In a move that has left her mother “heartbroken,” Rocío Hernández Pérez, one of the members of the #Dream30, will be deported today to Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, after pleas from organizers and family members to Latino politicians asking for help with her case went unheeded. According to both Hernández’s mother and #Dream30 organizers, Hernández’s case has already been processed. Hernández has also been given her street clothes back, and is expected to be in Juárez within the next couple of hours.
According to Rocío Pérez, Hernández Pérez’s mother, her daughter’s aunt and uncle were kidnapped by the Zetas. Pérez also added that her family could’t pay the ransom. She said that her daughter’s face has now been all over the news, and that she now fears for her daughter’s life. Originally from Veracruz, Hernández Pérez had to leave the U.S. because she couldn’t attend school in North Carolina.
“[Coming back to the United States] was her only chance for surviving, without having to hide and run,” Pérez told Latino Rebels in Spanish. “My heart dropped, and I kept asking, ‘Why is this still happening to us?'”
Pérez also had choice words for Latino politicians, especially for New Jersey senator Bob Menendez, whom she visited the last few days to see if the senator could write a litter or make some phone calls supporting her daughter’s case. On Thursday Pérez was arrested in Menendez’s office and on Friday she was told that she could speak to the senator’s legal counsel, but that Menendez’s office would not make any calls or write letters, citing Senate ethics issues.
“No Latino politician has stepped in to help my daughter and me, even with the situation being as horrible as it is. I put my own life on the line at [Menedez’s] office because my daughter’s life was on the line,” Pérez said.
In a quote to Latino Rebels, a spokesperson for the National Immigrant Youth Alliance, one of the #Dream30 organizers, said, “How can we legalize 11 million people if we can’t bring home one person in such dire conditions?”
Earlier this month, EFE spoke with Hernández:
The 23-year-old Mexican native Hernández Peerez was brought to the United States when she was only 4.
Her life proceeded normally in North Carolina until she finished high school and noticed that she did not have a Social Security Number and thus could not apply for scholarships that would allow her to attend college.
Also, she could not work or obtain a driver’s license.
“The most important thing for my family is education and as a last resource, I decided to self-deport and return to Mexico to see if I could continue my studies,” she said.
She said that from that moment on she began to experience discrimination from her classmates in Mexico, since despite the fact that she is Mexican by birth in that country they considered her a foreigner for having lived for so long in the United States.
[…] One of the members of the #Dream30 will be deported to Mexico. […]