Deaf Child's Deportation Prompts Outcry From State's Top Education Official

FREMONT, CA — The deportation of a 6-year-old boy who attends the California School for the Deaf in Fremont has drawn an outcry from the state's top education official.

State Superintendent Tony Thurmond said the disabled child was expelled from the country by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents without his hearing aids.

"I am deeply disturbed that a 6-year-old deaf student from our State Special Schools, who was home sick from school, was detained and deported without access to critical medical devices that support him to hear," Thurmond said Friday.

"I am calling on the federal government to return our student to his school community now," he said. "These inhumane and illegal attacks on our families must end."

An immigration attorney said the student, Joseph Andrey Londono Rodriguez, and a 5-year-old sibling had accompanied their 28-year-old mother, Lesly Rodriguez Gutierrez, to her routine immigration check-in Tuesday in San Francisco, where they were seized.

Gutierrez is an asylum seeker from Colombia fleeing domestic violence. Her attorney, Nikolas De Bremaeker, said Gutierrez has no criminal record in any country.

Matt Ortega, a Democratic candidate for California's 14th Congressional District, said the family lived in Hayward and belonged back there.

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