in Boston on June 3 after his wife suffered a medical emergency while being arrested by ICE, while she was in the building for an immigration court appearance. He is a US citizen. Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff

de Leon, Diaz Martinez’s husband, is a US citizen. The couple met in the Dominican Republic about four and a half years ago and have been together since. They live together in Providence.

Leon told the Globe that the couple had seen reports of arrests at immigration courts on the news, but had decided that Diaz Martinez should attend her court date anyway. They hoped she would be allowed to stay in the country long-term and eventually bring her children here.

“She was really scared to be deported,” Leon said in Spanish.

Now, he said, the couple felt “betrayed.”

“We always want to follow the rules,” Leon said the morning after his wife’s arrest, sounding defeated in a phone call. “I don’t understand what the motive for this is.”

In a statement to the Globe, a Homeland Security spokesperson said most immigrants who entered the country illegally within the past two years are subject to expedited removals and blamed the Biden administration for allowing “millions of illegal aliens” into the United States.

“If they have a valid credible fear claim, they will continue in immigration proceedings, but if no valid claim is found, aliens will be subject to a swift deportation,” the spokesperson said.

ICE did not respond to a request for comment on Diaz Martinez’s case.

Last Tuesday, as she was taken into custody, she seemed to need medical attention. She was struggling to breathe, had chest pain, and was having trouble standing upright. ICE called Emergency Medical Services, who examined her and eventually brought a gurney.

“I just don’t understand. She’s doing exactly what she’s supposed to do,” Sherman-Stokes said, appealing again to the ICE agents to allow Diaz Martinez to return home. But it didn’t sway the officials.

An ICE agent accompanied her to the hospital because she was in custody. Her husband was not allowed to enter the ambulance, or, later, her hospital room.

“You have to let him go,” an EMS worker told Diaz Martinez in Spanish, gently, as she lay on the gurney in the hallway of the court.

Diaz Martinez reluctantly released her husband’s hand. That night, she was taken to Massachusetts General Hospital, and then to the ICE field office in Burlington, where she has been sleeping on a concrete floor in a holding cell with about 12 other women, and using a foil blanket to cover herself, Sherman-Stokes said.

Derege B. Demissie, a criminal defense attorney, filed a habeas petition for Diaz Martinez not to be moved out of state, in collaboration with Sherman-Stokes. A Massachusetts federal judge temporarily granted the motion last week. Sherman-Stokes filed a motion for Diaz Martinez to be released on bond.

“She hasn’t stopped crying,” Leon, 40, said in an interview.

He followed up in a text: “I don’t know what to do.”

Sherman-Stokes, who has been practicing immigration law for more than a decade, said she had seen asylum-seekers enduring agonizing conditions at the US-Mexico border, in detention facilities, and elsewhere. But watching someone get arrested at court, where they were trying to follow the law and request asylum, was uniquely distressing.

“I just can’t shake what just happened,” Sherman-Stokes said. “These are folks trying their very best to comply with the law, and instead they’re taken away in handcuffs.”