Donald Trump’s administration deported a woman to Mexico one day after she showed up to a green card appointment “in flagrant violation” of legal protections for immigrants who came to the country as children, a federal judge has ruled.
Maria de Jesus Estrada Juarez entered the U.S. at 15 years old and has lived in the country for 27 years under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, an Obama-era program that has shielded thousands of immigrants like her from removal.
A federal judge on Monday said immigration authorities violated those protections and failed to give her due process in violation of her Fifth Amendment rights.
“I am overwhelmed with relief and hope after learning about the court’s decision,” Estrada Juarez said Tuesday.
“Being separated from my daughter and my home has been incredibly painful,” said Estrada Juarez, who lives in Sacramento, California with her 22-year-old U.S. citizen daughter. “I followed the rules and trusted the process, and I just want to return to my family and rebuild my life. This decision gives me hope that I will be able to come home soon.”
Estrada Juarez showed up for a scheduled green card interview at a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office in California on February 18 alongside her daughter.
She was arrested moments later and deported to Mexico the next day.
“These past weeks without my mom have been devastating,” her daughter Damaris Bello said in a statement.
“Nothing has felt the same without her,” she said. “We are so grateful that the court recognized what was done to her was wrong. We are counting the days until she is back where she belongs.”
Estrada Juarez’s DACA status “was undisputedly active,” California District Judge Dena Coggins wrote.
“The court recognized what we have argued from the beginning: Maria’s deportation was unlawful because DACA status protected her from being removed from the United States,” according to attorney Stacy Tolchin. “This ruling will reunite her with her U.S. citizen daughter.”
DACA allows recipients to legally love and work in the U.S. on a renewable, two-year basis.
As of last June, there were about 516,000 people in the DACA program, with the largest share in states of Texas, Illinois and California, according to the Migration Policy Institute, an immigration think tank.
Trump unsuccessfully tried to eliminate the program during his first term and has gradually chipped away at it in his second.
The administration has been accused of moving egregiously slow when it comes to renewing DACA status, putting the lives and careers of people who have counted on DACA at risk, recipients and advocates say.
More than 200 DACA recipients were arrested between January and November last year, and at least 86 were deported, according to Homeland Security data provided to members of Congress, though the Trump administration has provided lawmakers with conflicting data. A separate review found that 270 DACA recipients were arrested and 174 were removed.
Those discrepancies “demonstrate gross incompetence or intentional misdirection,” according to Democratic Reps. Delia C. Ramirez and Sylvia Garcia, who called on Secretary Kristi Noem to provide a full accounting of DACA deportations this month.
“We know that Noem and DHS have refused to abide by the protections that DACA provides to Dreamers. It is clear that DACA recipients are at great risk; we must have transparency,” Ramirez said.
Homeland Security argues that the government ordered the removal of Estrada Juarez in 1998 — when she was still a child — “and she was removed from the United States shortly after.”
“She illegally re-entered the U.S. — a felony,” according to a spokesperson for DHS. “She was arrested and her final order re-instated.”
But her last entry was under an “advance parole,” which allows immigrants with pending applications to re-enter the U.S. after traveling abroad without abandoning those applications, according to her attorneys.
“This case highlights serious failures in the government’s haphazard and irresponsible attempts to remove individuals without following the law,” Tolchin added.
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