Painesville: Mom of 4 on verge of deportation

6:15 PM, Sep 19, 2011

LAKE COUNTY -- A Painesville Township mother of four is scheduled to surrender to immigration agents Tuesday to be deported.

Esperanza Pacheco is in the country illegally, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

Pacheco, 39, of Mentor Avenue, spent Monday afternoon with her four daughters who stayed home from school in case their mother was taken away a day early.

"Maybe immigration might be coming for my mom to our house, and we don't want to leave her alone," said Pacheco's eldest daughter, Esmeralda Moctezuma, 14. "We wanted to be close to her."

As the family prepared for Pacheco's departure, churches, social service agencies, and the office of Congressman Steve LaTourette worked to hold off her deportation.

"We are hoping common sense will prevail," said Veronica Dahlberg of HOLA, the Organization of Hispanic Women of Lake and Ashtabula.

"We would like ICE to focus on the gang members and people who are real threats to national security, not a mother of four kids."

Acknowledging that Pacheco is technically in the United States illegally, Dahlberg said, "That's such an easy way to shut everybody up, to say they're illegal and end of conversation. We're talking about a family with U.S. citizen children."

All of Pacheco's daughters are U.S. citizens, as was her late father, who was a migrant worker. Pacheco's mother had legal status, as do her 10 brothers and sisters.

"My father never completed the paperwork for me. I have been waiting," she said through a translator.

Pacheco says her father ran out of money to complete the legal process. She produced an immigration document which showed her in the process of being approved for legal resident status 10 years ago.

While the paperwork languished, Pacheco continued raising her daughters in the Lake County trailer park that is home to mostly Mexican immigrants. Then in June, ICE agents seized her husband and began deportation proceedings against him.

"Is she a threat to the community? Is she a terrorist? Is she a national security risk? Is she a violent offender? And the answers to all those questions are obviously no," says David Leopold, a high-profile Cleveland immigration attorney who has taken the case on the family's behalf.

"The new directives Immigration and Customs have out of Washington say they are supposed to take our tax dollars and go after people who can do us harm," Leopold continued, "not waste them on a mother of four. She's not a priority case."

Leopold did not believe the immigration proceedings against Pacheco have anything to do with a 2002 incident in which she pleaded guilty to misdemeanor child endangering for leaving her children in the famiy's trailer home while she went looking for a job.

"It is that she is an easy target, low hanging fruit," Leopold said.

Pastor Angel Arroyo, Jr., also working on the family's behalf, agreed.

I feel she's a woman just trying to survive that's being harassed," Arroyo told WKYC. "She fits the category that should be on the bottom. She's not a terrorist, she's not a gang member, and she's not a felon."

If Pacheco is not returned to her family after she is surrendered on Tuesday morning in downtown Cleveland, her daughters say they will join her wherever she ends up.

"We will finish school here through December, and then to go Mexico with our uncle," says Esmeralda, who, along with her sisters, were born in the United States.

"If my mom goes, we want to go with her," offers Maricza, 10. "We don't want to stay here."

http://www.wkyc.com/news/article/207353 ... eportation