A Utah family’s Colorado nightmare moved closer to a happy ending Thursday. A $25,000 bond was approved for violinist John Shin, who had been picked up by Homeland Security agents in Colorado Springs on Aug. 17. He has been facing possible deportation at the Denver Contract Detention Facility in Aurora ever since.

“Right now, I feel elated, because we believe that any minute now, he is going to be released,” Shin’s wife, Danae Snow, told The Denver Gazette a few hours earlier while she was driving to the Salt Lake City airport in anticipation of his release.

“But it’s probably been the hardest two weeks of my life.”

Shin was released at around 5 p.m., with a follow-up hearing to be held next week in Salt Lake City.

Shin’s attorney, Adam Crayk, said the process is only just beginning for his client. But also that his team will be applying for a green card and, eventually, will move to terminate all deportation proceedings against him.

“Candidly, he really is not the type that we should be wasting time or resources on in immigration court,” Crayk said.

Shin, 37, came to the United States as a child with his father on a legal tourist, then a student visa, Snow said. Shin earned his master’s degree through the University of Utah Music Program while under protections provided by DACA, which was enacted into law in 2012. President Trump ended DACA protections for newly arriving immigrants in 2017, but current recipients can continue to renew their status and work permits. 

In 2019, shortly after his father died of brain cancer, Shin was arrested for impaired driving. 

“John was not coping in a healthy way at that time, and he made one horrible mistake,” his wife said. “But I feel like the overall impact of his life and his character should matter as well. He came here legally. He has stayed here legally up until that point. And then with our marriage, we have every reason to believe that he deserves to be here.”

The couple, both musicians and friends since their childhoods in Utah, got married in 2021. That made Shin both stepfather to and provider for Snow’s two children, now 17 and 12.

“What I would want people to know is that we’re a family who sends out Christmas cards, and we wear matching pajamas,” Snow said. “This isn’t someone who is a danger to our community.”

Shin is a violinist who has played with Ballet West and as a substitute with the Utah Symphony, among many other arts groups. Most gig artists from musicians to actors work from job to job and accept whatever side jobs and income opportunities come their way. Snow was laid off from her software job during the pandemic. Shin’s performance opportunities similarly dried up. But the couple is required to maintain a financial threshold to support Shin’s bid for legal status through an I-130 visa – the path toward securing a green card for Shin based on his wife’s citizenship.

Which is how his unusual story took him to Colorado Springs last month.

“With COVID, a lot of the music opportunities dried up for everyone,” said Snow. “So it became really difficult for us to make ends meet with music freelancing. So John took on a side job in telecom doing integrations in cell towers for a few days a week. That job went really well, and he enjoyed it, so he’s been doing both that and music since 2020.

“Last month, when he was in Colorado, he was actually doing installs at Fort Carson – and he was picked up while he was doing work on the base.”

It was a scene out of a bad horror movie, said Denver musician Shana Kirk, who did not know Shin but jumped in to help as soon as she heard of his arrest.

“When he badged into Fort Carson, they said there was a problem with his background check and they would need to further investigate,” she said. “So he went back to his hotel to wait for permission to come back on base. A couple of hours later, Homeland Security agents disguised as project workers called him and said, ‘We’re ready to take you back to the job.’ But instead of taking him back on base, they detained him in a van and brought him straight to the detention facility in Aurora.”

At his initial court hearing, the government argued that Shin’s detention was justified by his impairment arrest, which they said invalidated his DACA protections, a position that is certainly headed for the courts. Snow emphasizes that Shin fully resolved all requirements of his driving conviction back in 2019. But the official position of the Department of Homeland Security is that the family has had six years to protect Shin’s legal status since his conviction, but has not.

According to reporting by Colorado Public Radio, roughly 1,250 people have been detained at the Aurora facility since the Trump administration’s promised crackdown on illegal immigration. Of them, 395 have criminal records and 862 do not.

“My attorney is telling us that ICE’s directive is to arrest everyone,” Snow said. “He is saying that it is no longer a priority that they be criminals. They are now looking at every single person who has any kind of immigration status, and they have a very high quota that is only increasing. And so honestly, the danger to our community is high because they are looking at everyone at this point.”

While her family’s world has been crashing around her since Shin’s arrest, Snow has been sustained by an outpouring of support from Colorado musicians, teachers and other concerned citizens. A GoFundMe quickly raised $80,000 for legal expenses. Kirk and other members of the Denver Area Music Teachers Association stepped up to lend support on the ground.

“It is absolutely incredible,” said Snow. “I am just floored and amazed and so grateful. The power of the music community is unmatched. I met so many incredible people while I was out there. We started as strangers, but now we’re family.”

Kirk said the minute she heard that a fellow musician from another state had been picked up here in Colorado, she had to do something.

“We found a place for the wife and kids to stay while the bond hearing was going on,” Kirk said.  We found somebody to help with transportation – all of the little things.” That picked up when Snow had to return to Utah to focus on the start of her children’s new school years.

On Thursday, Kirk and several other members of her group were holding a vigil at the Aurora detention center, intent on staying until Shin’s release. Why?

“Well, because his case could have been a lot of people’s cases,” she said.

“And when you consider that we are holding all these people at facilities across the country at a cost to U.S. taxpayers of something like $200 a day, that adds up to a lot of money. Meanwhile, they’re not working when they could be working. They’re not with their families, when they could be taking care of their families.

“It’s all just very, very deeply disturbing.”