PHOENIX _ Arizona immigration activists prodded Phoenix politicians and law enforcement to declare the city a sanctuary for immigrants in the country illegally after a mother of two U.S. citizens was deported early Thursday morning.
Guadalupe Garcia de Rayos, 36, was deported to Nogales, Mexico, early Thursday, said her attorney, Ray Ybarra Maldonado.
As a nonviolent felon, she was considered a low priority for deportation under the Obama administration, but an executive order by President Donald Trump widened the priorities of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to include all immigrants in the country illegally with a criminal record.
Garcia de Rayos spent 22 years in the country illegally, arriving in the U.S. when she was 14. She was convicted in 2009 of felony identity theft after she was arrested in a workplace raid under then-Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
"There are a hundred people in harm's way with similar backgrounds to Guadalupe," Ybarra Maldonado said.
Activists demanded at a news conference in front of the ICE field office in Phoenix that new Maricopa County Sheriff Paul Penzone, a Democrat who defeated Arpaio in November's election, remove ICE agents from the main Phoenix jail on the city's Fourth Avenue.
"We want nothing of Arpaio's culture still there," said Carlos Garcia, director of the immigrant advocacy group Puente Arizona. "Get ICE out of the Fourth Avenue Jail. Stop running people booked through immigration background checks."
Garcia de Rayos was arrested during a routine check-in with ICE agents. Accompanied by protesters who worried that she would be detained because of the new executive order, Ybarra Maldonado accompanied her into the ICE field office.
"It's no fun walking someone to the slaughter," he said.
Protesters gathered outside the ICE office in hopes of preventing her transfer Wednesday night, with one demonstrator even chaining himself to a transport van.
