ICE wants to boot NJ woman even though she’s the star witness in her own stabbing

An undocumented New Jersey woman allegedly attacked last year by her knife-wielding ex-boyfriend may now get deported herself — and advocates worry that will torpedo the case against her would-be killer.

Cesy Ramos, a 51-year-old mom of two originally from Honduras, suffered four stab wounds during a brutal Jan. 31, 2024, assault at the hands of her 42-year-old attacker, Cristian Castro-Rosa of Elizabeth, according to a police complaint.

Authorities found her lying in a pool of blood at Castro-Rosa’s South Park Street home and arrested her alleged assailant, whom they later charged with first-degree attempted murder, aggravated assault and other crimes.

But as Castro-Rosa sits behind bars at the Hudson County Correctional Center ahead of his trial, Ramos has found herself in legal hot water, too.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents seized her on April 5 after an unrelated court hearing, according to advocates handling her case. And Ramos, who is in the country illegally, has been held at the Elizabeth Detention Center ever since.

Should the federal government move to deport her, they said, it could kneecap prosecutors’ attempts to hold Castro-Rosa accountable for the heinous deed.

“That’s what the [Union County] prosecutor has intimated to us … they have related that she is crucial to the prosecution of the defendant,” said Steven Sacco, a supervising attorney with the American Friends Service Committee, a Philadelphia-based social justice organization.

The prosecutor’s office declined to comment Thursday, saying in an email that the case is an “open criminal matter currently pending before the court.”

But Laura Sutnick, a criminal defense lawyer and former president of the Bergen County Bar Association, agreed that the case would likely fall apart without its star witness.

“There’s no way to prove the case without her testimony,” she said. “In so many situations, the only way to tell the jury the story of what happened is to have somebody who was there describe what happened.”

The turn of events has left Ramos, who has never committed a crime in her two decades living in the United States, in a state of shock, her representatives said.

“She is really struggling with the aftermath of the attack,” Maritza Darch-Escuderos, a Department of Justice-accredited representative who also works with the group, told The Jersey Vindicator this week.

“Emotionally, this is really, really re-traumatizing — the fact that somebody who has no criminal background has ended up in a detention center,” she said. “That’s really what’s making her actual physical condition worse.”

In a statement sent through Darch-Escuderos, Ramos said her estranged husband is to blame for her plight. He accused her of violating a restraining order she said she didn’t know existed. ICE seized her after the initial hearing.

“After being detained for over a week, I’ve had time to reflect in solitude,” she said. “It’s painful to realize that ICE acted faster to detain me based on a lie from my former abuser than the system did to bring justice against the person who stabbed me.”

Sacco buttressed this, saying the facts “speak for themselves.”

“You have a woman who has lived in the United States for 20 years,” Sacco said. “She has a U.S. citizen daughter, she’s obviously law-abiding in every way you can ask a person to be, and she’s been the victim of a heinous crime — and the federal government is punishing her for it.”

In a Thursday statement, an ICE spokesperson said Ramos is being “detained in [Elizabeth] pending removal from the United States, and ICE is currently reviewing her case.” 

“All aliens in violation of U.S. immigration law may be subject to arrest, detention and, if found removable by final order, removed from the U.S., regardless of nationality.”

‘Cristian Castro, made me this’

Authorities arrested Castro-Rosa in January 2024 after officers from the Elizabeth Police Department responded to a domestic violence call on South Park Street, according to the complaint against him.

Officers arrived at about 9:30 that night, and a witness quickly flagged them down and said Ramos and Castro-Rosa got into a fight on the second floor.

After a quick investigation, officers found the badly wounded Ramos lying in a pool of her own blood inside a third-floor apartment with a “large laceration” decorating her neck, the complaint said.

As authorities worked to save her, she told them it was her beau who’d left her in such a state.

“The victim spontaneously uttered, ‘Christian Castro, made me this,’” police wrote in their affidavit.

Two witnesses who lived with the couple told investigators Castro-Rosa stabbed Ramos over and over after an argument about money erupted into violence. Officers found a bloody serrated knife in the kitchen sink.

One of the witnesses lunged for Castro-Rosa in an attempt to wrestle the knife away, and both told police Castro-Rosa stabbed himself in the neck with the knife during the scrum.

Then he changed his shirt, mopped up some of the blood, called the cops and told them Ramos attacked him, according to the complaint.

Authorities arrested Castro-Rosa and brought Ramos to a local hospital, where she was treated for four puncture wounds in her neck, arrest documents said.

Darch-Escuderos said the Union County Prosecutor’s Office later issued Ramos a certification for a U visa, which, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, is a document noting that a victim has been helpful in the investigation or prosecution of a crime.

If federal immigration authorities decide to grant Ramos the visa, she could temporarily stay in the country while helping the police — and that could translate to eventual lawful permanent resident status, according to the department’s website.

ICE detainment

Despite the open path to legal residency, things kept deteriorating in the wake of the attack.

Ramos’ estranged husband, from whom she’s been separated since 2020, filed a temporary restraining order against her for reasons that remain unclear.

On April 4, he recorded her walking through a local park near his home and sent it to authorities as evidence that she’d violated the order, Darch-Escuderos said.

Cops arrested her outside a nearby beauty salon and charged her with violating the restraining order, trespassing and theft, according to ICE.

Darch-Escuderos said Ramos desperately wants to see her two daughters, ages 14 and 23, both of whom live with her husband. But she never violated the restraining order, she said. 

Still, federal agents detained her after the hearing because of a 2005 self-deportation order Ramos initially obeyed before illegally returning to the country later that year, she added. 

Ramos was still on ICE’s radar because she had failed to follow the proper procedures 20 years ago, which included getting her passport stamped at the American embassy in Honduras as proof that she’d self-deported, Darch-Escuderos said.

The agency believed she’d simply ignored the order and reinstated it when agents took her into custody, Sacco added.

In a statement, an ICE spokesperson said a judge ordered Ramos deported in February 2005, and she was removed in late March. 

But the spokesperson ignored questions about Ramos’ status as the star witness in an attempted murder, the U visa certification and when her next deportation hearing would be. 

“ICE officers make enforcement decisions on a case-by-case basis in a professional and responsible manner informed by their experience as law enforcement officers,” the statement said. 

Both Darch-Escuderos and Sacco accused the government of acting as a weapon on behalf of those who victimized Ramos.

“Her abuser is the person who put her into ICE’s hands two weeks ago, and the federal government’s cooperating essentially — fulfilling that abuser’s wishes, which is to make her suffer,” Sacco said.

“This is using the state as an extension of domestic violence.”