Mexican woman with 2 children born in the US deported

A Mexican woman who had been living in the US since the age of 14 has been deported to Mexico.

Seven protesters were arrested as they tried to block the vehicle taking her away from the immigration office in Phoenix, Arizona, where she was held.

Guadalupe Garcia de Rayos, 36, has two children born in the US.

President Donald Trump has promised to crack down on illegal immigrants with criminal records. Ms Garcia de Rayos had used forged documents to get a job.

Her husband and two teenage children remain in the US.

She pleaded guilty in 2009. In 2013 she was arrested and issued with a deportation order but was allowed to remain under a policy of leniency from the previous administration of President Barack Obama.

She was taken into custody on Wednesday when she went for her annual check-in with immigration officials.

She crossed the southern border from Nogales, Arizona, at 10:00 local time on Thursday.

“Seeing my mom in that van… it was unexplainable. It was really heart-dropping,” her daughter Jaqueline said during a press conference after the deportation was announced.

“No-one should ever go through the pain of having their mom taken away from them, or the pain of packing her suitcase,” the 14-year-old said through tears.

Ms Garcia de Rayos was detained a few days after Donald Trump signed an executive order broadening the regulations under which some people will be deported.

It stipulates that any undocumented immigrants convicted of a criminal offence get priority for deportation.

“We’re living in a new era now, an era of war on immigrants,” Ms de Rayos’s lawyer, Ray A Ybarra Maldonado told the New York Times.

“Ms Garcia, who has a prior felony conviction in Arizona for criminal impersonation, was the subject of a court-issued removal order that became final in July 2013,” a spokesperson for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) told the BBC.

Despite appeals, judges “held she did not have a legal basis to remain in the US”, Yasmeen Pitts O’Keefe said.

“ICE will continue to focus on identifying and removing individuals with felony convictions who have final orders of removal issued by the nation’s immigration courts,” she added in a written statement.

Dozens of activists gathered outside the centre in a bid to block vehicles from leaving, many of them chanting “justice”.

Police said seven people had been arrested “without force” but that most of the protesters were “peaceful and exercising their rights properly”.

Mr Trump’s far-reaching executive orders have also suspended refugee resettlement and blocked individuals from seven majority-Muslim nations from entering the US.

The move sparked numerous protests in the US and across the world, as well as several legal challenges, although the American public appears to be evenly split on the issue.

The travel ban was temporarily halted by a court last week.

Source: bbc.co.uk