ICE under fire for allegedly using ‘intentional’ deception to deport a 6-year-old deaf child

California’s Superintendent is demanding the return of a six-year-old deaf student after he, his mother, and his five-year-old sibling were detained and deported to Colombia. The Guardian reported that Tony Thurmond, the State Superintendent of Public Instruction, is accusing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) of “intentional” deception, claiming they made it impossible for attorneys to intervene.

Lesly Rodriguez Gutierrez and her two sons were arrested when they reported for a routine check-in at an ICE office in San Francisco as part of the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program (Isap). What’s especially heartbreaking is that a relative waiting outside couldn’t even hand off the assistive devices that the six-year-old, who is deaf and uses a cochlear implant, desperately needed. He isn’t the first child to be deported, irrespective of medical needs. 

Thurmond stated that “No child should be ripped from their home community and hidden in a detention center, especially not a Deaf child who is being deprived of the ability to communicate and understand what is happening to him.” He’s demanding that “the federal government return our student to his school community now,” emphasizing that “These inhumane and illegal attacks on our families must end.”

The cruelty never stops

Nikolas De Bremaeker, managing attorney for the Alameda County Immigration Legal and Education Partnership (ACILEP), said that the family had “strong humanitarian reasons why they should not be deported and they should have had their safeguards.” De Bremaeker believes that “Regardless of the status around deportation, humanity should stop them from sending a six-year-old into a life-threatening situation.”

Immigration attorneys and Gutierrez’s family faced a frustrating runaround from ICE as they tried to file legal petitions to contest the deportation. They were told Gutierrez and her children were headed to a detention center in Louisiana before subsequent updates changed the destination. Ultimately, the family was briefly held in a detention center in Phoenix before being deported to Colombia. 

De Bremaeker is convinced that the confusion about their location was a calculated move by ICE. He believed it was meant to stop him and other immigration attorneys from filing petitions in the correct jurisdictions. 

Gutierrez and her sons first arrived in the US in 2022. Even though her initial asylum was rejected, she is under the Isap as part of her appeal. 

Teachers and administrators from the boys’ school joined Thurmond to plead for his return. A teacher specialist explained that “These were not opportunities that they had in their home country. These were the reasons that [his] family emigrated to the United States, and specifically to the Bay Area of California.” 

She added that “Detention for any individual is traumatic. Consider the complexities when the individual is a six-year-old deaf child whose only access to the world is through ASL, a language that he has begun to learn in the past two years.”

Thurmond made a direct appeal to newly appointed DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin to “call Donald Trump and have this student released and returned so that we can continue to provide care for this young man.”