Thist story by Aaron Calvin was first published in News & Citizen on Nov. 26, 2025.
As one of three men detained by immigration police in Jeffersonville on Nov. 7 was granted bond, their lawyer has been denied access to the other two men after allegedly violating Department of Corrections policy around the use of translators.
Last Thursday, a virtual bond hearing held in Massachusetts state court morning for Jeffersonville business owner Vicente Acosta Yupangui, 40, concluded with a judge allowing Yupangui to await a removal hearing at his home. On Monday, Yupangui’s lawyer Kristen Connors was back in Vermont District Court in Burlington for another hearing, this time for a second man detained in the same Jeffersonville raid, Luis Lala Inamagua.
While the hearing pertained to filings around Inamagua’s federal case, Vermont Department of Justice lawyers were also on hand representing Northwest State Correctional Facility, where Inamagua, 46, has been detained along with Alex Japon Benites, 28, a third man detained in Jeffersonville. Until recently, Yupangui had also been detained there.
Connors said she had been “banned” from the prison and was not allowed to visit her clients in-person because she had brought an interpreter to help translate for a client who was related to that translator.
Connors said she was unaware this violated Department of Corrections policy and no one at the prison checked their identification or questioned them. When she tried to schedule an in-person meeting with Inamagua last week, she said she was informed that she had been banned from Northwest State Correctional Facility and that the state had filed an ethics complaint against Connors.
Isaac Dayno, a spokesperson for the Department of Corrections, initially denied that Connors had been “banned” from Northwest State Correctional Facility and declined to share a copy of the ethics report filed against Connors.
When pressed to further clarify Connors’ denial, Dayno acknowledged that there had been “confusion around her access privileges” after a miscommunication between the department’s legal team and prison staff.
Dayno said Connors “should be cleared to enter a correctional facility to meet with a client” but warned that any accompanying interpreter would need prior clearance from the Department of Corrections as well.
“The issue was not the interpreter’s relationship to the detainee but rather the fact counsel knowingly did not disclose that relationship, which is a violation of DOC policy,” Dayno wrote. “The Department is still investigating the circumstances of this violation.”
Connors, who only learned of this clarification in the department’s policy toward her when asked about it by the News & Citizen, said she would verify this claim with the department separately, and alleged the department had initially claimed she had violated specific policies regulating prisoner visitation that she claimed she had not violated.
Roofer freed
In a virtual hearing conducted Nov. 20 through the immigration court in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, Yupangui became the first of those detained Nov. 7 in the parking lot of the Maplefields in Jeffersonville to be allowed a bond hearing.
Prior to the hearing, Connors argued in filings that although Yupangui had entered the United States outside of the proper channels, he had been an asylum seeker for over a decade. She said he is a taxpaying owner of a roofing business based in Cambridge and is the father of four children who are citizens.
At the hearing, Sarah Sawwan, a Texas-based attorney representing the Department of Homeland Security, tried to make the case that Yupangui was a flight risk, citing the fact that he attempted to flee from immigration police, as many others at the scene did, and that his original immigration to the United States being unlawful.
Julio Cortes del Olmo, the Massachusetts lawyer who represented Yupangui in immigration court, argued that the court could not prove that Yupangui was among those who had fled, and pointed to the abundance of evidence of his client’s deep ties to the Cambridge community, from his family to the many who rallied to his cause after his detainment.
Del Olmo said that Yupangui received more than 10 letters of support, which he was able to submit to the court on behalf of his client. In one of them, Alisa Anderson, an owner at Three Mountain Roofing, another Cambridge roofing company with whom Yupangui works, had paid for his legal representation and characterized him as a “hard working man.”
Judge Natalie Smith determined that the state had not successfully proven that Yupangui was a flight risk and set his bond at $5,000.
Connors confirmed that Yupangui had been released on bond to await his removal hearing, which is scheduled for early December. Inamagua and Benites had their “master calendar” hearings, the first procedural step in the removal process, rescheduled to early December as well, though Connors hopes to secure them bond hearings as well.
Of the four other state-confirmed people detained in relation to the Jeffersonville operation, three have been transferred to a family-detainment facility in Texas and another was transferred to an Arizona facility, according to advocates.
