Canadian 'American Pie' actress, held by ICE for 12 days, is finally home

Theresa Braine, New York Daily News on Mar 17, 2025

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Canadian businesswoman and former actress Jasmine Moony, held in ICE detention for 12 days while trying to procure a new work visa, spoke out over the weekend after finally arriving home.

“I’m still, to be honest, really processing everything,” she told waiting reporters at Vancouver International Airport, according to CTV News. “I haven’t slept in a while and haven’t eaten proper food in a while, so I’m just really going through the motions.”

The 35-year-old founder of the Los Angeles-based Holy! Water wellness brand, who also appeared briefly in “American Pie Presents: The Book of Love,” said she was never really told why she was held, and didn’t know how she’d gotten released.

“No one told me anything. Not once,” Mooney said of ICE. “I still don’t even know how I’m home. My friends and my family and the media are the reason, I think, that I’m home.”

Her troubles began when she learned while visiting Vancouver that her three-year work visa had been revoked “because I didn’t have a proper letterhead on my paperwork,” Mooney told San Diego’s KGTV-TV. She decided to get a new one the way she had gotten the first: by showing up at the border in San Ysidro, California, with paperwork documenting her new job.

What happened next was something she wouldn’t have imagined in “a million years,” she told CTV News. Officials not only rejected her visa but also threw her into a series of holding centers, shuffling her and a slew of other women among various facilities across the Southwest, in “inhumane” conditions, instead of letting her return to Mexico or fly home to Canada.

“I was put in a cell, and I had to sleep on a mat with no blanket, no pillow, with an aluminum foil wrapped over my body like a dead body for two and a half days,” Mooney told KGTV of her three days at the Otay Mesa Detention Center.

A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesperson said Mooney had been detained March 3 for lack of proper documentation, in accordance with an executive order signed by President Donald Trump.

Despite her experience, Mooney knew she had it better than most other woman in detention, at least one of whom had been there for 10 months, she told CTV News. Many of them had not yet spoken to a caseworker, her father, Stephen Mooney, told CBC News.

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