A woman arrested by ICE while holding her baby at her green card interview in San Diego said the experience was “absolutely traumatizing,” spending five days in custody before being released with her green card approved.

“Just absolute devastation at having to hand my 5-month-old son over to my husband without knowing what was going to happen,” Katie Paul recalled of her arrest on Nov. 20.

She’s from the U.K. and met her husband Stephen Paul gaming online. They got married in the U.S. in the fall, and she had planned to return to the U.K. as they determined where they would live. But two days after their wedding, they found out she was expecting, and knew it would be a high-risk pregnancy.

“We decided that we wanted to be a family when he was born, and so we reached out to some immigration attorneys,” Katie said. “Every attorney that we spoke to said, you know, things like overstaying or unauthorized work are forgiven, and are a part of most marriage-based adjustment of statuses, and there would be no issues.”

Arrests at green card interviews began in San Diego on Nov. 12. When asked about this tactic, ICE has repeatedly said they are detaining people for overstaying their visas, saying in a statement, “Being unlawfully present in the United States is itself a violation of federal law.”

But multiple immigration attorneys have told NBC 7 that there’s an exception in federal law for direct relatives of U.S. citizens, including spouses, who are going through the green card process, and this type of enforcement is without precedent.

Katie and Stephen decided to remain in the U.S. so she could access medical care for the complications with her pregnancy, and applied for her green card. On Nov. 20, they said they took their son Alan to San Diego’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office for Katie’s final interview, arriving nervous but prepared. They told their lawyer it was fine if she joined by phone, rather than in person, because they had “just such an easy case,” Katie said.

“We were finalizing and we were just making small talk with the immigration officer,” Katie said. “Then all of a sudden, there was two ICE agents in the room, and munchkin was asleep in my arms because he’d just been fed, and he was tired. He was curled up in his blanket, and they said that they had an arrest warrant for me.”

“We were saying, like, you know, ‘Is there any way for this not to happen? Because, you know, we’ve got the baby,’” she recalled. “The USCIS supervisor was in tears herself because she’s a mom and she said there was nothing that she could do. And, you know, in the end, I had no choice.”

Katie said she handed their son to Stephen, who put him in his stroller and she leaned down to give him a kiss goodbye, with the whole family in tears.  

Having never committed a crime, Katie then found herself in handcuffs and leg cuffs.

“Absolutely traumatizing,” she said. “When I have socks on my legs, it like it’s the same kind of feeling and it just – it takes me right back to it.”

Katie said she was taken to the basement of the USCIS building, along with seven other women and some men arrested the same day, the same way. They were transferred to the federal building a few blocks south, then taken to the Otay Mesa Detention Center, some returning to the federal building, then back to the detention center again.

“I cried for about five hours straight at one point,” she said. “It was just a lot of despair because none of us understood what happened. None of us knew what was happening. It felt so abrupt. To go from your green card interview to being detained is just – I don’t know, it was just crazy.”

“I was terrified that they were going to deport me straight away,” Katie continued. She said she was given a notice that she would be deported within 48 hours without seeing an immigration judge, but refused to sign it.

“I was absolutely terrified because I was expected not to see my son for however long it would take,” she said. “It felt like my heart had been ripped out.”

“It hurt then and it hurts now because it was our family being torn apart,” Stephen said. “Katie was crying when I had to take Alan, and I knew every time that she spoke to me that what she wanted most was to hold her baby again.”

The couple said a legal battle ensued and on Nov. 25, Katie called her husband to find out she was being released, with her green card approved.

“I think I screamed,” she said, her husband adding that she burst into tears. Hours later, she was released at the San Ysidro trolley station. Now back home, Katie said she feels a lot of anxiety and is afraid to go outside, unable to return to even her daily walks with her son through their neighborhood.

“There’s just the side of me that is so scared of going through it again,” she said. “When I hear a noise outside, I get quite scared.”

“I’ve stopped knocking on the door when I come home because I don’t want her worrying that it’s ICE agents coming to pick her up,” Stephen said.

The couple said they are normally intensely private, but as their case has garnered international attention, they are weathering the storm because they feel fortunate that Katie was released relatively quickly, with so many people like her still detained, still fighting their cases.  

“Even though we’ve managed to come out of this quickly, there’s a lot of people in very similar situations who haven’t, who still need advocacy, who still need that help,” Stephen said. “We want to make sure that it’s not just our family that’s put back together. It’s all the families that were torn apart.”

“If it stops it happening to anyone else then it was worth it, I think,” Katie said.