Mom, 20-Year Model Citizen With No Rap Sheet, Deported In Michigan

DETROIT, MI — Lourdes Salazar Bautista is not the face of the “bad hombres” President Trump said he wanted to scour from the country under broad immigration reform. The 49-year-old mother of three U.S.-born children and small business owner has a spotless criminal record, but because the 20-year resident of Ann Abor overstayed a 1997 travel visa, she was deported back to Mexico on Tuesday.

The community Salazar Bautista has lived in for two decades wasn’t clamoring for her to be deported. In fact, Ann Arbor Mayor Christopher Taylor, the entire city council, county commissioners and state representatives have petitioned federal immigration authorities on her behalf, though unsuccessfully. Marches have been held. An interfaith church group is raising money to pay for legal bills that stacked up since immigration officials told her last spring that it was time to go. According to media accounts, virtually no one in Ann Arbor — or at the federal level, either — thinks she is a security threat.

Salazar Bautista puts a face on the plight of an estimated 11 million unauthorized immigrants who lived in the United States relatively worry free under Obama-era guidelines that focused on deporting serious criminals.

For them, the reality of President Trump’s order greatly expanding deportation criteria is a far cry from candidate Trump’s campaign assurances that it would be “a very, very hard” thing to deport someone “who’s been here for 15 or 20 years and throw them and their family out.” (For more local news, click here to sign up for real-time news alerts and newsletters from Detroit Patch, and click here to find your local Michigan Patch. If you have an iPhone, click here to get the free Patch iPhone app.)

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In Trump’s first 100 days in office, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested more than 41,300 immigrants, up 37.6 percent from the same period in 2016, the agency said.

About three-fourths of those arrested during the period have criminal records, but the biggest increase in arrests was among immigrants who, like Salazar Bautista, have no criminal records, the Washington Post reported. Among that group, arrests have doubled.

Maria Ibarra, who is among Ann Arbor residents who have marched in support of Salazar Bautista’s bid to remain in the United States and pursue a legal path to residency, said her deportation should serve as a wake-up call to Americans to look beyond the debate over policy and into the eyes of families whose lives are harmed by it.

“... This is what a deportation looks like,” Ibarra told WJBK-TV during an emotional farewell to Salazar Bautista at Detroit Metro Airport Tuesday. “It’s violent, painful and tearing people apart. It keeps happening and no one is paying attention.”

Taylor, the Ann Arbor mayor, said in a statement that the “senseless deportation has devastated a strong family and diminished a community” and that “we should be better than this.”

“Come back when you can, Lourdes,” he wrote. “You’ll always belong here in Ann Arbor.”

• See also from one of our Connecticut Patch editors: Because ICE Made A Typo, Kids Will Lose Their Dad

For Salazar Bautista, the exile to Mexico is fraught with fear.

Where will she find a good job in Mexico to replace the income from her cleaning business back home in Ann Arbor? What will become of the family home? She feels safe in Ann Arbor, the antithesis of the area of Mexico she will return to that is overrun with drug cartels and where crime and violence are daily occurrences. There, it’s not safe to go out after dark, Salazar Bautista’s family has said.

Salazar Bautista’s children accompanied their mother to Mexico, leaving their friends behind in the only home and indeed the only country they’ve ever known.

The 19-year-old will return to Michigan State University, where she will be a sophomore this fall, but is considering transferring to a school in the Ann Arbor area so she can live in the family home and try to keep the mortgage up. It’s still up in the air whether the other two children — a boy, 13, and girl, 15 — will remain with Salazar Bautista in Mexico or return to the United States to live with relatives during the school year. Salazar Bautista’s husband was deported to Mexico several years ago.

ICE showed up at the family’s home in 2010 to enforce a more than 10-year-old deportation order issued around the time her travel visa expired. Salazar Bautista’s husband was deported then, but she was allowed to stay in the United States to continue raising her children by an immigration court more sympathetic to keeping families at least partially intact than those functioning under today’s round-them-up ethos.

Pamela Quintana-Salazar, the oldest of the three children, told the Ann Arbor News that for all the bluster about sending immigrant criminals back home, “the people they should be going after are still roaming the community, are still roaming the country.”

“It’s very crazy how they're deporting people like my mom who have done nothing wrong, who pay their bills, who pay their taxes, who don't live off of the government,” Quintana-Salazar said. “She even came to this country legally. She overstayed her visa, yes, but she’s literally been doing everything correctly.”

Pamela Bautista said her mother has cooperated and checked in regularly with ICE, as required to defer deportation under the 2010 stay. In March, she learned she would be deported on Aug. 2.

ICE spokesman Khallid Walls told the Ann Arbor News that while the agency’s focus is on undocumented immigrants who pose a national security threat, anyone in violation of immigration laws is subject to deportation.

Salazar Bautista had been granted multiple stays of the 1998 deportation order, but her time in the United States had run out, he said.

“In a current exercise of discretion, the agency has allowed her to remain free from custody while timely finalizing her departure plans,” Walls said in a statement last week. “The agency will continue to closely monitor her case to ensure compliance.”

Image: Protester Torianto Johnson, a freshman at Pioneer High School in Ann Arbor, holds a sign supporting immigrants during a rally outside a federal courthouse in Detroit in May. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya)