California’s superintendent is calling for the return of a hearing-impaired six-year-old after he, his mother and his five-year-old sibling were detained on Tuesday while reporting for their check-in at an ICE office in San Francisco and deported to Colombia.
Lesly Rodriguez Gutierrez and her sons were arrested during their visit to ICE’s Intensive Supervision Appearance Program (Isap), said Alameda County Immigration Legal and Education Partnership (ACILEP). A relative who was waiting outside for Gutierrez and her sons was unable to hand off the assistive devices necessary for the six-year-old, who is deaf and has a cochlear implant.
“No child should be ripped from their home community and hidden in a detention center, especially not a Deaf child who is being deprived of the ability to communicate and understand what is happening to him,” Tony Thurmond, the California superintendent of public instruction, said in a statement on Friday. “I am calling 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,” said Nikolas De Bremaeker, managing attorney for ACILEP. “Regardless of the status around deportation, humanity should stop them from sending a six-year-old into a life-threatening situation.”
Immigration attorneys say they and Gutierrez’s family were given the runaround by ICE as they tried to file habeas petitions to contest the deportation. Family members said ICE first told them Gutierrez and her children were bound for a detention center in Louisiana, De Bremaeker said. Then they were told that they would be bound for Phoenix, Arizona, before going to Washington state, according to the lawyer.
“It very much feels intentional,” De Bremaeker said of the lack of information. “And it’s chaotic and irresponsible at best and intentional and deceptive at worst.”
ICE did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment on Gutierrez’s case.
Gutierrez and her children were ultimately briefly sent to a detention center in Phoenix and then deported to Colombia. De Bremaeker argues that the confusion around where Gutierrez and her children were located was an intentional attempt to preclude him and other immigration attorneys from filing petitions in the correct jurisdictions.
“There was so much chaos and we weren’t able to do anything to get these fillings – that we otherwise would have – done because of this pattern created by [ICE],” De Bremaeker added.
Gutierrez and her sons came to the US in 2022, and she filed an asylum application the following year. The application was originally rejected by a judge who ordered her removal, but Gutierrez appealed and was put on a supervision order that required her to check in at Isap every month and check in via a smartphone app each week, De Bremaeker said.
Since the family’s deportation, teachers and administrators at the school the six-year-old boy attended, as well as the state superintendent, have pleaded to authorities to return the boy to the US so he can continue to access support services. Since he only knows how to communicate in American sign language, being sent back to Colombia can have detrimental consequences on his developmental progress, they say.
“[The student] receives instructions that are carefully tailored to his learning profile and language development,” Thurmond wrote in a 5 March letter. “Because of this, remaining in an environment where ASL is the primary language of instruction is essential for his continued language development and academic progress and overall well-being.”
A teacher specialist at the six-year-old’s school worries that if he isn’t allowed to return to the US, 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 that he has begun to learn in the past two years,” she wrote. “These were not opportunities that they had in their home country. These were the reasons that [his] family emigrated to the United States, and specifically to the Bay Area of California.”
During a press conference on Tuesday, Thurmond also called on newly appointed Department of Homeland Security secretary Markwayne Mullin to “call Donald trump and have this student released and returned.
“Senator Mullin, you’ve shown that you’re a tough guy. If you’re a tough guy get on the damn phone, call Donald Trump and have this student released and returned so that we can continue to provide care for this young man.”
