Immigration Authorities Say Daughter’s Plea To Pope Francis Had No Influence On Release Of Detainee

The father of Jersey Vargas, a 10-year-old California girl who hopped a barrier at the Vatican last week to ask Pope Francis to urge the Obama administration to suspend deportations of undocumented immigrants, has been released from a Louisiana detention center after posting a $5,000 bond, according to the Associated Press. Mario Vargas Lopez, who according to ICE was arrested last year for driving under the influence and has spent five months in the detention center, according to La Opinion, will eventually go before an immigration judge to determine whether or not he will ultimately be deported.

Bryan Cox, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) spokesman in New Orleans, told Reuters that Vargas Lopez’s release on bond “in no way translates into special action on his behalf,” and called it “standard procedure.” Cox added that Jersey’s father, who was reunited with his family in Los Angeles on Friday, will be required to check in with ICE officials periodically as he waits to see a judge. In 2001, the Supreme Court recommended that immigrant detainees who are facing deportation proceedings should not be detained for longer than six months, though civil-rights groups have in the past uncovered cases like one in 2010, when over 350 detainees in Los Angeles were found to have spent considerably more time behind bars.

Jersey, who told the AP after the news of her father’s release she was “happy and proud because I’m finally going to have my dad back,” had traveled to Rome as part of a 16-person group representing the children of immigrant parents facing deportation. Her parents are from Hidalgo, Mexico. Two of her siblings were born there, while she and two others were born in the US. She earlier told El Universal that in her brief encounter with Pope Francis, the pontiff “blessed me, gave me a kiss on the forehead, and told me that he was going to talk with President Obama about me.”