Editorial This deportation of mother hurts many, helps none

Life is cheap in Guatemala, a country inured to violence by 30 years of civil war that ended with a blanket amnesty leaving no one accountable for the deaths of 200,000 mostly unarmed civilians.

This was the Guatemala 19-year-old Nury Chavarria fled in 1993, along with her father and brother. While they were granted asylum, however, Nury was not, for reasons that aren’t clear. She stayed here regardless, for reasons that are.

Peacetime in Guatemala has proven a contradiction in terms. Fueled by a surfeit of weapons and a society accustomed to using them, the postwar violence has continued apace. Last year saw on average 101 murders a week. Virtually all have gone unpunished.

When the war ended in 1996, the death squads, police, and former military officers transitioned to the drug trade, Guatemala being midway between South American supply and U.S. demand. Arms smuggling, human trafficking, extortion, and kidnapping for ransom filled in the gaps.

Youth gangs proliferated. Child sex tourism, kiddie porn, and sale of children became common. So did teen pregnancy. One in three girls gives birth before the age of 18, most often as a byproduct of rape. Women are being murdered at rates on a par with those of the war’s bloodiest years.

This is the Guatemala Nury Chavarria was to be sent to after 24 years in America, her appeals to remain in Norwalk with her four children, U.S. citizens all, rejected by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Our tax dollars — and President Donald Trump’s immigration policies — at work.

As the sole supporter of four kids between 21 and 9, with a stable job as a housekeeper and no criminal record, Nury was a low priority for deportation under the Obama administration, which granted her multiple stays for humanitarian reasons.

She was expecting another stay last month when she checked in with ICE in Hartford. Instead, she was fitted with an ankle GPS bracelet and told she needed a oneway ticket back. Her departure date was July 20, but she instead sought temporary sanctuary in a New Haven church.

Because she had neither the means to buy plane tickets to Guatemala for her children nor a means to support them once there, Nury would have been forced to leave them behind even though she had no one to leave them with.

Her eldest, 21-year-old Elvin, who has cerebral palsy and learning problems, wouldn’t be able to care for himself; as minors, 9-year-old Hayley and 15-year-old Kevin would become wards of the state of Connecticut.

“The burden of keeping her here is far less than sending her back,” says her lawyer, Glenn Formica, who points out that her dilemma “is common for many immigrant mothers. If this country can’t show mercy to immigrant mothers, we have lost all sense of our own humanity.”

Nury would have to wait a federally mandated 10 years before she could return to the U.S. By that time, her youngest child would be 19, the same age as her mother when she fled her war-torn country in the hope of a better life.

Like the families it destroys, U.S. immigration policy is broken, its effect on children like Nury’s both heartless and heartbreaking. A nation that shatters innocent lives and leaves no room for mercy is not the America we know.

Peacetime in Guatemala has proven a contradiction in terms. Fueled by a surfeit of weapons and a society accustomed to using them, the postwar violence has continued apace.