Officials free DACA recipient
Customs and Border Protection agents release a 28-year-old flight attendant they detained who has a DACA permit after the airline she works for assigned her to a flight to Mexico.
Selene Saavedra had been a flight attendant with Mesa Airlines for just a month when the company scheduled her on a flight to Mexico.
The 28-year-old from Bryan had put the country on her “no fly” list, worried that her temporary permit for young immigrants who came to the U.S. illegally as children would keep her from being allowed back in. Her supervisors incorrectly told her that status, known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, would protect her.
“I was afraid of being fired,” she told her husband, a U.S. citizen. “I’m a brand-new employee on probation.”
Saavedra told her supervisors at the regional airline that she was concerned. She followed up with a phone call on the day of her flight to make sure they were certain she could go. She had already been temporarily approved to become a legal permanent resident through her marriage, and she didn’t want to risk her status. She lacked only a few steps, including obtaining a waiver to undergo a consular interview in Peru, before she expected to receive her green card.
Immediately upon her return from Monterrey to Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport, Customs and Border Protection agents detained her, saying she did not have a valid visa. Federal agents imprisoned Saavedra in an immigrant detention
center in Conroe and asked the government to revoke her DACA permit. She faced deportation to Peru, a country she hasn’t seen since she was 3.
Her case is the latest example of both the uncertainty faced by more than 700,000 so-called Dreamers across the country and of the unfettered authority CBP officers have to deny anyone’s entrance into the U.S.
“This shows how broken our immigration system is,” said Stephen Yale-Loehr, an immigration law professor at Cornell University. “Immigration law is very complicated, and CBP has incredible power at the border, and this administration is exercising it to detain more people, rather than extending their discretion favorably.”
DACA rescinded
President Donald Trump rescinded DACA in 2017, and although courts so far have allowed current recipients to renew their permits, they can’t leave the country as they could before, when they could apply for a status known as “advance parole.” Jin K. Park, the first-ever DACA recipient to win Oxford University’s prestigious Rhodes Scholarship, may not be able to attend the school as a result.
The Trump administration has requested that the Supreme Court terminate DACA, but justices have not taken up the case. For the past 18 months, Dreamers have teetered between hope and despair as two government shutdowns teased a resolution to their fate but came and went without one.
When Saavedra arrived in Houston on Feb. 12, CBP officers processed her as a “refused crew member” because she didn’t have valid entry documentation. After 24 hours in their custody, she was transferred to the federal detention center, Tim Oberle, a spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said in an email.
Saavedra’s immigration attorney, Belinda Arroyo, requested that the agency grant her parole, which would allow Saavedra to remain here while she fights her immigration
case in court. Instead, she said, the agency told her that it had requested that the government revoke Saavedra’s DACA permit, which would mean she could immediately be deported.
‘Dire situation’
Arwen FitzGerald, a spokeswoman for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency in charge of DACA permits, said she could not comment on specific cases and cited a January 2018 memo stating that the agency would not accept or approve “advance parole” requests from DACA recipients allowing them to travel.
Saavedra’s situation was dire, and then her husband took to the internet. “It was a quagmire, and it was definitely a pointless battle,” said David Watkins, 33. “Until I got social media involved.”
He emailed The Points Guy, a U.S. website that is focused on travel and aviation and that has a popular online following. Thursday, the site published a story on Saavedra’s plight, and within hours her case had gone viral with the hashtags #FreeSelene and #Bringherhome.
United We Dream, the country’s largest organization for Dreamers, organized a press call. The Association of Flight Attendants-CWA launched a petition with MoveOn.org to request that Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen release Saavedra and drop her charges. By Friday, it had more than 18,400 signatures,
and Hillary Clinton had shared it on Twitter.
The union’s president, Sara Nelson, in a statement jointly issued with Mesa Airlines, urged the government to release Saavedra. “She has followed the rules, paid taxes and is currently in the process to citizenship,” Nelson said. “The United States is her country, and we need to bring her home.”
Jonathan Ornstein, CEO of Mesa Air Group, said in a statement that the government should free Saavedra and drop her immigration charges.
“It is patently unfair for someone to be detained for six weeks over something that is nothing more than an administrative error and a misunderstanding,” Ornstein said.
Late Friday, Saavedra called her husband, whom she met years ago at Texas A&M University, where they both studied.
“She called me crying and said, ‘Come get me,’” Watkins said. “The power of social media.”
Oberle, the ICE spokesman, confirmed that Saavedra was released from ICE custody at 6:15 p.m. Friday, “pending adjudication of her immigration proceedings.”
Watkins said the ordeal wasn’t over and that Saavedra would still have to plead her case in immigration court.
“But it’s been a month and a half of purely bad news, so this is the first bit of good news,” he said.