‘She doesn’t want to be here’: five-year-old US citizen and her mother deported to Honduras | US immigration
FFive-year-old Génesis Ester Gutiérrez Castellanos misses her cousins, classmates and kindergarten teachers in Austin, Texas. Although he was a U.S. citizen, on January 11, he and his mother, Karen Guadalupe Gutiérrez Castellanos, were deported to Honduras, a country Génesis had never known.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents were acting on an administrative deportation order against Gutiérrez, 26, issued in 2019, before Génesis was born.
“I kept telling them ‘the girl was born here’. They didn’t care, they took the child, put a sweater on her and told me to get in the car with her,” Gutiérrez told the Guardian.
The two were held in a hotel 80 miles from their home for almost a week before being deported to the Central American country, without access to a lawyer or a hearing before a judge.
Activists and analysts point to a number of procedural violations in the case and note similarities with recent detentions of children such as five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos in Minneapolis. They see this as a chilling indicator of what may lie ahead as Donald Trump’s administration continues mass deportations.
He said Gutiérrez had been living in the United States since 2018 after leaving the Honduran port city of Puerto Cortés, with a population of about 130,000, to “escape poverty and build a prosperous future.” A year later, he received a deportation order but remained in the country, and in 2020, Génesis was born.
Gutiérrez said that after being subjected to repeated harassment, the girl left her father and sought compensation. U visaIt is designed to assist noncitizen victims of aggravated crimes such as domestic violence and sexual assault. There is a significant backlog in processing such applications, and Karen’s case, like tens of thousands of others, was still pending.
Gutiérrez, who works as a janitor, said that despite what Génesis described as a “nice and stable life” growing up with her uncles and cousins, she lives in constant fear amid an increase in ICE raids. “I was getting in my car to go to work and I was afraid someone was going to be behind me and stop me and arrest me,” he said.
In early January, while Gutiérrez was hosting a friend who was also a victim of domestic violence, the alleged perpetrator showed up and the former couple had a heated argument.
They entered and Gutiérrez said he was sleeping in another room when officers from the Austin Police Department knocked on the door to respond to the disturbance. According to the statement, police said they “found an active ICE warrant” and notified the agency.
The mother and daughter were taken by ICE to the neighboring city of San Antonio and kept in a hotel. Gutiérrez said he was not allowed to call his family until three days after he was detained. By the way Texas-based NGO Grassroots Leadership, which first reported the case, said it had been instructed not to share its location.
An immigration attorney tried to intervene, but ICE agents reportedly He said they were unable to locate the couple in the agency’s database, which some believe may have been an intentional result of keeping them in a hotel rather than a detention center.
Kathleen Bush-Joseph, an analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, said: “Unfortunately, it is increasingly the case that people cannot be located in the system and lawyers cannot reach them to provide appropriate representation, directly undermining the rights of immigrants.”
ICE did not respond to a request for comment.
Gutiérrez’s next call to his family came days after he and Génesis landed in Honduras. Since then, the two have been staying with Gutiérrez’s mother. Because Génesis is a U.S. citizen, Gutiérrez said he made the “painful” decision to return the girl to the U.S. soon with another relative.
“His school, his uncles, his cousins, his whole life is there because he was born there and he doesn’t want to be here,” Gutiérrez said, adding that they had never been separated before. “The day I leave my daughter will be the most painful day of my life, but I will do it for her future.”
He vowed not to give up on returning to the United States to reunite with his daughter. “I’m going to ask for help, lawyers, everything. I’m going to fight until God tells me ‘that’s enough, Karen’.”
Last May, also in Austin, a mother and her three children, two of whom were US citizens, were arrested and detained by ICE agents. was deported To Mexico.
On Inauguration Day, Trump signed an executive order aimed at ending the 150-year-old birthright policy, but judges across the U.S. issued injunctions blocking that decision, saying it violated the constitution, federal law and Supreme Court precedent. The court is expected to hear the case this year.
Migration Policy Institute predictions Of the 6.3 million children under age 18 living in the United States with at least one unauthorized immigrant parent, 5.3 million are U.S. citizens.
“Families face extremely difficult choices about whether to stay together,” Bush-Joseph said. Given Trump’s focus on mass deportations, “I unfortunately foresee that there will be more of these very difficult situations where parents are deported and their children are either left behind or removed from the lives they know in the United States,” he said.
