Arizona Protests for Unauthorized Immigrants
Protesters in Phoenix blocked a van carrying detainees facing deportation, including Guadalupe García de Rayos. She was arrested after checking in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
By SUSAN JOAN ARCHER. Photo by Caitlin O'Hara for The New York Times. Watch in Times Video »
PHOENIX — For eight years, Guadalupe García de Rayos had checked in at the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement office here, a requirement since she was caught using a fake Social Security number during a raid in 2008 at a water park where she worked.
Every year since then, she has walked in and out of the meetings after a brief review of her case and some questions.
But not this year.
On Wednesday, immigration agents arrested Ms. Rayos, 35. Despite efforts by her family and others who tried to block, legally and physically, her removal from the United States, she was deported Thursday to Nogales, Mexico, the same city where she crossed into the United States 21 years ago.
Immigration agents “said she’s a threat, but my wife isn’t a threat,” her husband said in an interview.
With Guadalupe García de Rayos in Mexico
Times reporter Fernanda Santos drove down to Nogales, Mexico, with Ms. Rayos’s children to see their mother. Watch a conversation that was live on Facebook.
As one of the estimated 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the United States, Ms. Rayos was always a candidate for deportation, but as a matter of practicality, the Obama administration had focused its finite resources on removing the most serious criminals. The government even won a deportation order against Ms. Rayos in 2013, but had not carried it out, instead merely requiring her to check in periodically.
That all changed under President Trump, who ran on a pledge of being tougher on illegal immigration. Among the 18 executive orders that he has issued since taking office on Jan. 20 is one stipulating that undocumented immigrants convicted of any criminal offense — and even those who have not been charged but are believed to have committed “acts that constitute a chargeable criminal offense” — have become a priority for deportation.
Immigrants’ rights advocates say the new order could easily apply to a majority of unauthorized immigrants in the United States.
“We’re living in a new era now, an era of war on immigrants,” Ms. Rayos’s lawyer, Ray A. Ybarra Maldonado, said Wednesday after leaving the building here that houses the federal immigration agency, known by its acronym, ICE.
But groups supporting Mr. Trump’s moves on illegal immigration say that the deportations were long overdue, and would stop unauthorized immigrants from taking jobs from citizens, even if it meant that painful deportations would be taking place more often.
“It’s easy to put a human face on this one woman,” said Ira Mehlman, spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, adding that he was not opining on the merits of Ms. Rayos’s case.
“We can’t precisely pinpoint who the person or people are who might not have gotten a job taken by a person or people here illegally,” he said. “The general principle was we hold the people who violate the laws responsible for the consequences that accrue to other people.”
In a statement Thursday, Yasmeen Pitts O’Keefe, a spokeswoman for ICE, noted Ms. Rayos’s previous felony conviction and deportation order.
Ms. Rayos’s “immigration case underwent review at multiple levels of the immigration court system, including the Board of Immigration Appeals, and the judges held she did not have a legal basis to remain in the U.S.,” Ms. O’Keefe said. “ICE will continue to focus on identifying and removing individuals with felony convictions who have final orders of removal issued by the nation’s immigration courts.”
Lawyers from two of the nation’s leading civil rights’ groups said Ms. Rayos might be the first unauthorized immigrant to be arrested during a scheduled meeting with immigration officials since Mr. Trump took office.
Ms. Rayos was 14 when she left Acambaro, a city in an impoverished corner of the Mexican state of Guanajuato, and sneaked across the border into Nogales, Ariz., a three-hour drive from Phoenix. She married — her husband is also undocumented, and thus did not want his name published — and gave birth to a boy and a girl, who are now in their teens.
Ms. Rayos was working at Golfland Sunsplash in Mesa, a suburb of Phoenix, when Maricopa County sheriff’s deputies swooped in on Dec. 16, 2008, arresting her and several other employees on charges of suspicion of identity theft and using forged documents to obtain employment. The raid was one of the first ordered by Joe Arpaio, who was sheriff at the time, under an Arizona law authorizing sanctions against employers who knowingly hired undocumented immigrants.
She spent three months in a county jail, followed by three months in immigration detention, she told a reporter. In 2013, an immigration court ordered that she be sent back to Mexico, but her case had been on hold since the federal authorities — under the Obama administration — decided not to act on the deportation order.
Her son, Angel, still remembers the evening of her arrest — the knock on the door, the flashlight on the darkened living room, the sight of handcuffs on his mother’s wrists.
“I was in second grade,” he said. “I never forgot that night, and I’ve lived in fear of losing my mother every night since then.”
Ms. Rayos was afraid to go to her appointment on Wednesday, knowing what might happen. Carlos Garcia, executive director of Puente, an immigrants’ rights group, told her she could skip it and go into hiding or seek refuge at a church in North Phoenix, joining two other unauthorized immigrants facing deportation who have lived there for months.
She decided to face the odds. Before her appointment, Ms. Rayos and her family attended Mass. Later, she stopped for a moment, clasped her hands and bowed her head, as if she were reciting a silent prayer.
“I have faith in God,” Ms. Rayos said, pinching her forehead and trying not to cry.
She walked toward the gates that surround the ICE building, followed by Mr. Garcia and a small army of Puente volunteers, the same group that staged numerous protests against Mr. Arpaio at the height of his pursuit of unauthorized immigrants.
The volunteers chanted, “No estás sola,” Spanish for “you are not alone.”
When it became clear that Ms. Rayos would not walk out of the building, the protesters were ready. As a van carrying Ms. Rayos left the ICE building Wednesday, they surrounded it, chanting, “Liberation, not deportation.” Her daughter, Jacqueline, joined in, holding a sign that read, “Not one more deportation.” One man, Manuel Saldana, tied himself to one of the van’s front wheels and said, “I’m going to stay here as long as it takes.”
I'm outside @ICEgov office in Phoenix, where protesters have surrounded a van taking Guadalupe Garcia de Rayos to Mexico. pic.twitter.com/NClTpqtyGb
Police arrested 7 protesters blocking van. Dozens others still on sidewalk across the street from @ICEgov, including Rayos' 14yp daughter pic.twitter.com/WM09bkJCqm
Soon, police officers in helmets had surrounded Mr. Saldana. They cut off the ties holding him to the tire and rounded up at least six others who were blocking the front and back of the van, arresting them all. The driver quickly put the van in reverse and rolled back inside the building.
Ms. Rayos was one of several detainees inside the van. Later, a vehicle was seen leaving the building under police escort, and her husband said he suspected she might have been inside.
On Thursday, Ms. Rayos’s husband and children received a call from her, telling them she was in Nogales, Mexico, just south of the Arizona border.
His daughter had stayed with protesters until long past midnight. By sunrise, she was back home, packing her mother’s suitcase — her toothpaste, her brush, her favorite pants and shirts.
“Nobody should have to pack her mother’s bag,” she said, her lips quivering, tears filling her eyes. “It isn’t fair.”
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