Austin Woman and Her U.S. Citizen Kids Deported by ICE, According to Advocates

Austin immigration activists are worried because they say two U.S. citizen children and their mother, who had lived in the city without legal status for at least seven years, were sent back to Mexico on Wednesday.

Activist Sulma Franco with Austin-based Grassroots Leadership says that 37-year-old Denisse Parra Vargas was detained the day before with her 9-, 5-, and 4-year-old children after going to a Department of Homeland Security centre in Pflugerville for a check-in.

The two youngest children of Parra Vargas were born and raised in Austin.

Frank, who has known the family for a long time, said, “They were good people.” It looked like those people were doing everything they could to take care of their families in a responsible way.

Daniel Hatoum, a lawyer for the Texas Civil Rights Project, said that he was sure Vargas and her kids were in Reynosa by Wednesday afternoon. Franco said she had heard they were at a shelter, trying to find the children’s father, who had been sent to Nuevo Laredo as a deportation in the days before Parra Vargas’s. They are from Mexico, where they met.

The deportation of Parra Vargas and her children seems to be the latest case of U.S. citizen kids being taken away by the Trump administration as part of its ongoing crackdown on immigrants.

In Louisiana last month, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement took away a four-year-old with Stage 4 cancer after stopping the child, its mother, and other people. In South Texas, immigration officials also took away four American children and teens, ages 6 to 15, along with their parents. Two of the kids were sick with heart problems and one had brain cancer.

“They tell the family, ‘Either take them with you or we’ll quickly separate them from you,'” Hatoum, whose group is defending the South Texas family, said. Then they say that’s not really expulsion since they were given the chance to go. In a slang sense, though, it definitely is.

When asked for a comment on this case, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not reply right away.

Maria Reza, a spokeswoman for Grassroots Leadership, said that Parra Vargas was arrested days after she and her partner were questioned by immigration officials at a traffic stop near Dobie Middle School in North Austin’s Rundberg neighbourhood on Thursday. When police arrived, Omar Gallardo Rodriguez, Parra Vargas’s partner, was arrested and sent back to their home country of Mexico within days. Parra Vargas was also given an ankle watch, Reza said.

Hatoum said he thinks Parra Vargas went to the Pflugerville facility in part because she thought it would help the case of her partner.

Hatoum said, “There is some game-playing going on here.”

It’s not clear if Parra Vargas or her partner had an order to be deported or if they had a crime record or had been in immigration detention before. Reza said Parra Vargas had a case for refuge that was still being processed.