by Will Glover
The day of the order came Friday, May 26, 2017 and despite the legal wrangling of several immigration lawyers, Juarez accepted her fate and boarded a plane to Mexico.
She’ll be staying with an uncle she’s never met in a country she does not know. She came to the U.S., undocumented, at the age of eight months. Now she’s 23, leaving a husband sick with leukemia and an eighteen-month old son with medical issues of his own. They’re both U.S. citizens, as are her family members that you’ll see in the video.
Jaurez’s story is complicated, growing up for most of her life without parents, surviving the streets of Salinas, California in an area rife with gang violence. She committed crimes as a minor, but while she’s lived an upstanding life for over the past six years, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has decided she must leave.
Maria’s fate is still uncertain, and her story has surfaced important questions regarding the aims of our nation’s immigration policy. What happens next for her? What assumptions does the public have about the strain the undocumented put on tax paying citizens? Join us as we continue this important conversation on immigration policy and the real stories behind deportation statistics.
Joining Christy tonight are:
Diego Bonesatti (Michigan United), Bill Kubota (Detroit Journalism Cooperative), and Chastity Pratt-Dawsey (Bridge Magazine).
