She doesn't want to be here': five-year-old US citizen and her mother deported to Honduras

"Five-year-old Genesis Ester Gutierrez Castellanos misses her cousins, classmates and kindergarten teachers in Austin, Texas. Despite being a US citizen, she was deported on 11 January alongside her mother, Karen Guadalupe Gutierrez Castellanos, to Honduras, a country Genesis had never known. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents were acting on an administrative deportation order against Gutierrez, 26, issued in 2019, before Genesis was born. I kept telling them the girl was born here'. They didn't care, they picked up the child, just put a jumper on her and told me to get into the car with her, Gutierrez told the Guardian. The two were held for almost a week in a hotel 80 miles from their home, without access to a lawyer or a hearing before a judge, before being deported to the Central American country. Activists and analysts point to a string of procedural violations in the case and note similarities with other recent detentions of children, such as that of five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos in Minneapolis. They see it as a chilling indication of what may lie ahead as Donald Trump's administration continues with mass deportations."

"Gutierrez had been living in the US since 2018 after leaving Puerto Cortes, a Honduran port city of about 130,000 people, to escape poverty and build a prosperous future, she said. She received a deportation order a year later but remained in the country and in 2020 Genesis was born. Gutierrez said she separated from the girl's father after suffering repeated abuse and applied for a U visa, designed to assist non-citizen victims of qualifying crimes such as domestic violence and sexual assault. There is a severe backlog in processing such applications and, like tens of thousands of others, Karen's case was still pending. Despite what she described as a beautiful and stable life in which Genesis was growing up surrounded by uncles and cousins, Gutierrez, who worked as a cleaner, said she was living in constant fear amid an increase"

A US citizen five-year-old, Genesis Ester Gutierrez Castellanos, was deported on 11 January to Honduras alongside her mother, Karen Guadalupe Gutierrez Castellanos, despite being born in the United States. ICE executed an administrative deportation order issued in 2019 against the mother. The mother and child were detained for nearly a week in a hotel 80 miles from their home without access to a lawyer or a hearing before a judge prior to deportation. Activists and analysts point to procedural violations and similarities to other recent child detentions. The mother had applied for a U visa after separating from an abusive partner, but the application remained pending due to severe backlogs.

Read at www.theguardian.com