This story was originally produced by the New Hampshire Bulletin, an independent local newsroom that allows NHPR and other outlets to republish its reporting.
Fabian Schmidt sometimes wakes up afraid in the middle of the night, briefly forgetting he’s no longer at the maximum security prison where he spent two months last year.
Schmidt, a German green card holder who moved to the United States as a teenager in 2007 and now lives in Nashua, was detained by immigration officials at Boston Logan Airport last year. He spent two months jailed in Rhode Island for what his lawyer calls a paperwork issue involving a decade-old misdemeanor.
In the year since he was freed, he’s made little sense of the ordeal other than to say he was caught up in the early days of the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration crackdown.
His profile is different from other prominent targets of the dragnet: He’s European rather than Latin American or Middle Eastern, and he comes from a wealthy background. But as with other instances of legal immigrants being swept up in the purge, Schmidt’s situation made headlines, sparked backlash, and became a symbol of the administration’s arrest first, ask questions later approach to immigration enforcement.
“I’m just happy things are back to normal, because I saw a lot of people that didn’t get to go home to their families,” he said. “Right now, I actually feel like I’m in a really good spot. I’m driving home on my career. My wife and I, we got settled back in nicely, and I’m actually in a really good spot for me personally right now in this moment.”
Still, when Schmidt talks about the experience now, his mind is all over the place. He oscillates from anger to relief to numbness.
“At first I always thought I should get mad, right?” he said. “Someone mistreats you. Someone hurts you. You have a natural reaction of getting mad and getting upset, and you want to take it out on somebody, right? It’s a whirlwind of stuff.”
And, while he’s moved on with his life in a country he’s still proud to call home, sometimes, at night, he finds himself back where the churn began.
Caught in the net
On March 7, 2025, Schmidt was returning from a trip to Europe to visit family. He went through the customs line at Logan Airport as usual, but this time there was a snag. A Customs and Border Protection agent approached him and brought him to a holding room in the airport.
“I didn’t think much of it until I got into this room,” he said. “And then immediately when I got into this room, there was a bunch of people yelling, people in Kevlar vests, a family with a baby.”
Information was sparse.
“They just tell you, ‘We have a flag on your green card, can you please go sit?’ And that’s the passive aggressive energy that will make you go nuts, because you have your whole world crashing down in front of you, and you’re told to go sit in a chair.”
He sat in the chair for 16 hours.
On the other side of customs his girlfriend, Bhavani Hodgkins, whom he’d met three years before while bartending at Nashua’s San Francisco Kitchen, waited. Prior to his trip to Europe, Schmidt purchased an engagement ring.
After two hours, Hodgkins understood there was a problem. But she had no idea what that problem was or where he was. She was in the dark, and kept there.
Meanwhile, where Schmidt sat, agents started to shed light on his situation. They made it clear they didn’t view the detainment as any sort of mixup.
“Immediately, I felt anger and frustration in this guy’s voice,” Schmidt recalled. “He’s like, ‘So you think you can sell drugs in the United States of America.’”
Schmidt replied, saying he’d never sold drugs, but the agent told him there was a “major drug charge” on his record. That “major” charge was for possession in California, where he lived a decade earlier. Schmidt said he was at a college party in 2015 that had been busted by police, and that officers believed a bag found on the ground containing an unknown substance was his cocaine. He insists it wasn’t. Schmidt later pleaded no contest and believed the case was behind him.
His attorney, David Keller, noted that for years Schmidt traveled in and out of the country and renewed his green card without issue. That changed only when President Donald Trump began his immigration crackdown.
“The problem with that criminal case was they had never tested the substance to determine it was cocaine,” Keller said. “So had that case been brought to trial, had his lawyer actually tried the case, the government would have never been able to prove their case. For whatever reason, and we don’t know exactly why, that attorney didn’t take it to trial, but rather had Fabian plead to a sort of diversionary resolution.”
Schmidt also had a 2016 drunken driving charge that led to his license being temporarily suspended and has been brought up in news reports. Schmidt says that incident was the catalyst for him to get sober, which he has been for years. He says he now volunteers to sponsor others struggling with alcoholism in recovery programs in New Hampshire. However, the drunken driving charge was not the justification for his detainment.
“I’m sitting there thinking this was gonna be just a mix-up in documentation,” he said. “I was gonna get out in six to seven hours.”
He spent days sitting in a holding room chair. He had no contact with family, and lost any sense of how long he had been detained. He left the chair only to sleep in a cot that was rolled out each night. Shift change after shift change, the agents offered no answers. So he sat, slept, and ate: at every meal a choice between Cup O’ Noodles or a Chef Boyardee ravioli cup. He always chose the ravioli. It was easier to eat lukewarm.
On the fourth day, he collapsed.
“I started yelling for help, and the guy came over, and I will never forget this moment to the day I die,” he said. “He made fun of me. He’s like, ‘What, you trying to med out? You trying to med out? You’re one of those bitches that meds out?’”
The agent was accusing Schmidt of faking illness to get released. Officers, eventually realizing his condition was serious, took him by ambulance to Massachusetts General Hospital where he was diagnosed with influenza. He woke up handcuffed to the hospital bed. His family wasn’t notified.
Days later, on March 11, 2025, he was transported by Immigration and Customs Enforcement to a prison in Rhode Island.
For that hourlong trip, he was made to lie flat in an SUV, his hands and feet shackled. And that’s about as good as it would get for Schmidt for the next two months.
Confined to maximum security
Schmidt was placed in the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility, a publicly owned but privately operated maximum security prison in Central Falls, Rhode Island. The facility holds a mix of detainees from ICE, the U.S. Marshals Service, and the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
Maximum security is the level of custody at which murderers, gang leaders, and inmates with a history of escape attempts are held. Schmidt called Wyatt “a special beast” where fights among inmates are common, including three on his first day in custody.
“It’s bright. It’s loud. It’s action-packed,” he said. “You can never sit still, because you always have to have your head on the swivel.”
Keller said “there’s not really a good explanation” for why ICE placed Schmidt alongside such violent offenders. He could’ve been placed at the Plymouth County Correctional Facility in Plymouth, Massachusetts, instead, and there are supposed to be separate wings for ICE detainees and the general population.
“In a perfect world, there is total separation,” he said. “But that’s not the case.”
It wasn’t until Schmidt arrived at Wyatt that Hodgkins and the rest of his family learned where he was. Over the next two months, Hodgkins spent hundreds of dollars a week paying the prison to speak with him on the phone. She didn’t tell him how much those calls cost. Schmidt said “she was trying to shield me from the cost,” because if he knew how expensive it was, he wouldn’t have let her call so much.
Agents at the facility repeatedly tried to convince Schmidt to sign a form relinquishing his green card on the promise that if he did so, they would let him go free.
“I was like, ‘What? Why would I sign away my genius green card?’” he said, referring to the special type of visa — an O-1 visa, nicknamed the “genius visa” — his international businessman father secured for the family when they first moved to California. “For what reason?”
Keller said this is a concerning trend he’s seen with other clients too.
“I couldn’t even count how many consultations I’ve had where people are now abroad trying to figure out how to come back in, because they were green card holders, but they were threatened upon reentry and manipulated and coerced into signing a form,” Keller explained. “… CBP agents are being very vague and deploying coercive and unethical negotiation tactics by saying, ‘Here, you sign this, and it all goes away. We’ll let you go.’”
Keller said it’s difficult to prove agents coerced or put his clients in duress to get a signature.
“It’s way easier to, from the government’s perspective, act and ask forgiveness later,” he said. “But they’re not asking for forgiveness.”
Meanwhile, Schmidt could hear people protesting on his behalf outside the prison walls. His mother, Astrid Senior, and Hodgkins, had told the world his story.
As calls for Schmidt’s release grew louder and press reports brought international attention, Keller focused on the stated reason for detainment: the 2015 drug possession charge.
He and his colleagues had the California case reopened on the grounds Schmidt was given poor counsel — he never should’ve agreed to anything but a “not guilty” plea, Keller contends — and a judge dismissed the drug charge. That process took weeks, and then they headed to immigration court in Massachusetts. Minutes into the hearing, ICE was ordered to release Schmidt.
The immigration judge ruled so quickly that Schmidt hadn’t even made it onto the Zoom video when the order came down. He was waiting in line to enter the videoconference courtroom when Hodgkins messaged him on a prison tablet: “You’re free now.”
“I’m delirious and imprisoned,” Schmidt recalled. “So, I’m like, what does this mean? So I run over to the phone, even though I was in line, and I called David.”
A tearful Keller confirmed it was true and within hours Schmidt was being transported to an ICE office in Burlington, Massachusetts, so his family could take him home.
“Even just thinking about it right now, I’m getting goosebumps,” Keller said. “When you work with somebody and you care so much about them and their family, and you’ve stayed up countless nights and hours working on a case, you just grow very friendly with your clients. It is the best feeling to know that you’ve gotten the result that seemed unattainable in the beginning.”
Home again
Schmidt moved around growing up. He was born in Germany in 1990, and lived in England and Denmark as a child before arriving in Palo Alto, California, at 16. He moved to Nashua in 2022, to be closer to his mother.
Days after his release, Schmidt proposed to Hodgkins — now Bhavani Schmidt — at a Manchester steakhouse.
Since returning from incarceration, Schmidt has settled back into the chosen hometown he now shares with Hodgkins. He’s felt a wide range of emotions since returning, but ultimately, he’s arrived at gratitude, especially for his adopted New Hampshire community. It was the reaction he got from his neighbors in Nashua and passersby on the street who recognized him from newspapers that made him feel welcome again in his adopted home country.
“As soon as I got back here to Nashua, I got to see the community around me never left my side and then immediately embraced me with open arms when I got back,” he said. “And I gotta tell you, it’s almost surreal, because little me, I never thought that I would have that kind of an impact.”
Their apartment abuts a walking trail along the Nashua River and is a short walk to the restaurant where they met and celebrated their engagement.
“It was honestly the worst thing that we ever went through,” Hodgkins said. “But we had really beautiful blessings come out of it as well, so a part of me hates what happened, and we will forever be scarred from it, but we would not be the people that we are now. We would not be having the life that we have now if it wasn’t true.”
The couple married quickly, and Hodgkins sees a perverse positive in the situation they endured. Most couples believe they would do anything for each other; Schmidt and Hodgkins now have proof, she said.
“When he first got out, I was so angry at those people,” Hodgkins said. “And then I realized that I don’t want to hold onto that anger.”
Both Schmidt and Hodgkins said they’d rather move forward than stew about the past.
“We do not have a place in our heart for resentment,” Hodgkins said. “We want to live this beautiful life that this country has to offer us. We want to work hard. We want to make the most of what we have with our family and our friends, and we do not have a place for resentment.”
Still, Schmidt has considered filing a lawsuit, but has yet to do so. Keller said “there’s aspects of the case that, just from a legal standpoint, are challenging.” He said the law gives the federal government strong immunities, but “there are certain claims that they definitely violated.” That includes the Geneva Conventions, which Keller said were violated when CBP and ICE refused to alert the German consulate for the first week of his detention, and medical neglect when they allowed his illness to worsen at the airport before bringing him to the hospital.
“These claims are blatantly false with respect to CBP,” Hilton Beckham, assistant commissioner of public affairs at CBP, wrote in response to the Bulletin’s request for comment. “When an individual is found with drug related charges and tries to reenter the country, officers will take proper action. The Trump Administration is enforcing immigration laws — something the previous administration failed to do. Those who violate these laws will be processed, detained, and removed as required. Green card holders who have not broken any U.S. laws, committed application fraud, or failed to apply for a re-entry permit after a long period of travel have nothing to fear about entering and exiting the country.”
Schmidt is now paying off roughly $60,000 in legal fees, commissary items, and other expenses from the ordeal.
In his native Germany, Schmidt was featured in a documentary about Trump’s immigration agenda on a national public broadcast network. He’s also working on a book in German and hopes to either translate it to English or write a new adapted version for an American audience.
Even after the experience, Schmidt feels patriotic toward the U.S. He lived in four countries as a child, but when he reached an age when the decision was his to make, he chose to stay in the U.S.
“My heart was always to be an American,” he said. “There’s nothing left for me besides here.”
After his ordeal, Schmidt is resolved to becoming a U.S. citizen even if it means losing German citizenship, though a recent German law change might make that unnecessary. He’s consulting with his attorney about next steps.
