TROY — On May 29, Dalila Yeend was driving past Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with her two children on her way to Friendly’s for dinner when she rolled through a stop sign.

Now she faces the threat of being deported to a country of which she has almost no memory and being separated from her two children, who are both American citizens.

Yeend’s attorney, Siana McLean, questioned why the 35-year-old has for almost a month been kept in federal detention, rather than released with conditions such as an ankle monitor.

“I’m concerned that we’re detaining a mother of young American citizens, especially when she’s cooperating,” McLean said.

Yeend, who was born in Australia, has spent the past four weeks in a federal detention facility for illegal immigrants in Batavia. She is in a single unit with about 60 other women from around the world, most of whom do not speak English. From what she knows, she is the only one with small children.

A survivor of domestic abuse, Yeend says she spends most days worrying about her kids, an 11-year-old girl and a nine-year-old son with special needs. Every few days, immigration officers come and remove those scheduled for deportation, usually without warning and often in the middle of the night, Yeend said.

“We wake up and we just don’t see their faces again,” she said Thursday in a video chat with the Times Union. “We’re not given any information; no one knows what’s going on.”

Yeend’s story highlights the complicated wrinkles of the American immigration system, especially for those that have deep connections with their adopted home.

Yeend’s mother, Monique de Latour, brought her to the United States 18 years ago on a New Zealand passport. De Latour, an artist, was applying to become a permanent resident. At the time she was dating Gil Scott-Heron, the late soul musician, author and artist.

Yeend was at the time of her arrival 17, which made her a dependent under her mother’s application. But de Latour said a shady immigration lawyer misled the family and stole thousands of dollars from them.

As her mother began another petition, Yeend became an adult and was well on her way to making a life in Troy, getting married and having two children. That meant she needed to make her own application to stay in the country.

Her time in Troy wasn’t perfect. Yeend was arrested twice, once for criminal mischief and once as part of a large Rensselaer County investigation into welfare fraud, according to public records. Yeend fought the charges, which were dropped.

According to her current attorney, she made a green card application, working with an attorney doing pro bono work out of Buffalo. In the middle of the process, that attorney decided to stop practicing in that court and Yeend was once again left adrift.

She traveled to Buffalo several times to make her court dates, but the court told her she needed an attorney — something she couldn’t afford. The court told her several times to find one. In 2015, the court told her she would be receiving further paperwork in the mail. She thought it was the next step in her application process. Instead, it was paperwork notifying her that she would be deported.

ICE agents came to her home and told her they were starting deportation proceedings. She was required to check in every week with an ICE agent. Yeend, who had sole custody of the children after an incident of domestic violence, says the first agent she worked with was hostile to her, telling her she couldn’t bring her children to the check-ins and that he was going to deport her and turn her children over to her allegedly abusive husband.

An ICE spokesman did not return several calls seeking comment on Yeend’s case.

A new agent eventually took over her supervision and reduced the number of times Yeend was required to check in to once every few months. She was taking her son to various medical appointments and got him into a special school in Albany that would help with his health issues.

Then she rolled through a stop sign.

The Troy police officer arrested her and charged her with driving without a license. (Undocumented immigrants cannot hold licenses in New York.) She was held overnight in city lockup. In the morning, a judge released her on her own recognizance. But police held onto her for about another hour, she said, just long enough for an ICE agent to pick her up. The arrest warrant was signed by the first ICE agent that Yeend had viewed as hostile, not the one she had more recently been checking in with, she said.

A Troy police spokesman did not know the details of Yeend's case but said the city police department will hold a person if it has a warrant from another agency.

She was taken to Albany County jail and said she was placed on suicide watch. Yeend, who has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, said she wasn’t given her normal medications during that time. After two days, she was transferred to the federal holding center in Batavia. On June 26, she received word that her request to be released from Batavia pending a hearing was denied.

Since she was arrested, her children have bounced from house to house, staying with family members. She hasn’t told her nine-year-old son, Taquan, exactly what happened — he doesn’t handle change well, she said. Her 11-year-old daughter, Savannah, understands and wants to visit but is withdrawing and becoming more reclusive, Yeend said. Her mother moved up from South Carolina a few days after she was arrested. Contact with the outside world has been sporadic: In-person visits at the detention center only last an hour and video chats cost 20 cents a minute and automatically hang up every 15 minutes.

Her attorney says Yeend has applied for and received approval for an I-360 petition, which allows immigrants who are abused by American citizens to receive permanent resident status. All that is holding her up, however, is the previous deportation order for the failed green card application.

Yeend says she doesn’t know if she’ll receive a hearing on the matter, or if she’ll simply be deported. If she is removed, she'll be sent to New Zealand because that's the passport her mother used to bring her to the United States.

For her part, Yeend says wherever she ends up, she wants to be with her children. Savannah has an American passport, but Taquan does not.

“I don’t have any memory of New Zealand,” she said. “I’ve been in America longer than I was there.”