Deportation Raids Aren't Deterring Women and Children from Crossing the US Border Illegally Meredith Hoffman - VICE News
go to original May 19, 2016

Undocumented Father of Five US-born Children Seeks Sanctuary to Avoid Deportation Trauma for Family (Democracy Now!)

With bags on her shoulders and her four-year-old daughter in her arms, a 25-year-old single mother named Amanda fled her village in El Salvador without saying goodbye to her parents or siblings. She was focused on just one thing: survival.

"I owned a store, and gang members made me pay them $200 of what I made each week," she recalled. "I paid for five months but ran out of money. Then one morning, two gang members came into my house and said they'd murder me and my daughter that night if I didn't pay them. I gathered everything I could and left."

After a perilous journey north through Mexico, Amanda crossed the US border with her daughter in late April and applied for asylum, a status granted to individuals who face persecution in their homeland. She is among tens of thousands of mothers who have fled gang violence in Central America since 2014.

In an attempt to deter the unauthorized migration of families to the United States, the federal government created a massive family immigrant detention system and launched a series of deportation raids. Immigration officials revealed last week that they will conduct another string of raids in May and June, removing hundreds of undocumented immigrants from the US who have arrived over the past two years.

"As I have said repeatedly, our borders are not open to illegal immigration. If you come here illegally, you will be sent home," Jeh Johnson, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), said in a press statement about the first round of raids in January, in which officials rounded up 121 women and children for deportation. He said that the raids would help send a message to potential undocumented migrants not to venture north.

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