‘New pieces of herself’

‘All American’ Argentine faces deportation without hearing

Before she was arrested following an immigration protest, Daniela Vargas loved to watch “Grey’s Anatomy” and dreamed of becoming a math professor and soccer mom, with three kids in an SUV.

Now the 22-year-old friends describe as all-American girl may be deported without a hearing to Argentina, a country she hasn’t seen since she was seven when her parents fled a collapsing economy and violated a visa waiver program to work in Mississippi.

Her attorneys said they will file a motion with the Department of Homeland Security to allow Vargas, now detained in Louisiana, to remain in the U.S. until they can make her case before a judge.

For now, she’s being processed as a “visa wavier overstay,” which could deny her a hearing and put her on a plane to South America.

“She said she was in a cell with other girls. She hasn’t even taken a shower yet because she’s scared to,” her friend Jordan Sanders said. “She has no clue what’s going on.”

Sanders said federal agents in two unmarked cars pulled them over five minutes after they left the news conference in Jackson, where Vargas had joined clergy, civil rights lawyers and advocates in speaking out against President Trump’s immigration policies.

“They rushed around the vehicle and opened Dany’s side of her door and they were just like, ‘You know who we are, you know who we’re here for,’” Sanders said. The agents drove off with her in handcuffs.

It’s a shock for the young woman who did so well playing trumpet in her high school band in Morton, Miss., that she got a solo in the state band finals. She went to community college and then the University of Southern Mississippi, having twice obtained protection from deportation under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

“Every time we talked it was like she was finding new pieces of herself,” said Macy Hudson, a classmate from the same town of about 3,500 people in central Mississippi.

The DACA program – derided as “illegal amnesty” by critics – has protected about 750,000 immigrants since the Obama administration launched it in 2012. It allows young immigrants who arrived as children and are living in the U.S. illegally to stay and obtain work permits, good for two years at a time.

AP PHOTO Diana Hodges places a sticky note that calls for freeing 22-year old Daniela Vargas, a Argentine native who has lived in the United States since she was seven years old, on the office doors of lawmakers at the Capitol in Jackson, Miss.