The mother of a 19-year-old autistic man who walked away from his Plainfield home in his pajama bottoms on Jan. 24 is clinging to the hope that her son is still alive.
Stephanie Senior says ICE agents were in the city that day, so it’s possible that they may have mistakenly picked up her son, Connor Oldfield, after he left the house around 1:15 p.m.
“He’s got to be somewhere,” Senior said, adding that her son was not carrying ID with him. “He’s either with ICE or with someone.”
Senior, who along with friends and family has been searching for her son for 11 days, says ICE was in the neighborhood that Saturday. She said it’s possible her son got swept up in an ICE raid, and without ID, is locked up somewhere.
She said the Plainfield police reached out to ICE, but they have no record of Oldfield. ICE did not respond to an inquiry by NJ Advance Media on Tuesday.
“What concerns me is they’ve arrested so many people, my son may not be in the database yet,” she said. ICE’s online detainee locator system has been the subject of criticism for years by relatives of those detained, immigrants’ rights groups and detainee’s lawyers for being inaccurate and taking a long time to update.
Plainfield Police Director James Abney did not respond to repeated requests to provide an update on the case.
ICE’s presence in Plainfield prompted a group of high school students to stage a small protest at City Hall on Tuesday. An estimated 50 to 100 students at three public high schools in Plainfield walked out of class at 11 a.m. to protest ICE operations in the city.
Students marched to the steps of City Hall in a demonstration. “The message was ICE is not welcome in Plainfield, not welcome in New Jersey, and not welcome in America,” said Dani Garcia, 17, a senior at Plainfield Academy for Arts and Advanced Studies.
Garcia said Plainfield Mayor Adrian O. Mapp spoke to the students and assured them that city police were not working with ICE agents. Mapp later declined a request to be interviewed by NJ Advance Media or to release a statement.
Senior said Oldfield is on the autism spectrum but is verbal. He was home alone on the afternoon of Saturday, Jan. 24, which she said is not unusual. She said her son had no history of wandering, and there had been no argument or family strife that would prompt him to leave.
“He’s a homebody,” she said. “He’s been home alone many times.”
Senior came home and reported her son missing to Plainfield police around 3:30 p.m. She began searching for him that night, and has been looking for him ever since.
Oldfield disappeared the day before a heavy snowstorm blanketed the state and led to temporary suspensions of bus and train service. The state has been in a deep freeze ever since, with overnight lows hovering in the teens.
Oldfield was wearing distinctive yellow, black and grey pajama bottoms and a grey zip-up coat. He is 5-foot, 8-inches tall and weighs 165 pounds, has black hair and brown eyes.
Plainfield police asked residents to check their home surveillance cameras. Senior said the police told her that a couple of clips showed her son running in the area around Dewitt D. Barlow Elementary School, a short distance from Oldfield’s home on Watson Avenue.
Over the weekend, Senior was part of a community search party that canvassed homes and businesses in Plainfield and surrounding towns. But so far, there have been no solid leads, she said.
Volunteers have checked shelters, hotels and churches, bus and train stations, she said.