California’s superintendent is calling for the return of a hearing-impaired six-year-old boy after he, his mother and five-year-old brother were detained Tuesday while reporting for booking at an ICE office in San Francisco and deported to Colombia.
Lesly Rodríguez Gutiérrez and her children were arrested during their visit to ICE’s Intensive Supervision Appearance Program (Isap), said the Alameda County Immigration Legal and Educational Association (ACILEP). A family member waiting outside for Gutiérrez and his children was unable to provide the necessary assistive devices to the six-year-old boy, who is deaf and has a cochlear implant.
“No child should be torn from their home community and hidden in a detention center, especially a deaf child who is deprived of the ability to communicate and understand what is happening to him or her,” Tony Thurmond, California’s superintendent of public instruction, said in a statement Friday. “I call on the federal government to return our student to his school community now. These inhumane and illegal attacks on our families must end.”
“They had strong humanitarian reasons why they should not be deported and they should have had their safeguards in place,” said Nikolas De Bremaeker, managing attorney at ACILEP. “Regardless of the situation surrounding deportation, humanity should prevent a six-year-old child from being sent to a life-threatening situation.”
Immigration attorneys say ICE gave them and Gutierrez’s family the runaround as they attempted to file habeas petitions to challenge deportation. Relatives said ICE first told them that Gutierrez and her children were headed to a detention center in Louisiana, De Bremaeker said. They were then told they would head to Phoenix, Arizona, before going to Washington state, according to the attorney.
“It seems very intentional,” De Bremaeker said of the lack of information. “And it is chaotic and irresponsible at best and intentional and deceptive at worst.”
ICE did not respond to The Guardian’s request for comment on Gutiérrez’s case.
Gutiérrez and her children were eventually briefly sent to a detention center in Phoenix and then deported to Colombia. De Bremaeker maintains that the confusion over where Gutierrez and his children were was an intentional attempt to prevent him and other immigration attorneys from filing petitions in the correct jurisdictions.
“There was so much chaos and we couldn’t do anything to get these fillings, which we otherwise would have done, because of this pattern created by (ICE),” De Bremaeker added.
Gutiérrez and her children arrived in the United States in 2022 and she filed an asylum application the following year. The request was originally rejected by a judge who ordered his removal, but Gutierrez appealed and was placed with a supervision order requiring him to register with Isap every month and through a smartphone app every week, De Bremaeker said.
Since the family’s deportation, teachers and administrators at the school the six-year-old attended, as well as the state superintendent, have pleaded with authorities to return the boy to the United States so he can continue to access support services. Since he only knows how to communicate in American Sign Language, being sent back to Colombia could have detrimental consequences for his development, they say.
“(The student) receives instructions carefully tailored to his or her learning profile and language development,” Thurmond wrote in a March 5 letter. “Because of this, remaining in an environment where ASL is the primary language of instruction is essential to their continued language development, academic progress, and overall well-being.”
A specialist teacher at the six-year-old’s school is concerned that if he is not allowed to return to the United States, he will not have the necessary access to the specialized education that has helped him learn to express himself.
“Detention for any individual is traumatic. Consider the complexities when the individual is a six-year-old deaf child whose only access to the world is through ASL, a language he has begun to learn in the last two years,” he wrote. “These were not opportunities they had in their home country. These were the reasons why (their) family immigrated to the United States, and specifically to the Bay Area of California.”
During a press conference Tuesday, Thurmond also called on newly appointed Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin to “call Donald Trump and get this student released and returned.”
“Senator Mullin, you have proven that you are a tough guy. If you are a tough guy, pick up the damn phone, call Donald Trump and release and return this student so we can continue to provide care to this young man.”
