ThinkProgress
By Esther Lee
February 2, 2016
A
32-year-old undocumented mother, who was granted temporary deportation
reprieve under President Obama’s 2012 executive action known as the
Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, was deported to Mexico after she tried to
reenter the country legally with an immigration document allowing her to
travel abroad to visit an ailing family member.
Lesly
Sophia Cortez-Martinez, who has three young U.S. citizen children, was
on her way back from Mexico through the Chicago O’Hare International
Airport this week when
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents prevented her from leaving
the airport. As a DACA beneficiary, Cortez-Martinez was allowed to apply
for advance parole, which allows some immigrants to travel out of and
reenter the United States under certain circumstances
for education, business, or a death in the family.
As
Cortez-Martinez reentered the United States on Monday night, however,
agents saw in the immigration system that she had a prior deportation
removal order from 2004.
According to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services
(USCIS) website, the government cannot issue an advance parole document
if an applicant is “in exclusion, deportation, removal, or rescission
proceedings.”
Cortez-Martinez
insisted that she didn’t know about the old removal order, explaining
that she went to Mexico for a death in the family and returned to the
U.S. without
documents, her lawyer Mony Ruiz-Velasco explained to ThinkProgress a
day before Cortez-Martinez was deported.
“I
feel pretty certain that she would not have traveled outside the
country — obviously she’s been here so long, she wasn’t going to risk
that — her understanding was
that they approved her request meaning that she’s eligible to travel,”
Ruiz-Velasco said.
Although
Ruiz-Velasco filed an emergency stay of removal, Cortez-Martinez was
deported back to the country that she hasn’t lived in since she was a
teenager.
Her ties are all here in the United States.
“She’s
lived here in the United States since she was 15 years old,”
Ruiz-Velasco said. “She has no way of coming back to the United States,
so she would be permanently
separated from her family. Her husband has DACA so he can’t just travel
in and out [of the country] and her children are all little, and
they’re U.S. citizens. Her ties are all here in the United States.”
Since
he took office, President Obama has insisted that his administration
would go after “felons, not families,” a refrain based on the idea that
immigration officials
would dedicate federal resources to prioritizing the detention and
deportation of immigrants with criminal violations, rather than
undocumented children or parents with long-standing U.S. ties. Obama’s DACA initiative has also helped divert federal resources
to pass over undocumented immigrants who were brought to the country as
young children and have since maintained clean records.
But
according to Tania Unzueta, an organizer with the immigrant advocacy
group Not1More Campaign, Cortez-Martinez’s case proves that’s not always
the case. Cortez-Martinez
has three U.S.-citizen children and doesn’t have a criminal record, two
qualities that the Obama administration has asked immigration officials
to consider before taking people into deportation proceedings.
“The
president keeps talking about going after people who are dangerous, and
yet we know the people who are actually considered priority [cases] by
Border Patrol and by
ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] agencies are members of our
community, like Lesly,” Unzueta told ThinkProgress.
And
Cortez-Martinez is not alone. Erika Andiola, a prominent immigrant
activist, wrote in a public Facebook post last year that she “almost
didn’t make it back” into the
U.S. even though she had obtained advanced parole. “Border Patrol agent
didn’t know what Advanced Parole with DACA was and when he figures it
out, and finds on my record a misdemeanor of when I got arrested at
Senator Reid’s office in 2010 for the DREAM Act,
he starts going on and on about how horrible DACA is and how he
shouldn’t let me back in,” Andiola wrote.
Pretty much every single DACA person that has come back into the country have issues at Border Patrol when they enter.
Ruiz-Velasco
lamented that some of her other clients have also faced mistreatment
from border agents when they have tried to reenter the country. “Pretty
much every single DACA person that has come back into the country [has] issues at Border
Patrol when they enter,” she said. “A lot of them have been treated
poorly. A lot have been harassed. They’ve been given a hard time. They
have been told that they don’t deserve to be here.
One individual was told that DACA doesn’t exist anymore. They have to
advocate on their own behalf and that’s how we have prepare them when
they travel with advance parole.”
“There’s
very little accountability over the people who makes such crucial
decisions about who [gets] deported and who gets to stay,” Unzueta
insisted. “Right now we’re
scrambling trying to find who’s making the ultimate decision at the
local level and the national level and the reality is that we only have
people in the local DHS office to appeal to. ”
“This
is a problem of oversight particularly about these case-by-case
decisions that can change people’s lives completely,” she added.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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