Mexican Mom Was Deported With Her American Children; Family Attorney Says They Were Deceived by ICE

An undocumented mother was deported back to Mexico with her three children, two of whom are American citizens. Their family says they were deceived by authorities after being promised an asylum case in Austin, Texas.

Denisse Parra, her husband and three children aged 4, 5 and 9, were detained on May 1 at a stop light in front of Dobie High School in Austin due to an expired license plate in their car. They were immediately interrogated about their immigration status, Noticias Telemundo reports.

Family members say they were not allowed to talk to anyone while detained. Eventually the mom was released with the three children with an ankle monitor, while the husband remained under Immigration and Customs Services (ICE) custody.

Days later, Parra and her children arrived at an immigration appointment. They said they were promised an asylum case and even a work permit. Instead they were taken into custody once again, then to Laredo, Texas and ultimately deported to Reynosa, Mexico.

"Unfortunately, she believed them. She's a very vulnerable person and was scared," Sulma Franco, Immigration Campaign Manager for Grassroots Leadership, told Noticias Telemundo.

The family's attorney issued a statement complaining about the treatment by immigration agents. "ICE denied communication with close relatives who were willing to keep the children and instead detained them for 24 hours before deporting them to Mexico," said litigator Cori Hash.

"It's a huge pain, an injustice, and something I can't explain," a family member who asked to remain anonymous told Telemundo. "[The children] don't understand what's happening. They just want to go home and wonder why they're there."

The family urged all migrants to be careful and not to trust authorities. "Don't believe what they tell you or that they're just going to sign something because it's not true," they said in a statement.

Parra and her American children are not the first U.S. citizens with Hispanic connections to be deported or detained by ICE.

In one of the most notorious instances, three children who are U.S. citizens— aged 2, 4 and 7— were removed to Honduras along with their undocumented mothers, according to attorneys and court records. One child, a 4-year-old boy with Stage 4 cancer, was sent without medication or access to his doctors.

Both families were detained at routine immigration check-ins in New Orleans, denied communication with attorneys or family members and placed on a flight to Honduras the following morning.

The full scope of U.S. citizens wrongfully deported is not known as the federal government does not release data on how often members of this group are mistakenly detained or even removed from the country. However, The Washington Post estimates that there are at least 12 other well-known cases, drawing conclusions from court records, interviews and news reports.

"As immigration officials become more indiscriminate about who they're targetin— all while they're pressured to deport people faster and to avoid immigration court proceedings— it creates a situation in which the possibility of illegally detaining and deporting a U.S. citizen rises immensely, because citizenship is not something that we can spot on people's foreheads," said Cesar Cuauhtemoc Garcia Hernandez,a law professor at Ohio State University.