Arizona students march to protest football player's potential deportation
An Arizona high school senior who has been in the US since he was a toddler was arrested and faces deportation to Mexico, sparking an outcry from his classmates.
Thomas Torres, a football player at Desert View high school, is set to graduate on 22 May– but has now been ordered to appear in immigration court on the same date.
He is in custody at a federal holding facility in Casa Grande, according to Lorena Rodriguez, whose family the teen has been living with in Tucson, near the US-Mexico border.
“People like Thomas are needed in this country,” Rodriguez wrote on an online crowdfunding page she started to raise money for his legal defense. “He’s a hard-working young man willing to better his future.”
Torres was a toddler when he was brought to the United States by his parents, Rodriguez said. His parents returned to Mexico years ago, and Torres has lived with Rodriguez’s family throughout high school.
He shares a room with her brother, who is also about to graduate high school. Both their caps and gowns are hanging in the bedroom closet.
Classmates at Desert View marched four miles from the school to the sheriff ’s office to protest his arrest and possible deportation, carrying signs reading “Thomas is the American dream,” “Abolish the Border Patrol,” and “Without justice, there is no peace.”
They called on local law enforcement agencies to stop collaborating with immigration authorities.
Torres was taken into custody last Thursday after a traffic stop by sheriff’s deputies and turned over to Border Patrol, said Victor Mercado, a spokesman for the Sunnyside Unified high school district.
He did not have a driver’s license, since Arizona does not issue licenses to people in the country unlawfully.
A sheriff’s deputy stopped the car Torres was driving to check whether the insurance was up to date, the sheriff’s office said. When he did not produce a license and told the officer he was not authorized to live in the US, the deputy contacted the federal border patrol agency.
Torres has played sports throughout high school and worked several jobs, bussing tables at restaurants and doing yard work, Rodriguez said. “No job is ever too small or big for him,” she wrote.
Torres’s potential deportation is the latest in a spate of immigration enforcement actions by Trump’s administration that have sparked outrage.
Also in Arizona, a man whose wife was killed serving in the Army in Afghanistan was deported to Mexico, only to have authorities reverse course and return him to the United States.
The wife of a decorated Marine veteran in Florida was deported last year. A New York pizza delivery man was arrested and threatened with deportation after delivering pies to an army base, before a judge ordered him released. And a mother of four American children in Ohio with no criminal record was deported, before a judge allowed her back into the country almost a year and a half later to fight her case.