It has been almost a month since the Infmissionation Authorities arrested Catalina “Xochitl” Santiago, a 28 -year -old immigrant rights activist, community organizer and beneficiary of the Deferred Action Program for Children’s Arrivals (DACA).
According to his family and lawyers, Santiago has a valid DACA status, making it one of the almost 538,000 undocumented young adults brought to the United States as children who are currently authorized to work and study. According to the program, DACA recipients are also supposed to be protected from detention and immigration deportation.
Santiago was arrested on August 3. Before boarding a domestic flight at an airport in El Paso, two men approached him with border patrol uniforms. A video posted by Movement Cosec shows one of them telling Santiago that they needed to ask how he obtained his labor authorization.
After that, Santiago was taken to an immigration detention center and subject to deportation procedures.
“When I heard of his unfair arrest, he broke me,” said his brother, José Santiago, in a virtual press call on Thursday that included relatives, lawyers and the support of immigrants defense groups who asked for their release. “My family couldn’t believe it. We were devastated.”
The administration of President Donald Trump has insisted that Daca beneficiaries “may be subject to arrests and deportation” because “Daca does not confer any form of legal status in this country,” according to the National Security Assistant Secretary, Tricia McLaughlin.
Originally from Mexico, Santiago grew in southern Florida, where he began to cultivate his passion to help others, according to his younger brother, José Santiago.
Santiago moved to El Paso, where he has worked with the harvest movement group to advocate undocumented immigrants. He settled there and married his wife, Desiree Miller, earlier this year.
Miller said that she and her wife run a community garden, where they teach children and the elderly about agriculture and medicinal plants.
Christine Miranda, a friend and colleague of Santiago in motion harvest, said they have worked together to organize protests and demonstrations throughout the country. They also successfully advocated driving licenses for undocumented immigrants in New Jersey and Massachusetts, and defended Daca during Trump’s first term.
Santiago “is my best friend, my greatest defender, and it is really difficult to know what she is suffering,” Miller said.
The National Security Department did not respond to a request for comments on why Santiago was arrested. But the Federal Agency told a local television station in the step that “Santiago’s criminal history includes causing positions, possession of drugs and drug paraphernalia.” While Santiago was arrested five years ago according to these accusations, she was never formally accused of anything, according to Norma Islas, one of Santiago’s lawyers.
Islands and Luis Cortes, another lawyer from Santiago, have presented a motion to rescind the ongoing deportation procedures against their client based on their DACA protections.
According to Cortes, his client only has “a raid conviction that occurred during a peaceful civil disobedience” organized as part of the youth mobilization efforts that helped keep Daca in his place. “It is not a criminal behavior, it is a civil action.”
Cortes added that the Government has constantly renewed the state of Daca de Santiago, a process that requires “rigorous background verifications.”
Cortes described the comments of the DHS as an attempt to “vilice it to justify its arrest and arrest.”
Before the next Immigration Hearing in Santiago in September, community members in El Paso and Defensores in a dozen other cities throughout the country have organized at least 20 demonstrations and vigils that demand the release of Santiago.
“We want Xochitl for free,” said Miller.
The case of Santiago is one of the most recent showing how DACA receptors are being arrested in the midst of Trump’s immigration repression efforts.
This month, José Valdovinos, a 27-year-old DACA receiver in Arizona, was arrested by immigration officers who said that “Daca is no longer considered a legal entry to the United States,” said his wife, Jitzell Flores, to Kyma-DT, an affiliated of NBC in Yuma, Arizona.
NBC News also reported immigration arrests of four other DACA receptors last month.
“These are not isolated incidents. They are evident warning signs,” said Thursday of Deya Aldana, director of National Campaigns of United We Dream, the network led by the largest immigrant youth in the country, during the virtual press call. “What we are seeing is a shameless and alarming escalation in the effort to move away and weaken Daca.”
Since 2012, when an executive action of President Barack Obama created the program, Daca opened work and educational paths to hundreds of thousands of young people without the legal immigration status, becoming one of the most successful immigrant integration policies.
Trump’s efforts to end Daca in his first mandate and republican legal challenges have excluded 600,000 adolescents and young adults eligible for DACA of the program, which is currently not open to new applicants.
TO This year’s judicial ruling determined that all DACA recipients can continue to renew their status as long as they meet their requirements.
“Daca is dying for a thousand paper cuts,” Aldana said, “hoping that the American people will not be paying attention.”
