Mukta Joshi is part of The New York Times’s Local Investigations Fellowship.
Melvin Funez, 22, and Hannah Klein, 21, met two years ago on Instagram.
They both lived with their parents in Lakeland, Florida, at the time. They would play video games and chat endlessly online, often until they fell asleep together on FaceTime. They bonded over date nights at Chili’s and shared a love for movies and seafood boils.
A year later, they moved out of their parents’ homes and began living in a new apartment with Funez’s dog and a kitten they adopted together. In the fall of 2025, they decided they were ready to get married. They made plans for a simple courtroom ceremony in January.
Klein was excited. “He was going to buy a ring and randomly propose,” she said.
But as the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown intensified across the nation, the couple became nervous. Klein is a U.S. citizen. Funez is not. His mother had brought him to the U.S. from Honduras when he was 5 months old.
“I would have nightmares of him getting picked up by ICE,” Klein said.
On the morning of Nov. 29, just as they had feared, Funez was stopped by police. A headlight on his car had been out and the local sheriff’s department held him for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, when he was unable to produce proper documentation.
Funez was held for weeks in Florida and Louisiana and was transferred in December to the Adams County Correctional Center, a private, for-profit detention facility in Natchez, Mississippi.
The couple didn’t give up on their marriage plans. Starting in January, Funez began submitting requests to hold a ceremony at the CoreCivic-owned Mississippi detention center, something that has long been allowed under federal rules.
Using a tablet given to him by the facility, and the detention center’s electronic portal, he repeatedly inquired about the marriage process.
His first request was addressed to CoreCivic and directed at the chaplain. The chaplain told Funez his first conversation needed to be with his ICE representative.
Funez’s subsequent requests to ICE, reviewed by Mississippi Today, always received anonymous responses. Each request was closed, with one response saying, “We do not allow detainees to get married at this facility.”
Federal policy since 2019 has stated that marriage requests by ICE detainees will be considered on a case-by-case basis. It states that a request is ordinarily granted unless a facility administrator or field office director determines there are “compelling government interests” to deny it or that the marriage meets other criteria for denial, such as posing a security threat.
Prior to 2019, the policy explicitly stated that “compelling interests” did not include the possibility of a marriage allowing a detainee to avoid deportation, language that is no longer included in the policy.
A representative for ICE acknowledged receipt of Mississippi Today’s request for comment, but did not respond.
“Our Adams County Correctional Center follows all ICE policies,” said Brian Todd, a spokesperson for CoreCivic. The warden and assistant warden of the Adams County facility did not respond to a request for comment.
An ICE facility disallowing detainees to get married altogether is highly unusual and would constitute a violation of rights, said immigration attorney Brandon Riches. Riches, who has represented clients held at various facilities in the South, said he had not heard of any detention centers with blanket bans on weddings. One of Riches’ clients got married while at the Jena, Louisiana, facility in June, he said.
“While there are levels of various approvals to have this done, the right to marry should not be infringed upon because of current immigration policies,” Riches said. “These are not criminal detentions.”
ICE detention is legally classified as administrative detention. Unlawful presence in the United States or not possessing proper documentation is considered a civil violation – like a parking ticket or a health code violation – not a crime.
But even prison inmates who are convicted of crimes have a constitutionally protected right to get married while serving time. News reports show that detainees have gotten married in facilities across the country (such as in Texas and Washington). Susan Torres, a Florida-based immigration attorney who represents Funez, said at least five of her clients have gotten married while detained at different facilities in the past.
“There’s usually a person that’s even designated for marriages that you can reach out to, and they will usually approve your request as long as it’s reasonable,” Torres said.
But Klein said she has been unable to even contact staff at the Adams detention center despite multiple attempts to reach them. “When they answer, it’s a robot, and it gives you 10 options of people to speak to. I picked every single option so I could get a hold of somebody. No one answered the phone,” she said.
Meanwhile, Funez has been spending his days waiting for his bond hearing, hoping to be released. To honor his engagement, he has been wearing a white and blue ring with a letter “H,” for “Hannah,” that a fellow detainee from Mexico spent a week weaving for him.
In a video call from an ICE detention facility, Melvin Funez, 22, shows the engagement ring a fellow detainee made for him.“They give us food in plastic bags every so often. He would cut the plastic bag into strips, tie one end to a bed post and tie the other end onto a shampoo bottle and spin it until it becomes a fine thread,” Funez said.
His bond hearing is scheduled for Wednesday morning. If he is released, Funez says he wants to use the same plastic bag ring to propose to Klein. “It reminds me that I fought for our relationship, and to stay in a country that to me is our home,” he said.
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