Homeland Security chief defends deportation of DREAMer immigrant
By
Shelley Connor
22 April 2017
In a joint interview with Attorney General Jeff Sessions broadcast by MSNBC on Friday, Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly defended the deportation of Juan Manuel Montes, a 23-year-old Mexican native who was expelled from the US in February despite being actively enrolled in the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA), which is supposed to protect undocumented immigrants who were brought to the US as children from being deported.
Montes’ case, the first reported deportation of a so-called DREAMer, the nickname for DACA enrollees, came to the attention of the public on Tuesday when lawyers for Montes filed suit in federal court in Southern California to demand that the Trump administration release documents relating to his case.
Montes, who has lived in the US since he was nine, was arrested, interrogated and walked across the border from Calexico to Mexicali on February 17 despite being covered by the DACA program through 2018. Under the program, enrollees are required to reapply every two years.
Montes’ lawyers explain in court filings that their client was mugged and beaten in Mexicali and, desperate to return to his home and family, tried to scale a border wall two days later, only to be caught by US border police and deported once again to Mexico.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which oversees Customs and Border Protection and its tens of thousands of border police, has refused all requests from Montes’ defense team for documents on the case. In response to the lawsuit, it claims that Montes was not deported on February 17, but voluntarily crossed into Mexico without obtaining prior permission from US Citizenship and…