38-year-old regional video gaming champion Ludovic Mbock, who came to the US legally from Cameroon, was snatched by ICE while applying for his yearly work permit—as he’s done for 20 years. He has since been detained for three weeks and moved to facilities in Louisiana and Georgia, and his freedom depends on a critical bond hearing this week. In this urgent episode of Working People, we speak with Diane Sohna, Ludovic’s sister, and Nikhil Delahaye, a close friend of Ludovic’s and a fellow gamer.

Additional links/info:

• Ludovic Mbock Instagram
• GoFundMe: Support Ludovic’s Legal Defense
• Antonio Planas & Rondez Green, The Baltimore Banner, “He thought it was a routine ICE check-in. Now his family fears he’ll be deported”
• Heidi Kemps, GameSpot, “The fighting game community bands together in solidarity to help free player from ICE”

Featured Music:

• Jules Taylor, Working People Theme Song

Credits:

• Audio Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez, and we’ve got an urgent episode for y’all today that underscores the bleak reality and the abject cruelty of the Trump administration’s mass incarceration and deportation campaign, and what you can do to support the people, families, and communities that are being ripped apart by it. As we’ve discussed many times on this show, and as we’ve been reporting at the real news, while President Trump and the MAGA Wright have repeatedly claimed that they are targeting immigrants who are violent criminals and threats to public safety, the so- called worst of the worst, the cold statistical reality is that the vast majority of people being swept up and brutalized in this fascist campaign are people with no criminal conviction whatsoever and no criminal charges.

At most, they have a civil immigration violation. They are not maniacal murderers and terrorists. They are day laborers supporting their families. Street vendors, gig workers, housekeepers, construction workers, farmers. They are working people like you and me. And even tourists, academics, journalists, and gamers are being swallowed up in the drag net. As Antonio Planas and Rondez Green recently reported in the Baltimore banner, “His family described it as a routine check-in with ICE for Ludovic Mbock, a 38-year-old regional video gaming champion who came to the US from Cameroon legally as a teen and built a life in Oxen Hill. But immigration and customs enforcement in Baltimore arrested him two weeks ago and sent him to detention facilities in Louisiana and Georgia. Mbock’s lawyer and family fear he will soon be deported back to Cameroon where he will not be safe. He’s an openly gay person. He won’t be able to survive in Cameroon,” said Mbock’s lawyer, Edward Neufville.

Cameroon punishes same-sex activity with fines and prison sentences of up to five years. Bach also has no family in Cameroon, said his sister, Diane Sohna, who was born in the US. His arrest has mobilized the gaming community, which has helped raise nearly $100,000 for his legal defense. Newfield has filed a habeas petition challenging Mbock’s arrest. In response, US District Court Judge George L. Russell III ruled that Mbock will remain in custody for 10 days after he requests a bond hearing in immigration court in Hyattsville, which Mbock can attend virtually. To talk about Ludovic Mbock’s case and what it tells us about the reality behind the rhetoric of Trump’s mass deportations, I’m really grateful to be joined on the show today by two guests. First, we are joined by Ludovic’s sister, Diane Sohna, and we are also joined by Nikhil Delahaye, a close friend of Ludovic’s and a fellow gamer.

Thank you both so much for talking to me today. I really appreciate it and I really, really wish we were meeting under less horrifying circumstances. I want to jump right in and ask if you could both tell our audience just a little bit more about who Ludovic is, and then we’ll talk a bit about what has happened to him in the recent weeks.

Nikhil Delahaye:

Yeah. Thanks so much for having us on the show. Just genuinely appreciate the support. And I especially want to give a huge shout out to everyone who has been rallying behind Ludovic. I have been in the greater fighting game community since 2011, 2012, and really being able to see people from truly around the world who all share our hobby of being able to go and play finding games typically in person at tournaments, at hotels, convention centers all around the world, and seeing people really tangibly support and realize the ways our community can be impacted by these policies has really bolstered our faith in a time that has been really trying and extremely difficult. Ludovic has been, he’s always, I always say he is the exemplary example of the sea inviting in community. There are threads on social media of people who encountered Ludovic in tournament, of karaoke room at a tournament, had chances to just talk to him while they’re waiting in line for merchandise or food.

And there are so many stories like that of people who’ve interacted with Ludovic, because Ludwig has been in the fighting game scene for I think even longer than I have, like truly going back to the early 2000s. Even for context, when I went over to Sweden for the Tech and World Tournament Finals, let them know that I was in the Maryland Virginia scene and I said, “Oh, I’m friends with this person, this person and Ludovic, and people from Croatia, people from Lithuania, people from England, from France all knew who Ludovic was. And like, oh yeah, the Chandlee player, Shoe Fighter four, the guy who beat Digo, the guy who beat this, the guy who beat that. ” So all of that, having that experience in January, then coming back in February to this really was like even in the darkest times when we were trying to figure out what we were doing, I knew in my heart that there were people out there if we spread the word that would support because this is someone who’s been and given back to a community for decades.

This is someone who’s been here and really made the lives richer of everyone he’s interacted with for decades. And not to mention the experiences that I’m sure Diane can talk about, but video games were a huge part of his life and were a huge part of his social life. And still, even now, even calling into the facility, we let him know that, “Hey, these troop fighter DLC is coming out. He looks kind of messed up to fight. There’s this tournament that’s coming up. People are probably going to want to see you there. When you get out, let’s see what we can do to make sure we get you back up to tournament speed.” So it’s still something that gives him comfort and hope and still something that binds us all together. And really, I just can’t say enough about the overwhelming amount of support I’ve gotten from members of the fighting and community across the planet and truly has been such a huge help to us, the friends and family who are helping to bring him home.

And then also more directly to the family. I heard people who have known Ludovic of 2005 who immediately have been rallying to his support and who’ve known the family for a long time.

Diane Sohna:

So just to piggyback off what Nikhil said, again, thank you to everybody. When I got the call three weeks ago, I wasn’t expecting this, nor did I think that we’d be able to get this turnout. I always knew my brother was sweet and he was a happy person and everybody loved him, but I didn’t understand the magnitude until this. I mean, this is, of course, like you said, a bad situation, but just seeing the support that he has and the love that he’s receiving, it just amplifies the fact that he is a good person and shows me, being his sister that I’ve known all his life, just opened me up more and be like, “My brother’s really a good person. He doesn’t deserve this. ” He wasn’t meant to be in this situation. As you said earlier, he was doing his regular routine check-in as he always does and didn’t come back out, which hurt everybody deeply.

So as I always say, to know him is to love him. This has proven that he doesn’t deserve this. He’s not a bad person. He was just doing his check-in and just trying to be a noble citizen, mind his business and follow the rules. That’s all he does. He just likes to have a good time, play his games, dance and eat. He could do that all day. He would do that all day. So the fact that he’s not, I know it’s not a great feeling. I know he’s uncomfortable. I know he’s not happy and it makes me and everybody else feel his pain. Of course, we can’t feel where he is, but it’s just aggravating. It’s annoying. It just makes you think that this administration is even worse than what it is when you see it at home in front of your face. But yeah, I’m just at a loss still and it’s been three weeks and we’re just waiting till Friday.

My brothers were born in Cameroon. My mother came here about a year before I was born, so they stayed with my grandmother in Cameroon. From the stories I always heard, my mom always take brothers just like to play video games. All your grandma said this. He goes and play video games. So when I finally met him in 2010, I was like, “All you do is play video games.” And he just told me that’s my escape. That’s just something that I love to do because everybody else was into soccer and stuff like that. He would go to the arcade for … My grandmother just told me a few days ago, he has so many stories of losing Ludovic, but he would just be in the arcade for hours on it. So when he came to America in 2002 with my brothers, they came to leave with us because mom is here.

I have a little sister. Let’s all live as a family and live the American dream. Met him and I was like, “Oh, this is my favorite brother automatically because this is my twin. We’re best buddies, we’re the closest in age and he’s just more relatable. He taught me how to do Dance Dance Revolution, how to play Tecent, how to play his Dreamfighter. We cooked together. He got me so hip to anime movies. And the one movie we love is a zumi and I never watched Japanese or Asian movies.” And we would watch that back to back for hours on it, just counting how many people she would kill. And he would go back home and be like, “Okay, we’re going to go do this also. We did it in street fighter.” I’m like, “I can’t do that, Lucavic. Okay, whatever.” But yeah, he doesn’t do that as a living for a living, but he should.

I didn’t realize how big he was. He’d always say, “Oh, I’m the best player. I’m the best.” I’m like, anybody says that, but he actually is. So kudos to my brother.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and it’s so wild to think that Nikyle, you guys were at a competition, you come back and then you’re facing this horrifying Kafka-esque reality back here in the United States. And I wanted to ask, I know it’s painful, scary to recount, but for folks who are just listening to this and maybe just learning about this story now, could you sort of walk us through the timeline of events as you experienced them from Ludovic going to his check-in to now? Yeah, anything that you’re comfortable sharing just to lay out the timeline and the process since this nightmare began.

Nikhil Delahaye:

Yeah, no, it’s definitely something that has helped to keep notes of each day because it really all tends to blend together. When I say I was in Copenhagen in Sweden, it feels like a lifetime ago, when in reality that was less than five weeks ago. And I remember I specifically went to Copenhagen in Sweden because I’m like, I want to be able to experience what it’s like to not have ambient stress and to be able to forget at least the situation and just be able to see what I guess a functioning society looks like and to come back and immediately be ripped out of that reverie and have to go into essentially survival mode was jarring to the point where I’ve had to describe multiple times, it’s like as soon as I got the news that Ludovic had been detained, it’s like, okay, I have to stop being a person at this point, I have to start being a function because a person is going to be emotionally affected by all of this.

A person is going to allow the government to grind them down, allow the frustrations to get to them. A function is something that the government and the process sees and the powers that be cannot dissuade or cannot move. So I have to be immovable because for the benefit of the family, for the benefit of his friends, for the benefit of Ludovic himself, there needs to be at least one person who is completely resolute and fully focused on what we’re doing. And as soon Diane can explain more of the timeline, but basically on the 17th, he went in at 3:00 PM to his regular check-in. One of our friends dropped him off to the point where, for context, from the 13th, when I saw a lot of it last, we were at a friend’s dinner and he didn’t even mention that he was going in on the 17th because it was such a routine thing he’d done so many times.

And we were talking, he had literally texted me saying, “Yeah, we should have more tech-in sessions at the house.” And I’m like, “Yeah, let’s figure out a timeline.” And then the next text I get on Wednesday after I believe he called you, Diane, was that Ice had picked him up at the facility. And we were all like that. First of all, for us, we didn’t even know that he was going to the facility and we only figured it out much later because of just word had gotten around and Diane had contacted his other friends who eventually contacted me and really just that whole process was like, “Okay, this is the nightmare that I’ve had, literally had nightmares woken up in a cold sweat about in terms of the government has kidnapped one of my friends and/or family.” And it was that moment of, okay, I can either give into the terror of this situation or I can see how I can be of service and help because as much and terror and fear as I’m feeling, I could only imagine from Diane’s perspective and the family’s perspective what they were feeling.

And I wanted to be able to see what I could do to manage as much of that as possible so that they could have space to feel while stuff needed to get done.

Diane Sohna:

I was at work as I am now just going about my day and for some reason, something just made me … iPhone has a thing that where they screen your unknown calls. And I looked down and it said, it was an 800 number and it said Ludovic. And I was like, “Why would he give his number to a credit?” I didn’t know it was, so I just answered. And he said, “Yeah, the collect call from Ludovic.” And I was like, “A collect call. He doesn’t get in trouble. What is this about? ” Piffed it up, answered, he said, “Yeah, I stopped me. ” I said, “Say that again.What do we mean?” He said, “I got me. I’ve been detained.” So from there he was like, “I just need you to call.” He gave me two numbers to call and I was just like, “Okay.” So I hung up the phone and I just called.

And then from there, that friend called Nicole and then since then me and Nicole have just been in unison trying to get things done. I guess his friend dropped him off and waited that from there he was held in Baltimore for that night. The next day he was moved to Louisiana that night. Was it the next day? Yeah. He was moved to Louisiana without us knowing because we were moving diligently, we just figured out that he was no longer … In Baltimore, he called us after the fact before he was moved.

And then from there again, was it less than like 24, maybe 30 hours later, he was moved to Georgia. So since then, we definitely didn’t know about that. That move was very abrupt overnight and uncomfortable from what Ludovic described to us. And I feel terrible that he had to go through it because I know that experience for him was probably one of the worst besides being in Baltimore, so I’m very not happy about that. And then since then, he’s just been in Georgia for the past two weeks and we’ve been now just waiting to get him back.

Nikhil Delahaye:

Yeah. Some of the … In between, basically as soon as I got activated and knew about what was happening, I was like, “We have to secure him a lawyer immediately.” Everyone is shocked. Everyone is scared. Everyone doesn’t know what to do. Everyone was saying, “Okay, do we wait till tomorrow?” I’m like, “They’re going to move him. We need to secure a lawyer immediately.” And basically it was me and my girlfriend and a bunch of other people. We just went, we called the migrant solidarity mutual aid, we called CASA, we called every immigration lawyer that we knew, and we just went down a Google list of every single immigration lawyer in Maryland and called them all at 9:00 PM on, it was like 45 different lawyers we called and only one of them was able to get back to us. And in the time since, after leaving like 45 messages, we’ve only gotten three calls back.

So if we were not able to connect with that lawyer that night on their twenty four seven hotline, we would have been in a significantly worse situation because we were able to connect with the lawyer to file a habeas on … We talked to them on the 18th, he filed the habeas on the 19th. They moved him then on the 19th after the habeas was in effect. So the habeas went into effect at 10:00 AM, at 10:11 AM. The flight, we were able to get confirmation left at 1:00 PM. So we have hard proof they moved him after the habeas was in effect in Maryland. And the habeas in Maryland specifically said, “This petitioner shall not be moved outside of where this court does not have jurisdiction.” So that was the first court order that was violated and we have proof of that. Then a lot of it goes to Louisiana.

We are all trying to scramble because the ice tracker doesn’t update. It takes like 24 hours update. He calls us thankfully because we were able to talk to him and get the numbers.

Then immediately we’re like, “Okay, we need to do everything in terms of a stay of deportation. We need to do everything in terms of reopening his immigration case. We need to do opening everything in terms of being able to secure a Louisiana resource in case they try to under this case.” So really, as soon as he was moved, it was another 24, 48 hours of just we need to call 50 something lawyers. And obviously not all lawyers are created equal during this process. We talked to some good ones, we talked to some not so great ones. And all in my mind, the whole time is like time is passing. I don’t know what they’re doing to him. We don’t know how they’re moving him. We don’t know what they’re planning for him. And the more legislation we can get filed, the harder it becomes for them to violate.

It’s easier for them to violate one court order. It’s hard for them to violate five. So I am operating under the knowledge that they’re going to violate stuff and they’re going to try and cover it their own tracks, but let’s try and make it as difficult as possible during that time period. We had launched the GoFundMe. We were providing daily updates. We still have a huge amount of support and we were like, okay, with this amount of support, we could probably pursue all the legal things we need to and not have to worry about being unable to fight or hitting a wall in that way. It’s just a matter of securing the resources in the right place. So literally right after I was talking to a Louisiana lawyer, had two hours of like, “Okay, we secure the Louisiana lawyer. She’s going to go to the facility, show the habeas.” I then get the notification, they moved him again.

And I’m like, I was so mad. I was so furious because we had just did a mad dash to try and secure Louisiana lawyer. And then it was a solid … Once we got the notification they were going to move him. It was like at 10:00 PM on the 21st, we did not hear from Ludovic for another like 12, 15 hours. We had no idea where he was. He dropped off the tracker. We had people checking the tracker every single hour for any sort of update and for a solid, I think like 12 to 14 hours. It was just, we have no idea where Leatherman is. And we luckily hear from him that night, it was at like 70, 80 PM really late after stressing the whole day and the calling, because we basically had to go and like all the people who track ice flights, we’d be okay from this facility at this time period where the different destinations they could go, because we start cold calling all these different places.

So they’re like, “Okay, there was a flight to Honduras.” We called the Honduras facility, we called the Louisiana, we called every single other flight that could possibly go to in that window, we called all of them. And obviously we’re given the runaround by ice on the phone, we’re not getting any information. All the while time is ticking, we have no idea where he is. And then we finally get the call knowing he’s in Georgia, he lets us know, we’re like, “Okay, at least we know where he is. ” The lawyer is filing to reopen his case on the day after, the lawyer’s filing everything that serves as possible to reopen his case. And the whole time we’re thinking of like, he’s going to move the two places. How are we going to get him back to Maryland and how are we going to make sure his case stays in Maryland?

So we talked to him again throughout the week of the 21st. He let us know, okay, there’s other people from Maryland who are here. They picked up a bunch of people that day with him in Baltimore who were all coming in for routine and they’re just pressuring people to sign deportation papers. And we were able to tell a lot of like, “Whatever you do not sign those papers because they just essentially just were giving up your rights and sending people to God knows where.” And in the times since of the people that they came with, they basically were keep moving people who were planning to fight for themselves. All the people who immediately signed, all the people who immediately who didn’t have the resources to fight, say to Baltimore and then were moved somewhere to be deported. All the people who were choosing to fight, they were moving around to all these different periods in an effort to essentially break their spirit because what Avik told us, the transition from Louisiana to Georgia, they got all rounded up at 10:00 PM and they were put in chains and they were not removed from those chains until 5:00 AM.

So from 10:00 PM to 5:00 AM, they were transferred to buses and claims, both of which within OAC, lot of saw people, elderly people who were chained, elderly people who were denied medical care, elderly people who almost passed out and early died and all the while they’re in chains this entire time on the way to Georgia because they couldn’t just move them in the morning. They had to move them overnight and so there’s no sleep in chain the entire time. And he said the thing that made him sort of laugh was sort of like, this is ridiculous, was that they sat a flight attendant on the plane still gimping this sort of safety instructions in terms of, “Please look at this dropdown.” And it’s like, “We’re in chains. We literally can’t do that. Why are you doing this to cover your own butt?

It’s your job, but look at the context, the situation, what you’re doing right now.” And he sort of laughed with us about that on the phone, but I could tell that really, really affected him. I was like, “That’s slavery shit. Call us way to pay that slavery shit to keep people and change that long and keep them from me able to go to the bathroom or do anything for that long.” So really the timeline once we got Georgia was continuing to push for media, continuing to push for everything else. And then essentially what we had to do in order to make sure he can get the right legal coverage is while he’s gone, reconstruct his light from his apartment. So moving around in that absence of Ludovic to try and find documents, to try and think what would he have done, try and connect with him on the phone through even though monitored call and say, “Where could we find this?

Where could we find that? Where could we find that? ” All the while we are hustling to try to get legal coverage handled. So I’m talking to the lawyer every single day. We’re talking to Congress people, we’re talking to senators, we’re talking to legal resources. I have like four or five other immigration lawyers that I’m talking to you to run everything by and all in different jurisdictions, all different areas that the place they might try to move in. We’re trying to get information in terms of other people who are detained, is there a huge number? And we were able to find like in the time period the Ludovic was detained, there were like 10 other habeas cases that were filed from Baltimore specifically, of all of which were people who were moved. And so I reached out to, in my ACLU context, reached out to all these different contacts, people say, “This cannot fall through the cracks and this cannot happen to anyone again.” And all the while Diane, and from her perspective, is trying to manage the overwhelming amount of grief that comes from someone just being absent and someone just being gone.

And I cannot, from my perspective, I wanted to be able to handle as much of the tactical and tangible stuff as possible because the emotional process of having to navigate this, I wanted to be able to leave for the family and leave for Diane to be able to do on their own time and not feel rushed because unfortunately due to the reality of the immigration process in this country and when someone is detained, you don’t have time to feel. You don’t have time to think, you don’t have time to second guess yourself because literally every single minute counts. There are multiple days in the early days where I was like, “If I delayed by an hour or a minute, we would’ve lost track of lot of it. ” And I thank myself every day that I was essentially having to essentially stress people out, be like, “We have to do stuff right now.” I know that it’s hard, I know that it’s scary, but we have to do things right now.

And that’s the thing that I think I would tell anyone is make sure you can have someone who can be on that pace and at that schedule because unfortunately you don’t have time to go through the process, but Diane could definitely speak more to what the family was going through during that time period.

Diane Sohna:

So family wise, I don’t even know where to start because I’ve never seen my mom in this space. I hate to say this, but it just seems like you’ve lost your child. It’s just that feeling of granted now we know where he is. When she didn’t know where he was, it was just like, you’re just lost. So she just tells me every day I just go to work just to go to work to keep me busy, but she sits at home and she’s literally crying and just crying. And when I went to see her, you can already see that she’s lost 10 pounds. She’s just stressed out and she’s not answering the phone. She doesn’t want to talk to nobody because it’s just overwhelming. So I’m getting all the calls from everybody else that’s, “Hey, where’s your brother?” And I’m like having to retell this a million times over feeling everybody else’s feeling.

And then on top of me having my own life, my own kid and just like all of that, it’s a lot. I tell Anaka all the time, I love him now. I don’t know what I would’ve done without him because this process is literally meant to break you. Like he said, it’s so much that you have to do in this bit of time that it’s impossible. And that’s why they have been able to get away with what they do. They have been now, but they won’t with this one, but it’s still just, it’s a lot. There’s no way to put it, but it’s a lot. And if we’re feeling this, what is he feeling being there? It’s just, it’s overwhelming. It’s scary, it’s exhausting, frustrating, go to sleep every night, just praying that he’s sleeping peacefully as well, but who’s to say?

Maximillian Alvarez:

I really appreciate you both sharing that and my heart just breaks hearing it. And my heart continues to break thinking about all the people, the thousands, tens of thousands of people who are also have been swallowed up into this mass deportation, monstrous machine who don’t have that support, who don’t have people who are able to do what you two and your community have done, what folks on the GoFundMe have been able to do to provide that support. I am so, so grateful that Ludovic has that and I’m so heartbroken that so many others don’t and that even to have that is to still be caught up in a nightmare. It’s just to be kind of keeping pace with this monstrous machine that is trying to break you, as you both rightfully said. And so I really want to just drive home for listeners that this is how it looks.

Don’t wait for it to happen to you and then try to come up with a plan. This is something that you need to plan for and be ready for, and this is the kind of thing you’re going to be up against if and when it comes for you and your family. And I also wanted to just ask a quick basic clarifying note before we kind of wrap up here and talk about where the case stands now and what folks can do to support y’all. But just to really drive this home, and it circles back to what we said in the intro about how Trump claims he’s going after the worst of the worst and yada, yada, yada, Ludovic has committed no crime here, right? He was going for a work permit that he’s been getting routinely and then suddenly the game changes and he’s in chains.

Am I right about that?

Nikhil Delahaye:

Yeah, I would say really the biggest thing that puts the chair on top of all of this is that Ludovic had a supervision order that just allowed him to get a work permit the whole time. He’s had it for decades. And when we were able to file for bond, and yesterday. That is the first time he received the papers saying his supervision order had been revoked. And it was dated not for when he was detained. It was dated for yesterday, which means by their own admission, by when he was detained, his supervision order was not violated. His supervision order was not rescinded. Additionally, to add insult to injury yesterday, he received the papers notifying that he would be transferred away from Baltimore after he’s been in Georgia for two weeks. So those tells us two things. One, they have the capacity to send people documentation, let people know what’s going on.

Two, if you have the right legal protection, they do get notification of when things are filed. And three, there’s a conscious choice there to either not communicate that or communicate a part of that. Because in a process of all this, we’ve reached out to senators and district attorneys, they’ve said their version of the story. That includes, oh, he had this from 2005, not mentioning he had been detained 2008. You’ve been in order of supervision the entire time he’s got a work requirement. It’s not a single violation of that process by their own admission. But they then focus on a habeas was filed on this date. Say deprecation was filed on this date and this date. And it’s like all day all the time. It’s like, okay, so you knew when that was filed because at the time of after moving him, you’re not mentioning the fact that the habeas was filed at this date and you moved him after that.

You’re not mentioning this day of deportation was filed at this date and you moved him again after that. You’re not mentioning the fact that we filed all of these things at this time period. You have confirmation of receipt of them and you’re choosing not to do that. So really just want to stress for all the people is like, the thing that I’ve learned throughout all process is if you stay ready, you don’t have to get ready. I really and truly want people to understand that it is a down to minute to minute thing. And you have to be able to steal yourself to really understand that there’s a lot of this shouldn’t be happening. You don’t have time to think about what should. You don’t have time to think about what would, you don’t have time to think about what could be. You can only think about what is because what is, it is what you can control and what is is what you can do and what is is something tangible they can’t take from you, daft flight you into thinking it doesn’t exist.

And there will be people who make you think that all these legal things like, “Oh, they’re just going to deny them anyway. It’s going to deny them anyway.” All of that builds towards a pattern of behavior and an overall case that helps protect the person, but you are trying to save. And it will be frustrating because it will be very much situations of rules of thee, but not for me, rules of me, but not for me. They get to break whatever they want. They get to do this. They get to do that. And all of it is just tracking your decisions every single day. Write down who you talk to, write down what you did, write down what you learned and track it. We have documents tracking from the beginning of this process and all of that is helping inform the final case in terms of when we sent this, when we received this.

And so never let them tell you they didn’t get something because they get it. Never let them tell you they didn’t see something because they see it. Never let them tell you that, oh, X and Y is impossible. Because the minute a bigger short comes into the pool and says, “Hey, you guys have to listen to this. ” They’ll try to cover their own tracks. But really it is a process. It takes a long time and a lot of resources and a lot of money to get to that point. And it’s a lot of disrespect and a lot of dehumanization and a lot of us really trying to actively break your spirit before you can get to that point. And truly and honestly, I think about all the people who don’t have a community who can rally like this and keeps me up at night because I wish I could do what I did for Ludovic for thousands of people, but I would die in the process.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and I know I only have a few more minutes left with y’all and I wanted to use those minutes to talk about where things stand now and any final messages that you have for listeners about what you all need, what Ludovic needs, what folks can do to get involved and support y’all before we close.

Diane Sohna:

So right now we are just waiting till Friday. We have the bond hearing on Friday to see, hopefully it gets granted and he can be released. The formal release, like Nikal said earlier, we’re still waiting to see if it’ll be immediate over the weekend or on Monday. But the goal is that for Friday we hear good news that he is granted his release. As far as help, we do still have the GoFundMe up. Donations are still being accepted because the legal process does not end even when he returns home. It will be an ongoing battle to make sure he’s fully a full citizen of the United States here. So that can help if you guys want to call representatives to get the word out, any more media to reach out. The more we speak about it, the more it gets heard, the more it’s seen and ICE can get shut down.

Nikhil Delahaye:

Yeah. Really it’s just like my main message to people throughout this whole process is like, Diane and I are not superheroes. We are not like people who were ordained or like special people who were born with a certain set of skills. We are regular people who had to step up to defend someone beloved. And it is so easy to make people like that into heroes. And I really like, that’s not the story here. The story here is like we’re ordinary people who were able to step up because we had to. And for listeners, for anyone who’s in this situation, you will be asked to have to step up in a situation you should never be asked to. And more than anything, if you try to keep your head down and isolate yourself from your community, you will be putting yourself into an exponentially worse situation because we could only have gotten here by the support of wider community, by the support of people willing to give their time and just by talking about it.

So much of what this administrative is doing is trying to isolate people, try to try them against each other and make you feel like there’s no one on your side. We’ve seen in Minnesota, we’ve seen in LA, we’ve seen all these people, there are communities that are rallying to protect their loved ones. And you have to rally to protect your loved ones against a system that is designed to break that. And there is no greater thing that I can say than like you don’t have to wait to be a person who can step up and make a difference. If you have the skillset right now, you can be a person who helps make a huge difference. There is a lawyer out in Minnesota who took one class on habeas cases, he is free 10 people because his track record against the government, he’s like, “I know how to argue this now.” And he’s not an immigration lawyer.

He just stepped up and said like, “I’m a barred lawyer in this state is on people who are being detained.” If we had hundreds of people to do that across the country, we could get some people free. It’s just a matter of people believing and being frankly crazy enough to be like, “Yeah, no, I’m not going to let the powers that be take my loved one from me. ” And more than anything, you don’t have to wait to be a certain type of person. This type of activism, this type of support doesn’t look like being a certain type of person. It means just being a person with a skillset who can set up. And even little things like if you know someone who’s working on this, cooking a meal for them, like being able to watch their kids, being able to do tiny things like that, all add up to people to refuel people to essentially fight a hydro with infinite resources.

And we’re hoping that on Friday we’ll be able to show Ludovic who has his faith rocked in so many different ways, but also the people of Maryland and then like this area that not only can you fight, you can win and you can win conclusively with the power of community. And again, none of this would be possible without the fighting in community, the greater Washington DC community, Maryland, Virginia, all the tons of people who have contributed to this process and really just want to thank everyone who has been a part of telling this story and a part of sharing this story because we wouldn’t have been able to get here to the point where we have a bond hearing scheduled without a lot of people putting in work. And I pray and I hope that no one I know ever has to go through this ever because it truly breaks something inside you as a person.

It doesn’t mean it can’t be fixed, but it means that there’s a lot of effort there and really and truly I just want to just impart to people as like, it seems like an abstract nightmare when it’s on the news. It seems like an abstract nightmare when you hear about it and you can maybe keep your head down from it and you can mainly hide from it. Some people might be able to, but if you don’t get ready for the possibility of it happening, you will not be able to keep up and you lose track of people. Has told us and talked to us about people who inside that who have been there for a year, people who’ve been there for two years, people who get sent down to Georgia and have their case transferred and get sent to a judge who denies every single bond order and they just languish there.

And the thing that really just fills my heart is like even in light of it being in the worst situation possible, he is still thinking of ways to help these people. He is still thinking of ways with the people and the people he’s connecting with, the people he’s showing kindness to, that even at essentially their rock bottom, he is finding ways to keep up their spirit and it’s find a way to be able to help them like he has been helped. And if lot of it can do that for people who are being detained, who are having their rights violated, then it is up to us, the people on the outside to do absolutely everything we can, to advocate, to make sure we bring not just some of them, but bring all of them home and to make sure this never happens to anyone ever again.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to thank our guests, Diane Sohna, the sister of Ludovic Mbock, who is currently being detained and facing deportation, and Nikhil Delahaye, a close friend of Ludovic and a fellow gamer. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see y’all back here next time for another episode of Working People. And in the meantime, please go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network across our YouTube channel, our podcast feeds, our website, and our social media pages, and help us do more work like this by going to the realnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you guys, it really makes a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves, take care of each other. Solidarity forever.

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