Chicago illegal alien deported to Mexico while awaiting DACA decision
Southwest Side man quickly deported to Mexico while awaiting DACA decision
With the Trump administration seeking to kill the Obama-era program for immigrants, Jesus Alberto ‘Beto’ Lopez Gutierrez, 25, was deported after suing ICE.
By Carlos Ballesteros | Injustice Watch Jul 3, 2020, 5:30am CDT
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Jesus Alberto “Beto” Lopez-Gutierrez (center rear) with (from left) his father Miguel Lopez, sister Mariela Lopez, mother Lourdes Gonzalez and brother Miguel Lopez. Provided
On a rainy Sunday in early June, Jesus Alberto Lopez Gutierrez — “Beto” to his friends — took out the grill at his uncle’s house in West Elsdon to cook his family carne asada.
Lopez Gutierrez had been living in the basement unit with his parents and siblings since immigrating from Mexico in 2005. The pandemic largely put an end to big family gatherings, but neither rain nor coronavirus could stop his aunts, grandparents, uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews from showing up.
They wanted to say goodbye.
It had been three months since Lopez Gutierrez was released on bail from immigration detention after being stopped for speeding. But after an appellate court upheld a deportation order in May, the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency told him to show up June 9 at their field office in Iowa.
“I had a feeling that Sunday might be the last time I saw my family,” says Lopez Gutierrez, 25.
He was right. The day after his Iowa check-in, ICE put him on a plane back to his native Mexico.
ICE rarely deports anyone from Chicago to Mexico that quickly.
“It typically takes two to three weeks to be removed from the Chicago area,” says Diana Rashid, a supervising attorney with the National Immigrant Justice Center in Chicago. “I can’t think of a case where it happened in less than a week.”
Lopez Gutierrez’s lawyers think the quick deportation was in retaliation for him suing ICE after the agency blocked his request to be released from detention last year so he could apply for deportation relief under the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy under which he appeared to qualify.
An ICE spokesman won’t discuss that, saying the agency arrested and deported Lopez Gutierrez because his deportation appeal fell through.
Immigration officials still haven’t issued a final ruling on Lopez Gutierrez’s DACA application. But they said days before he was deported that they intended to deny it based on three nonviolent traffic violations — which his lawyers say wouldn’t allow his deportation under the agency’s policies.
A spokesman for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the federal agency that oversees DACA, won’t comment on individual applications.
A week ago, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked the Trump administration’s plan to dismantle DACA.
The nation’s high court found that the government offered no compelling legal basis for ending the policy former President Barack Obama instituted to protect those brought to the United States as children who want to stay and be able to legally go to school and work.
But the administration already had essentially made DACA useless for many of the estimated 680,000 young, undocumented immigrants who potentially qualify for DACA but, as was the case with Lopez Gutierrez, are not currently protected by the policy and could be deported even though this is the only country many have known as home.
“As a mother, you see your kids as being almost perfect,” says Lourdes Gutierrez, Lopez Gutierrez’s mother. “But if only people knew how goodhearted my son is, maybe they wouldn’t have taken him away.”
The youngest of three children in his family, Lopez Gutierrez was born in the Mexican state of Jalisco.
His family came to Chicago and settled on the Southwest Side when he was 10, after his father Miguel Lopez was laid off from his job at a brewery in Guadalajara.
“The plan was to come for three years and save up, but it’s almost been 15, and we’re still here,” Lopez says.
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