Laura had neither. She’d lived in the United States undocumented her whole adult life.

“Do you have your residence card?” Solis asked.

“No,” Laura said, glancing anxiously at her cousin and her friends. Solis questioned them, too. Only Elizabeth had a visa, which she fished out of her purse. Solis directed the others to get out of the car. “I’m calling Border Patrol,” he said—an unusual move, at the time, for a small-town cop in South Texas.

Laura panicked. At five feet two inches and barely a hundred pounds, she looked younger than her age. She often wore tube tops and short shorts, and styled her hair in a girlish bob. Her affect was “attached to childhood,” her older brother told me; she collected porcelain dolls, and loved Japanese anime and Saturday-morning cartoons. Laura’s friends saw her trembling. Like her, they had kids who were U.S. citizens and steady jobs they didn’t want to lose, but they knew that Laura’s fear was distinct. She had an ex-husband across the border, in Reynosa, Mexico, who had promised to kill her if she returned.

“I can’t be sent back to Mexico,” Laura told Solis, beginning to cry. “I have a protection order against my ex—please, just let me call my mom and she’ll bring you the paperwork.”

The Immigrants Deported to Death and Violence Sarah Stillman reports on people who fled their home countries fearing for their lives, and the tragic consequences when they were sent back.

Laura’s two-year-old had an operation scheduled for later that week, to remove an abscess in his neck, and Laura also told Solis about that. “I need to be here,” she begged, in Spanish. In English, Elizabeth detailed the threats from Laura’s ex, Sergio. “You can’t do this,” Elizabeth said. “He’ll kill her.”

“Sorry,” Solis replied, shrugging. “I already called.” (Solis could not be reached for comment. He was later sent to prison for unrelated convictions, including bribery, extortion, and drug conspiracy.)

Laura had started dating Sergio when she was eighteen, and he soon became physically abusive. After a particularly horrific night the previous spring, when Sergio assaulted her, Laura had finally called the police, and coöperated with them to secure his arrest. He was later deported. In the year since then, Laura had tried to create a normal childhood for her sons. She shared a small trailer with Elizabeth and the boys near the Sharyland Plantation, a gated community of houses with lima-bean-shaped swimming pools and Roman-pillared porches which advertised its “delicate scent of hibiscus and bougainvillea flowers.” Sometimes she’d dress the boys in cowboy outfits, and use the neighbors’ sheep and horses as their personal petting zoo. At night, she’d sneak into the citrus groves and pick oranges for breakfast, humming her favorite song, “Single Mom”: “A single mother who does not worry, who will always fight to be a mom. Tell him she can be a mother without him.” Still, Sergio haunted her. In Mexico, he’d reportedly joined a local drug cartel. He often texted Laura death threats.

Laura and her friends waited by the roadside until a U.S. Border Patrol agent named Ramiro Garza arrived and ordered the three of them into his vehicle. Laura pleaded with Garza as he drove them to a nearby processing center, where Laura’s friends saw her, under pressure, sign paperwork for a “voluntary return.” Three hours later—after holding off until dawn “for safety reasons,” Garza later explained, “since there were females involved”—he drove them to the McAllen-Hidalgo International Bridge, which crosses the Rio Grande and leads to Reynosa, a city so violent that the U.S. State Department forbids its employees there from venturing out after midnight.

As the sun rose, Laura stepped onto the bridge and into a much larger story, one that has launched a major legal battle over the U.S. government’s duty to protect prospective deportees who plead for their lives. The lawsuit, and others like it, has implications for the treatment of hundreds of thousands of immigrants who have found refuge in the United States, and for whom deportation can be tantamount to death. Some, like Laura, are survivors of domestic violence seeking safety in the U.S. Others, like Elizabeth, are Dreamers, undocumented youths who were granted relief from deportation under President Obama, only to have their status imperilled by his successor. Still others are asylum seekers from Central America, Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia, and elsewhere, who have fled gangs, climate crises, and armed conflicts, and then been misinformed or turned away by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers, some of whom have been emboldened under President Trump.

In the final moments before Laura crossed the bridge, she turned to Agent Garza. “When I am found dead,” she told him, “it will be on your conscience.”

blah blah blah she died.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/15/when-deportation-is-a-death-sentence

But don't you DARE call it a shithole.

Shitlib cognitive dissonance is OFF THE CHARTS. I can count at least a dozen massive contractions in this article alone.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3863208&forum_id=2#35179643)

Ding fag!

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3863208&forum_id=2#35182448)

America is a racist shithole where minorities are gunned down without repercussion.

Also Libs:

America is a racist shithole for daring to send minorities back to their homes where they can be gunned down without repercussion.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3863208&forum_id=2#35182458)

Not an immigration lawyer, is it a good idea to commit lots of crimes if u are in US illegally and don't want to be deported?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3863208&forum_id=2#35182463)