Two weeks ago, Lee Stinton was a popular Key West hairdresser with a job, a partner of four years, a dog named Ernest Heminggay, an employment authorization from the federal government and a green card application moving through the immigration process.
Today, Stinton is an Irish immigrant detainee at Krome Detention Center, where he has been held since he was stopped on his e-bike June 12 in Key West.
“He was going to work at a salon on Kennedy Drive from our house downtown, and taking the streets through the neighborhoods,” Stinton’s partner, DeVaun “DJ” Davis, told the Keys Weekly on June 24. “He may or may not have rolled through a stop sign and was stopped by a Key West police officer.”
An encounter that could have ended with a ticket or warning instead led to a three-hour trip to Krome and two weeks of captivity and frustration in a crowded detention center as the U.S. government works overtime to detain and deport as many as 3,000 undocumented immigrants a day.
“The ICE agent that got involved in his traffic stop — and I’m still not sure how that happened, whether he was riding with the police officer or showed up separately — saw the photo of the two of us on Lee’s phone’s lock screen, and assumed I was Haitian,” Davis said. “He asked Lee, ‘Is that your boyfriend? We’ll go find him as well and get two for one.’”
Davis is a U.S. citizen and a mail carrier with the U.S. Postal Service.
What was Lee Stinton’s immigration status?
Edward Lee Stinton, who goes by Lee, arrived in Key West from his native Northern Ireland in 2018. At the time, he was married to a man who was a U.S. citizen. Stinton had a work/travel visa and had begun the green card process available to those with American spouses.
When Stinton’s marriage ended in domestic violence charges against the spouse, Stinton applied for and received VAWA protection. It stands for the Violence Against Women Act and is meant to protect victims of domestic violence. If approved for VAWA protection, immigration processes can be expedited.
“Lee was going through all the right processes and filing all the documentation.” Davis said. “He had a VAWA protection and an employment authorization card. I had just taken him to Miami for an immigration hearing in the past few months. Things were proceeding.”
But, back in 2018, when Stinton first arrived in the U.S. and his marriage dissolved into abuse, his travel/work visa expired.
“So yes, he had overstayed a visa seven years ago, and that’s what ICE is using to detain and possibly deport him,” Davis said. “But we don’t understand, because in the past seven years, the federal government hasn’t once used that against him, and instead has allowed him to proceed along the way to getting a green card. He doesn’t have so much as a parking ticket. He has all his 1099s. He’s been paying taxes and has no arrests. It’s terrifying because we don’t know what’s going to happen.”
Conditions at Krome Detention Center
Once detained on June 12, Stinton spent several days in a holding room at Krome Detention Center with about 50 other people.
“No beds, one wooden bench. People slept on the floor. Lee is a vegan and didn’t get any vegan food until he’d gone without eating for four days,” Davis said. “It wasn’t until Congressman Carlos Gimenez announced he was planning to visit Krome the next day that Lee finally got moved into a ‘pod’ with a cot and fewer people, and finally got a change of clothes and vegan food.”
One of the most humiliating aspects of the ordeal, Davis said, is the government’s insistence on removing Stinton’s multiple piercings.
“They took him to Kendall Hospital to remove the piercings — and there are several — and while there they had him handcuffed and shackled at the ankles, walking him down the hospital hallways like he’s some sort of serial killer. My god.”
Alerting the media
Stinton’s detainment is among the first in Key West that people have been willing to discuss with the media. Other detainees’ families and friends are fearful to speak out because of either their own immigration vulnerabilities or those of people around them.
Back in Northern Ireland, Stinon’s parents, Edward and Elaine Stinton, have publicized their son’s situation with stories appearing on the BBC and in the Belfast Telegraph newspaper.
Stinton’s and Davis’ friends in Key West have launched a petition drive to send to ICE. They also plan to speak on his behalf at the June 30 special city commission meeting in Key West, where officials are seeking answers to questions residents have about ongoing immigration enforcement efforts.
As of now, Stinton’s case is entirely up in the air, Davis said, because as of the night of June 24 his name and case number still hadn’t shown up on the ICE website, where immigrants and their families and attorneys can typically follow any proceedings and track any scheduled hearings.
“They won’t tell (his attorney) how long he’ll be there. If they find they’re going to deport him — it’s a holding center, not a processing center — they will send him to Texas to process him and then deport him,” Stinton’s father told the Belfast Telegraph. “The silliest part about it (according to) his solicitor is that he could be deported, sent back home to here, there’s a certain form you can fill in from here and you can go straight back to the U.S. straight away.’”
The 45-year-old hairstylist, who was previously voted Britain’s top hairdresser and Ireland’s Most Stylish Man, is a “valued member” of the Key West community, according to a petition set up by locals to campaign for Stinton’s release.
The petition says he has been “earning the trust and respect of colleagues, customers and supervisors and has been a tax-paying member of the community since 2019.”
It adds that Lee’s detention has “caused significant hardship to his family, friends, and our community. As residents of Key West, we rely on each other for support, and the absence of Lee has left a noticeable gap in our daily lives. Lee poses no danger to our community and has no criminal history.”
According to the ICE website, in describing its Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) at the state level, “ERO’s mission is to protect the homeland through the arrest and removal of aliens who undermine the safety of U.S. communities and the integrity of U.S. immigration laws.
Florida’s ERO directs its limited enforcement resources toward aliens posing the greatest threats to homeland security through intelligence-driven leads. ERO focuses its enforcement
efforts on aliens who pose the greatest threat to national security, public safety, and border security.”
Keys Weekly has contacted the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement public information officer in South Florida and the Keys, but had not received a reply as of press time.
