When Deportation Is a Death Sentence

"Back in her home town, Elena was assaulted at gunpoint by the man she’d fled. He tortured her, holding a lighter to her skin. Other gang members cracked her thirteen-year-old son’s skull. She fled, with her kids, to a tobacco-farming town in western Honduras, where the man who’d been pursuing her found her again. Once more, she escaped to the U.S. This time, authorities agreed that Elena’s fear—and the threat to her kids’ lives—was credible. But, like Rosaleda, she is barred from receiving asylum because of her prior deportation.

Many immigrants, after being deported, never get a second chance to prove their claims. Constantino Morales was a cop in Guerrero, Mexico, until he tried to break up a drug cartel and became a target of violence. He escaped to the U.S. and worked at a Cheesecake Factory in Des Moines, Iowa, and then became a popular laborers’-rights advocate. As with Laura, a minor traffic stop led to his removal, which he initially fought. At a community meeting with Tom Latham, at that time a Republican congressman, Morales said, “If I am sent back, I will face more violence, and I could lose my life.” Morales had applied for asylum a month earlier. He was denied. At the time, the U.S. State Department called Guerrero “the most violent state in Mexico.” Seven months after Morales’s deportation, he was shot and killed."

read the newstory by SARAH STILLMAN