Guatemalan woman who lives and works on Vermont dairy farm gets immigration reprieve — for now
'Sí se puede,' Bernardo said. 'And united we stand strong.'
According to her attorney, Brett Stokes, ICE agents told her Monday that she was free for now, but that she must return again in 90 days.
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For more than a decade, Bernardo and her partner have lived and worked on an Orleans County dairy farm, milking cows and raising a growing family. They have five children of their own and take care of two of Bernardo's orphaned half-sisters — all between the ages of 5 and 18.
Bernardo entered the country without permission in 2014 and was immediately apprehended, according to Stokes. She has had to check in with ICE officials ever since, but those appointments have grown more frequent — and more fraught — since President Donald Trump took office vowing to deport a record number of undocumented people.
Bernardo's case has drawn significant attention in Vermont over the years, with dozens of state lawmakers
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'I consider them more than just employees,' he told the Globe. 'They're part of the family.'
Morin and his partner, Lynn Beede, drove Bernardo and two of her children to Monday's meeting. After she addressed the crowd of supporters, Morin said he was filled with 'relief and happiness.'
'I'm glad for her family and for everybody,' he said. 'The outcome was good today, but it's not over yet.'
Bernardo was not the only Vermonter facing a nerve-wracking check-in Monday morning.
Steven Tendo, a pastor and community organizer who fled his native Uganda in 2018, entered the building alongside Bernardo for a similar appointment with ICE officials. He was also released and told to return in 90 days.
Tendo, 40, has said that he faced political persecution and torture in Uganda after a charitable organization he founded tangled with the Ugandan government over its civic education efforts,
In 2019, a federal immigration judge denied Tendo's application for asylum, citing inconsistencies around aspects of his story. After spending more than two years in a federal immigration detention center in Texas, he relocated to Vermont, where he lives in Colchester. He now works as a licensed nursing assistant at the University of Vermont Medical Center in Burlington.
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Members of a union that represents him and other hospital workers, Support Staff United, were among the protesters who joined Monday's rally for Tendo and Bernardo.
'It's a huge relief to know that you've left your bed not thinking that you're going to go back,' Tendo said after leaving his appointment. 'And all of the sudden someone tells you, 'Oh, you're OK for the next three months. Come back in October.''
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Yahoo
39 minutes ago
- Yahoo
This family self-deported to Mexico, and lost everything
By Diego Oré URUAPAN, Mexico (Reuters) -As broadcasters declared Donald Trump the next President of the United States, Sonia Coria turned to her husband and asked if they should go home. For seven months they had been living in Glendale, Arizona, sharing a two-bedroom apartment with Coria's aunt and slowly building a life far from the threats and cartel violence that made them flee Mexico. Coria, 25, took odd jobs as a cleaner and her husband, Carlos Leon, also 25, worked as a gardener. Their eldest child Naomi, eight, was going to a local charter school, making friends and picking up English. In the small kidney-shaped pool of the condominium building where they lived, she had learned to swim. Little Carlos, five, was learning to ride a bike. Their neighborhood in western Glendale - a city of some 250,000 people just outside Phoenix - was home to lots of Mexican migrants. Opposite their apartment block was a small butcher, Carnicería Uruapan, named after the town they had fled in the dangerous Mexican state of Michoacan. They had bought their first car on installments - a tan-colored 2008 Ford F-150 pickup truck that cost them $4,000. They were still poor, sometimes going to soup kitchens for a meal or picking up appliances and toys that neighbors had thrown out, but it was a life they could only have dreamed of back home in Mexico. Trump's campaign, and his victory, changed how they felt about living in the United States. They had followed the law, entering the United States at a border crossing and applying for asylum. The application was in process. But they now worried they could lose everything. "We run the risk of them taking away the little we've managed to scrape together," Coria remembers telling her husband that night as election coverage played on the television. Leon nodded and hugged his wife. They began to cry quietly, afraid Carlos and Naomi would hear them as they played on the floor in the bedroom they all shared. The kids had been allowed to stay up late, so that Coria and Leon could watch the results come in. The family's account is based on interviews with Leon, Coria and NGOs that helped them on their return to Mexico. Reuters was not able to verify all details of their journey, but core facts were supported by photos, videos, messages, and customs documents the family shared. As the Trump administration vows to enact the "largest deportation operation in American history," authorities have raided workplaces, sent alleged Venezuelan gang members to a notorious prison in El Salvador, and deployed National Guard and active-duty Marines to contain anti-government protests in Los Angeles. Beyond the 239,000 people the administration has deported so far, some cuffed and led on to planes, the very public expulsion of migrants has had another effect: triggering tough and complicated decisions in immigrant households across the U.S. on whether to stay or leave. As they discussed returning to Mexico, Leon set one condition: That they wait until after Trump took office on January 20, to save up some more money and to see if he proved as hardline on migration as he'd promised. In the end, fear led them to leave before Trump had even been sworn in. 'PROJECT HOMECOMING' Despite high-profile deportations to Guantanamo or El Salvador, the total number of deportations under Trump trails former President Joe Biden's last year in office. Increasingly, persuading migrants to leave of their own accord has become a core strategy. "Self-deportation is safe," reads a DHS flyer on display at immigration courts in the U.S. "Leave on your own terms by picking your departure flight." The Trump administration in March launched an app called CBP Home designed to help people relocate and in May, Trump unveiled "Project Homecoming," a sweeping initiative that offers "illegal aliens" $1,000 and a free flight to leave. Since then, "tens of thousands of illegal aliens" self-deported through CBP Home app, a Department of Homeland Security official told Reuters, without giving further details. More than 56,000 Mexicans have voluntarily returned from the U.S. since Trump returned to the White House, according to Mexican government figures. Figures from last year were unavailable. Self-deportation is not a new idea. During the Great Depression and again in 1954's Operation Wetback, U.S. deportation campaigns pressured over a million Mexicans and Mexican-Americans to leave - far more than through formal deportations. "Self-deportation is not an accident, but a deliberate strategy," said Maria Jose Espinosa, executive director at CEDA, a non-profit organization in Washington that works to improve relations between the U.S. and Latin American countries. 'LEFT WITH NOTHING' On January 19, Coria, Leon, and the two kids packed what they could fit into their F-150 and drove toward the Mexican border. It was just a three-hour drive. A few weeks before, they had witnessed immigration enforcement detaining the father of a Mexican family living two doors down from them. That, Coria said, had made up their minds. A lawyer they saw at the Mexican consulate in Phoenix reinforced their view, telling them that their asylum application was weak and they would likely be deported. The consulate told Reuters the lawyer, Hugo Larios, did on occasion offer free consultations, but they did not have access to details of what was discussed or a record of the Coria-Leon family visiting in January, only in April 2024. Larios did not respond to requests for comment. It was a hard decision to leave. They had fled their hometown in February last year after armed men claiming to be members of the notorious Jalisco New Generation Cartel began showing up at the avocado farm where Leon was working as a guard, demanding protection money. Leon didn't have the money to pay, and the owner was away. Now, they were going back. Uruapan is one of the most violent cities in the world, with an official murder rate of nearly 60 per 100,000 inhabitants. In recent years organized crime has taken over the area, running or extorting farms and businesses and killing those who refuse to pay. But the family hoped their savings would make a difference. They had managed to scrape together $5,000 and the plan was to buy land and open an auto repair shop using their pickup truck to help with the business. At 5 p.m., on January 19, they drew up to the Dennis DeConcini border crossing at Nogales. As they passed Mexican customs, the Mexican National Guard stopped their vehicle and asked for papers, the family said. Leon didn't have the car title, just a temporary permit issued that day, so officials confiscated the truck and threatened to arrest him for vehicle smuggling. The officials also took $5,000, the family's entire savings, for what they called a fine before Leon could go free. With no car and no money, Coria, Leon, Naomi and Carlos sat on the ground outside customs, surrounded by their remaining possessions - 100 kilos of clothing, tools, kitchen utensils, a television, refrigerator, and children's toys. "We lost everything," Coria recalled, in tears. "We left with nothing and came back worse off." A spokesperson from Mexico's National Customs Agency declined to comment on the specifics of the Coria case. She said in an email to Reuters that its office "acts in strict adherence to the legal framework governing the entry and exit of merchandise, as well as the customs control applicable to persons and vehicles crossing points of entry into the national territory." Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum told journalists this month that her government is strengthening its "Mexico Embraces You" program to receive Mexican migrants voluntarily returning from the U.S. to ensure "they are not subject to any act of corruption by customs or immigration when they enter our country." The program offers a $100 cash grant, job placement, free transportation to their places of origin, and facilities for importing goods, but the family returned before it went into action. As the sun began to set, the dry desert air turned cold. The family worried about where to spend the night and how they would reach Michoacan, some 2,000 kilometers away. They were spotted by Francisco Olachea, a nurse with Voices from the Border, a humanitarian organization that works on both sides of the border. Olachea remembers approaching the crying family outside customs and offering them a hand. They loaded the Corias' belongings onto the NGO's ambulance and a rented pickup truck paid for by Olachea and another NGO, Salvavision. That night, Olachea took them to NANA Ministries, a Christian organization in the border town of Nogales. They were offered water, fruit, coffee, and pozole, a traditional Mexican broth made from corn kernels with meat and vegetables. The four spent the night in a small room. Together, Voices from the Border and Salvavision raised just over $1,000 to buy the family bus tickets to Michoacan and send some belongings to Sonia Coria's mother's house in black garbage bags. What they couldn't send was donated to the church where they had spent the night. On January 20, the family returned to Uruapan. The four of them shared a small room with no door in the tin-roofed home belonging to Coria's mother. The couple slept on the floor, and the kids shared a bed with no mattress. They later moved into an even smaller room at an aunt's house. Leon eventually found work in a car repair workshop. Coria got a job in a Chinese restaurant. The children complain about leaving the United States. Carlos asks for his bike; Naomi is forgetting her English. In June, a 62-page letter from customs seen by Reuters informed them that their truck had been seized and had become property of the federal treasury. Also, that they owe the equivalent of $18,000 in customs duties for bringing in the F-150 to Mexico. Solve the daily Crossword
USA Today
40 minutes ago
- USA Today
This rural airport (with a jail on the tarmac) is Trump's deportation hub
The Alexandria Staging Facility features a detention center on the tarmac and has become President Donald Trump's main hub for deportation flights. ALEXANDRIA, LA – Sam Zeidan pulled onto the grassy shoulder at the airport, hoping to see his brother among the shackled men boarding a deportation flight. A jet roared on the sweaty tarmac. The site, known as the Alexandria Staging Facility in rural Louisiana, is the nation's only ICE jail-combo-airport and is the top hub for the Trump administration's mass deportation campaign. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportation flights climbed to a five-year high in June, and Alexandria ranked first among the nation's five busiest deportation hubs, according analyst Tom Cartwright, who tracks ICE flights for the nonprofit Witness at the Border. The record pace has continued in July, with the Trump administration leaning heavily on the Louisiana ICE detention centers that feed Alexandria. The Alexandria Staging Facility sits on the tarmac of a small regional airport between a golf course and gated neighborhood. Zeidan squinted through the chain-link fence. A Palestinian immigrant with U.S. citizenship, Zeidan told USA TODAY he believed his older brother was going to be deported that day from Alexandria. "He's been making a lot of trouble here," Zeidan said on a Wednesday in mid-June, lacing his fingers through the fence. "Yesterday, they sent him over here but the flight was canceled." More: Trump approval rating drops in new poll; more Americans oppose immigration policies 'Cornerstone of ICE deportation flights' Louisiana's nine dedicated ICE facilities have been holding more than 7,000 detainees each day, on average, in recent months. The state dramatically expanded ICE detention during the first Trump administration, growing its network from four detention centers and about 2,000 detainees. Alexandria's holding facility is one of the oldest, dating to 2014. It has 400 detention beds, receives buses from the ICE jails in rural communities around the state and is run by one of the nation's largest private prison contractors, GEO Group Inc. "Historically, it's a facility that people will go to in the couple of days before their removal flight, because it's attached to the airport and ICE Air," said Deb Fleischaker, a former ICE official who served under the Biden and first Trump administrations. "It's designed as a short-term detention facility." On that mid-June morning, guards could be seen moving men and women off a white prison bus into the humid air, already nearing 90 degrees. Chained at the wrists, waist and ankles in five-point restraints, they climbed a stairway into a plane with "Eastern" painted on the body, blue on white. "If you had to pick one ICE facility that is the cornerstone of the ICE deportation flights, Alexandria is it," Cartwright said. "There are a lot of detention centers that feed into it." Deportation flights on the rise Nationwide, the number of deportation flights rose to 209 in June, according to Cartwright – the highest level since the Biden administration conducted more than 193 flights during a mass deportation of Haitian asylum-seekers in September 2021. That's up 46% from 143 deportation flights in June 2024, he said. The number of deportation flights has increased 12% since President Donald Trump's inauguration, according to Cartwright's analysis. But because the administration doesn't release details of who is on the planes, it's unclear whether the total number of people deported has risen at the same pace. Some deportation flights depart with seats full, 80 to 120 people, to Mexico or Central America, Cartwright said. Others – like the charter carrying eight criminal deportees to South Sudan – leave to faraway destinations with fewer passengers on board. ICE reported removing 271,48 immigrants in the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, 2024. ICE removed 228,282 people from Oct. 1 through mid-July, according to ICE data. The agency didn't respond to USA TODAY's request for information on the number of deportations during the Trump administration so far. Congress recently approved a cash infusion to boost ICE's Enforcement and Removal Operations division: $29.9 billion. The lump sum can be used, among other things, for "for fleet modernization" to support deportations. Alexandria may not hold the top spot for long: The U.S. Army plans to host a 5,000-bed temporary detention center on Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, with access to the airport on base. More: White House touts nearly 140,000 deportations, but data says roughly half actually deported 'It's Trump season' Zeidan and his family run a grocery store in Alexandria, and he drives Uber on the side, he said. But his brother got into trouble over drugs and was picked up by ICE after being released from a six-year state prison sentence. "He's been in Jena nine months," Zeidan said, referring to the ICE Central Louisiana Processing Center in Jena, Louisiana. His brother's wife is a citizen, Zeidan said, and the couple have five children. He wasn't sure why ICE held his brother for nine months. Or why, his family would later learn, he was held on the tarmac that day for more than four hours before being bused to Texas, then back to a detention center in Louisiana, where he is still being held. He shrugged: "It's Trump season, you know."
Los Angeles Times
40 minutes ago
- Los Angeles Times
Trump says he's deporting the ‘worst of the worst.' What is really happening?
They called them the 'worst of the worst.' For more than a month and a half, the Trump administration has posted a barrage of mugshots of L.A. undocumented immigrants with long rap sheets. Officials have spotlighted Cuong Chanh Phan, a 49-year-old Vietnamese man convicted in 1997 of second-degree murder for his role in slaying two teens at a high school graduation party. They have shared blurry photos on Instagram of a slew of convicted criminals such as Rolando Veneracion-Enriquez, a 55-year-old Filipino man convicted in 1996 of sexual penetration with a foreign object with force and assault with intent to commit a felony. And Eswin Uriel Castro, a Mexican convicted in 2002 of child molestation and in 2021 of assault with a deadly weapon. But the immigrants that the Department of Homeland Security showcase in X posts and news releases do not represent the majority of immigrants swept up across Los Angeles. As the number of immigration arrests in the L.A. region quadrupled from 540 in April to 2,185 in June, seven out of 10 immigrants arrested in June had no criminal conviction — a trend that immigrant advocates say belies administration claims that they are targeting 'heinous illegal alien criminals' who represent a threat to public safety. According to a Los Angeles Times analysis of ICE data from the Deportation Data Project, the proportion of immigrants without criminal convictions arrested in seven counties in and around L.A. has skyrocketed from 35% in April, to 46% in May, and to 69% from June 1 to June 26. Austin Kocher, a geographer and research assistant professor at Syracuse University who specializes in immigration enforcement, said the Trump administration was not being entirely honest about the criminal status of those they were arresting. Officials, he said, followed a strategy of focusing on the minority of violent convicted criminals so they could justify enforcement policies that are proving to be less popular. 'I think they know that if they were honest with the American public that they're arresting people who cook our food, wash dishes in the kitchen, take care of people in nursing homes, people who are just living in part of the community … there's a large segment of the public, including a large segment of Trump's own supporters, who would be uncomfortable and might even oppose those kinds of immigration practices.' In Los Angeles, the raids swept up garment worker Jose Ortiz, who worked 18 years at the Ambiance Apparel clothing warehouse in downtown L.A., before being nabbed in a June 6 raid; car wash worker Jesus Cruz, a 52-year-old father who was snatched on June 8 — just before his daughter's graduation — from Westchester Hand Wash; and Emma De Paz, a recent widow and tamale vendor from Guatemala who was arrested June 19 outside a Hollywood Home Depot. Such arrests may be influencing the public's perception of the raids. Multiple polls show support for Trump's immigration agenda slipping as masked federal agents increasingly swoop up undocumented immigrants from workplaces and streets. ICE data shows that about 31% of the immigrants arrested across the L.A. region from June 1 to June 26 had criminal convictions, 11% had pending criminal charges and 58% were classified as 'other immigration violator,' which ICE defines as 'individuals without any known criminal convictions or pending charges in ICE's system of record at the time of the enforcement action.' The L.A. region's surge in arrests of noncriminals has been more dramatic than the U.S. as a whole: Arrests of immigrants with no criminal convictions climbed nationally from 57% in April to 69% in June. Federal raids here have also been more fiercely contested in Southern California — particularly in L.A. County, where more than 2 million residents are undocumented or living with undocumented family members. 'A core component of their messaging is that this is about public safety, that the people that they are arresting are threats to their communities,' said David Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, a Libertarian think tank. 'But it's hard to maintain that this is all about public safety when you're going out and arresting people who are just going about their lives and working.' Trump never said he would arrest only criminals. Almost as soon as he retook office on Jan. 20, Trump signed a stack of executive orders aimed at drastically curbing immigration. The administration then moved to expand arrests from immigrants who posed a security threat to anyone who entered the country illegally. Yet while officials kept insisting they were focused on violent criminals, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt issued a warning: 'That doesn't mean that the other illegal criminals who entered our nation's borders are off the table.' As White House chief advisor on border policy Tom Homan put it: 'If you're in the country illegally, you got a problem.' Still, things did not really pick up until May, when White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller ordered ICE's top field officials to shift to more aggressive tactics: arresting undocumented immigrants, whether or not they had a criminal record. Miller set a new goal: arresting 3,000 undocumented people a day, a quota that immigration experts say is impossible to reach by focusing only on criminals. 'There aren't enough criminal immigrants in the United States to fill their arrest quotas and to get millions and millions of deportations, which is what the president has explicitly promised,' Bier said. 'Immigration and Customs Enforcement says there's half a million removable noncitizens who have criminal convictions in the United States. Most of those are nonviolent: traffic, immigration offenses. It's not millions and millions.' By the time Trump celebrated six months in office, DHS boasted that the Trump administration had already arrested more than 300,000 undocumented immigrants. '70% of ICE arrests,' the agency said in a news release, 'are individuals with criminal convictions or charges.' But that claim no longer appeared to be true. While 78% of undocumented immigrants arrested across the U.S. in April had a criminal conviction or faced a pending charge, that number had plummeted to 57% in June. In L.A., the difference between what Trump officials said and the reality on the ground was more stark: Only 43% of those arrested across the L.A. region had criminal convictions or faced a pending charge. Still, ICE kept insisting it was 'putting the worst first.' As stories circulate across communities about the arrests of law-abiding immigrants, there are signs that support for Trump's deportation agenda is falling. A CBS/YouGov poll published July 20 shows about 56% of those surveyed approved of Trump's handling of immigration in March, but that dropped to 50% in June and 46% in July. About 52% of poll respondents said the Trump administration is trying to deport more people than expected. When asked who the Trump administration is prioritizing for deporting, only 44% said 'dangerous criminals.' California Gov. Gavin Newsom and L.A. Mayor Karen Bass have repeatedly accused Trump of conducting a national experiment in Los Angeles. 'The federal government is using California as a playground to test their indiscriminate actions that fulfill unsafe arrest quotas and mass detention goals,' Diana Crofts-Pelayo, a spokesperson for Newsom told The Times. 'They are going after every single immigrant, regardless of whether they have a criminal background and without care that they are American citizens, legal status holders and foreign-born, and even targeting native-born U.S. citizens.' When pressed on why ICE is arresting immigrants who have not been convicted or are not facing pending criminal charges, Trump administration officials tend to argue that many of those people have violated immigration law. 'ICE agents are going to arrest people for being in the country illegally,' Homan told CBS News earlier this month. 'We still focus on public safety threats and national security threats, but if we find an illegal alien in the process of doing that, they're going to be arrested too.' Immigration experts say that undermines their message that they are ridding communities of people who threaten public safety. 'It's a big backtracking from 'These people are out killing people, raping people, harming them in demonstrable ways,' to 'This person broke immigration law in this way or that way,'' Bier said. The Trump administration is also trying to find new ways to target criminals in California. It has threatened to withhold federal funds to California due to its 'sanctuary state' law, which limits county jails from coordinating with ICE except in cases involving immigrants convicted of a serious crime or felonies such as murder, rape, robbery or arson. Last week, the U.S. Justice Department requested California counties, including L.A., provide data on all jail inmates who are not U.S. citizens in an effort to help federal immigration agents prioritize those who have committed crimes. 'Although every illegal alien by definition violates federal law,' the U.S. Justice Department said in a news release, 'those who go on to commit crimes after doing so show that they pose a heightened risk to our Nation's safety and security.' As Americans are bombarded with dueling narratives of good vs. bad immigrants, Kocher believes the question we have to grapple with is not 'What does the data say?' Instead, we should ask: 'How do we meaningfully distinguish between immigrants with serious criminal convictions and immigrants who are peacefully living their lives?' 'I don't think it's reasonable, or helpful, to represent everyone as criminals — or everyone as saints,' Kocher said. 'Probably the fundamental question, which is also a question that plagues our criminal justice system, is whether our legal system is capable of distinguishing between people who are genuine public safety threats and people who are simply caught up in the bureaucracy.' The data, Kocher said, show that ICE is currently unable or unwilling to make that distinction. 'If we don't like the way that the system is working, we might want to rethink whether we want a system where people who are simply living in the country following laws, working in their economy, should actually have a pathway to stay,' Kocher said. 'And the only way to do that is actually to change the laws.' In the rush to blast out mugshots of some of the most criminal L.A. immigrants, the Trump administration left out a key part of the story. According to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, its staff notified ICE on May 5 of Veneracion's pending release after he had served nearly 30 years in prison for the crimes of assault with intent to commit rape and sexual penetration with a foreign object with force. But ICE failed to pick up Veneracion and canceled its hold on him May 19, a day before he was released on parole. A few weeks later, as ICE amped up its raids, federal agents arrested Veneracion on June 7 at the ICE office in L.A. The very next day, DHS shared his mugshot in a news release titled 'President Trump is Stepping Up Where Democrats Won't.' The same document celebrated the capture of Phan, who served nearly 25 years in prison after he was convicted of second-degree murder. CDCR said the Board of Parole Hearings coordinated with ICE after Phan was granted parole in 2022. Phan was released that year to ICE custody. But those details did not stop Trump officials from taking credit for his arrest and blaming California leaders for letting Phan loose. 'It is sickening that Governor Newsom and Mayor Bass continue to protect violent criminal illegal aliens at the expense of the safety of American citizens and communities,' DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement.
