The Colombian cleaner at the centre of a legal row that led to the resignation of the immigration minister Mark Harper has been arrested by border police while waiting at a register office for her daughter's wedding to begin, the Guardian has learned.

Isabella Acevedo was detained by immigration enforcement officials on Friday afternoon at Haringey town hall in north London moments before her daughter was due to be married, according to others present, before being forcibly marched to a van and driven away.

Acevedo had worked as Harper's cleaner for seven years until February, when the then immigration minister discovered she did not, as he had believed, have leave to remain in the UK.

Harper, who had been responsible for the controversial "go home" adverts on vans urging illegal immigrants to leave Britain and was at the time steering an immigration bill through parliament that requires employers to check the status of their staff, resigned from his post.

He was reappointed to the government in this week's reshuffle as a junior minister at the Department for Work and Pensions. He did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Acevedo was waiting for her daughter to enter for the marriage ceremony when about 15 immigration officers and a small number of regular police burst in, according to Trenton Oldfield, a family friend who was present. Oldfield, a publisher and campaigner, successfully resisted deportation to Australia after being arrested for jumping into the Thames to disrupt the 2012 university boat race.

"[The officers] swept into the room when we were just about to start the ceremony," he said. "We don't know where they came from. They must have been waiting in the building."

Acevedo was "very quickly" taken away, he said, along with her brother, while the bride and groom were questioned before being told by the officers that the ceremony could not go ahead because of an alleged discrepancy in their paperwork. Registrars later said they were happy that the couples' papers were in order and proceeded with the ceremony, though without Acevedo present.

Mobile phone footage taken by Oldfield shows Acevedo sitting in the building's lobby surrounded by four uniformed officers and watched by two others. One of the officers attempted to stop him filming, saying: "If you film anything we will seize your phone to use as evidence, do you understand that?" Oldfield repeatedly asks the officer to specify under which law he can prevent him filming, before the officer appears to reach for the phone to compel him to stop.

Acevedo had been paid £30 a week by Harper for four hours of cleaning and ironing at his Westminster flat. He claimed most of this back from his parliamentary expenses, a total of more than £2,000 over the seven years she worked for him.

In his resignation letter to David Cameron, Harper said he had checked Acevedo's status when he hired her in 2007 but it was only when he asked the Home Office to confirm her legal status that he discovered she did not, as he had thought, have indefinite leave to remain.

A spokeswoman for the Home Office, which oversees immigration enforcement, said the department never comments on individual cases.