ICE deports family, including deaf boy who wasn’t given his assistive devices | California
California’s inspector general is calling for the return of a six-year-old hearing-impaired boy after he, his mother and his five-year-old sibling were detained and deported to Colombia while reporting for check-in at an ICE office in San Francisco on Tuesday.
The Immigration Legal and Educational Partnership of Alameda County (ACILEP) said Lesly Rodriguez Gutierrez and her sons were arrested during a visit to ICE’s Intensive Enforcement Program (Isap). A relative waiting for Gutierrez and his sons outside was unable to deliver necessary assistive devices to the six-year-old boy, who is hearing impaired and has a cochlear implant.
“No child should be removed from their community and stored in a detention center, especially a Deaf child who is deprived of the ability to communicate and understand what is happening to them,” California superintendent of public education Tony Thurmond said in a statement Friday. he said. “I call on the federal government to return our student to the school community now. These inhumane and illegal attacks on our families must end.”
“They had strong humanitarian reasons not to be deported and they had to take their own security measures,” said Nikolas De Bremaeker, ACILEP’s administrative lawyer. “Regardless of the circumstances of the deportation, humanity must prevent them from sending a six-year-old child into a life-threatening situation.”
Immigration lawyers say they and Gutierrez’s family were kidnapped by ICE while trying to file habeas petitions to challenge deportation. De Bremaeker said family members said ICE first told them Gutierrez and her children would be sent to a detention center in Louisiana. They were then told they would go to Phoenix, Arizona, before heading to Washington state, according to the attorney.
“This feels largely intentional,” De Bremaeker said of the lack of information. “And it is chaotic and irresponsible at best, and willful and deceptive at worst.”
ICE did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment on Gutierrez’s case.
Gutierrez and her children were briefly sent to a detention center in Phoenix and then deported to Colombia. De Bremaeker argues that the confusion over the whereabouts of Gutierrez and her children was a deliberate attempt to prevent him and other immigration attorneys from filing petitions in the correct jurisdictions.
“There was so much chaos that we couldn’t do anything (that we would have done otherwise) to get these fillings done. [ICE]” added De Bremaeker.
Gutierrez and his sons arrived in the United States in 2022 and applied for asylum the following year. De Bremaeker said the application was initially rejected by a judge who ordered his dismissal, but Gutierrez appealed and was given a supervision order requiring him to check in at Isap every month and check in via a smartphone app every week.
Since the family’s deportation, teachers and administrators of the school the six-year-old attended, as well as the state superintendent, have pleaded with authorities to return the child to the United States so he can continue to access support services. Since he only knows how to communicate in American sign language, they say being sent back to Colombia could have detrimental consequences on his development.
“[The student] He is receiving instructions carefully tailored to his learning profile and language development,” Thurmond wrote in a March 5 letter. “Therefore, remaining in an environment where ASL is the primary language of instruction is crucial to his ongoing language development, academic progress, and general well-being.”
The specialist teacher at the six-year-old’s school is concerned that if he is not allowed to return to the US, he may not have the necessary access to specialized training that helps him learn to express himself.
“For any individual, detention is traumatic. Consider the complexity of that individual being a deaf six-year-old whose only access to the world is through ASL, a language he has begun learning in the past two years,” he wrote. “These were not opportunities they had in their home countries. These were [his] the family emigrated to the United States and specifically to the Bay Area of California.
At a news conference Tuesday, Thurmond called on newly appointed Department of Homeland Security secretary Markwayne Mullin to “call Donald Trump and ensure that this student is released and brought back.”
“Senator Mullin, you have shown that you are a tough guy. If you are a tough guy, get to the damn phone, call Donald Trump, and get this student released and returned so we can continue to provide care for this young man.”
