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A Texas immigration judge has ordered Kaitlyn Tracey, a 33-year-old Canadian woman, to be deported back to Canada after she was arrested for assaulting a teenager on a New Jersey boardwalk during Fourth of July weekend. The deportation came swiftly, with the judge issuing the order even before Tracey entered a guilty plea in the criminal case stemming from the July 3 incident at Point Pleasant Beach.
Tracey, who lived in Asbury Park, New Jersey, approached a group of four teenagers on the boardwalk while recording them on her phone. According to court documents and police reports, she yelled at two of the teens who were wearing sweatpants with the words “Trump” and “ICE” emblazoned on them. The confrontation escalated when Tracey struck one of the girls, hitting her across the face and body with an open hand in what surveillance video captured in full.
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The incident, though it left the teen uninjured, sparked widespread attention online after video of the encounter went viral. Police identified Tracey as the suspect and secured an arrest warrant. She turned herself in to authorities on July 13, a week after the assault took place. She was initially charged with endangering the welfare of a child, simple assault, harassment, and obstruction.
The case took a striking turn regarding Tracey’s immigration status. Authorities discovered that she had overstayed her visa by nearly a year. According to the Department of Homeland Security, Tracey entered the United States in April 2024 on a passport with authorization to remain through September 6, 2024. She never left. The DHS subsequently dubbed her the “maple leaf menace” in a social media statement, declaring she “has no business being in our country.”
From the Ocean County jail, Tracey was transferred to Delaney Hall, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in Newark that has become a focal point of immigration enforcement under the current administration. A Texas immigration judge then ordered her deportation, determining that she should be removed from the country. The banishment was described by the judge as likely to last “for a very long time.”
Her deportation order came before she resolved the criminal charges in New Jersey. In a recent court hearing conducted by phone from a Texas ICE facility, Tracey entered a guilty plea to one count of simple assault, a misdemeanor. According to reports of the hearing, her defense attorney, Francis Hodgson, attempted to downplay the severity of the incident. Hodgson described Tracey as having “taken responsibility for her role in it” and characterized the altercation as “a reasonable judgment, consistent with other similar-type matters that happen every day during the summer on this boardwalk.”
The victim’s family appeared to accept the plea agreement. In a victim impact statement read aloud in the courtroom, the girl’s parents expressed gratitude that the incident had been documented on camera and video. They noted that they belonged to immigrant families and were proud of their country and its independence. Tracey was sentenced to one day behind bars but received credit for time already served.
Her husband, Matthew Geroni, an American citizen who describes himself on social media as the “Clown of Asbury Park” and the “Jester of the Jersey Shore,” had previously posted tearful appeals on TikTok pleading for help to get his wife released from ICE custody. He created a GoFundMe page seeking donations for her legal defense, but it was removed after being mass-reported by what he claimed was a Facebook group of Trump supporters. A fundraiser was later moved to another platform.
Notably, Geroni did not mention the assault allegations in his public appeals for help. Instead, he focused on portraying his wife as a victim of the detention system, complaining about what he described as “horrible” conditions at Delaney Hall. He was absent from the courtroom during her criminal sentencing hearing.
Tracey will now be transported back to Canada, though the exact timeline and method remain unclear. Immigration officials transferred her from the Newark facility to ICE’s processing center in Laredo, Texas, located just minutes from Laredo International Airport. The swift nature of both her criminal conviction and immigration deportation order has made the case one of the most widely discussed of 2026 in New Jersey, drawing national attention to immigration enforcement and questions about how such incidents are handled.