NEWARK,USA -- Sharon Nyantekyi was an enthusiastic student of American politics at Rutgers University, until she became a victim of it.

Nyantekyi's recent 21-day odyssey through state immigration detention facilities transformed this straight-A honors student from dreaming of a job working for The Department of Homeland Security into working on behalf of those caught in its grip.

"It was horrible, horrible. The worst experience of my life, hands down," she said Wednesday on the Rutgers Newark campus.

Nyantekyi, a native of Ghana, went to an immigration hearing Feb. 16 in Newark, her husband Mark Anane, by her side. She was so confident her green card application would be approved that she bought an outfit for the occasion and got her hair done. Her husband brought along his camera. They planned to celebrate by going out to lunch afterward.

Instead, she was handcuffed and taken in shackles to the Middlesex County Adult Correction Center in North Brunswick. Unaware of the charges against her, Nyantekyi said she ended that day lying on the floor of a jail cell in a fetal position, sobbing.

"I was hysterical," she said.

Nyantekyi, 23, said she was brought to New Jersey by her grandmother from Ghana as a child, to join her mother, already living here. Raised in Woodbridge from first grade through high school, Nyantekyi never realized she was undocumented until she asked her mother for the necessary documents to apply for a learner's permit as a teenager. Her mother confessed that Sharon had been brought to America using a visa issued to a cousin.

"I was just devastated," Nyantekyi said.

Her mother, guilt-ridden, "took desperate measures," said Nyantekyi. In 1999, she paid a man claiming to be an immigration lawyer $3,500 to fix their paperwork by claiming they were refugees from war-torn Sierra Leone, Nyantekyi said.

When Nyantekyi found out, she urged her mother not to go through with the ruse. They asked the man to withdraw the application, Nyantekyi said; but she did not find out till she went to get her green card in February that the false papers had been filed -- and denied by immigration authorities. A final order of deportation to Africa had been issued in absentia against her and her mother.

In the Middlesex County Jail, Nyantekyi said she was housed with the female criminal population and subjected to horrors beyond her comprehension, including verbal abuse and physical and sexual threats by inmates.

Those in custody for immigration violations are classified as administrative detainees, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement encourages detention facilities to keep them separated from the general inmate population.

Edward Cicchi , the Middlesex County jail warden, said Wednesday that's not always possible.

"When we have females we don't have a separate spot to put them, so they're in with the general population," he said. Cicchi said that although he could not discuss immigration detainees under ICE rules, he became aware of Nyantekyi's situation and transferred her to protective custody in solitary confinement.

"I'm confident we treated this girl fairly," he said.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not return phone calls and e-mails requesting comment.

Meanwhile, her husband and family members worked to get Nyantekyi released. They contacted her professors at Rutgers, who quickly came to her defense, writing letters to the immigration court to vouch for her character and requesting her release.

"I didn't even know she was an immigrant, she has no accent. She's married to an American citizen. She's an honors student," said Robert Saunders, an assistant professor of political science at Rutgers. "She applied for a green card because she wanted to work for the American government some day. Instead, they led her away in shackles and put her in solitary confinement."

The letters helped get Nyantekyi transferred to an ICE detention facility in Elizabeth, where she met other detainees whose stories made her feel her experience was "a walk in the park," she said. The women she heard crying each night as the officers came to remove them for deportation influenced her decision to devote herself to helping them.

"I believe this country seeks to do good, but there's a breakdown somewhere in the system," she said. "The state of panic our government went into after 9/11 has been channeled toward the wrong people."

Nyantekyi was finally released on March 9 but still faces a deportation hearing on May 9.

The following week, she is supposed to graduate from Rutgers.