Reluctant Ex-Pats: U.S. Born Kids Face Deportation As Well

With a crowd of TV cameras and adults with microphones towering over them, Adrian, Yadira and Adriana Ramirez – 6, 10 and 12 years old – sat on a bench outside of First United Methodist Church in Palo Alto yesterday, and shyly told the news crews that though they wanted to stay at their home in Palo Alto, they would go to Mexico to be with their father, who was deported an hour after his arrest by Immigration Customs and Enforcement officers.

The Ramirez children are among thousands of U.S. citizen children of undocumented parents who are facing deportation and have to decide whether to bring their children with them -- taking them away from the educational opportunities they have a right to in the United States -- or let them stay and be forced into foster care.

But even at 12 Adrian knows that to be deported or stay in foster care isn’t a real choice. He said what he really wants “is to stay like a family and not be separated.”

boy Adrian, a seventh grader at Terman Middle School, speaks Spanish but can’t write in Spanish and can only read a little. He wants to stay at his school in Palo Alto. “If I go,” he said, “I’d leave my friends behind.”

Yadira, a fifth grader at Barron Park Elementary School, agreed. “We wanna study here.”

ICE officers arrested their parents, Pedro Ramirez and Isabel Aguirre, as the couple walked to their car on the morning of Feb. 28. Ramirez, who has lived in the United States since 1985 and worked at Albertson’s supermarket for the past nine years, was deported before he could cash his last paycheck, and family friends report he arrived in Tijuana penniless and without a place to go.

Aguirre is currently under house arrest with a monitoring bracelet and must leave the country by Friday, April 6. Community members have now raised enough money to help her buy plane tickets so she can bring her children with her – otherwise, the kids would have been placed in foster care. The press conference in Palo Alto was organized by American Muslim Voice in collaboration with a number of interfaith and community groups.

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