The woman who became the unofficial face of the millions of illegal immigrants striving to remain in the United States has been deported to her native Mexico almost a year to the day after she took refuge in a church in Chicago.
Elvira Arellano was arrested on Sunday in Los Angeles as she made her first foray out of her self-imposed sanctuary since she entered the church on August 15 last year. The arrest brings to an end a tense stand-off between Arellano and the US immigration services, which have been attempting to deport her since 2002.
Her eight-year-old son Saul was present in Los Angeles when his mother was arrested — a poignant detail as Arellano’s campaign to remain in the country focused on the more than three million children of illegal immigrants who, like Saul, were born in the US and are therefore American citizens.
She is said to have asked the arresting officers to give her some time with her son to calm him down before she was taken away. While his mother was sent overnight to Tijuana in Mexico, Saul remains in Chicago under the guardianship of members of the Adalberto United Methodist church where the two had been living over the past year.
Arellano’s decision to defy an immigration order last August and seek refuge in the church sparked off a nationwide sanctuary movement across 16 states.
Other cases have been adopted by churches in New York, Los Angeles and the Midwest, but none has attracted such intense public attention as hers. She entered the US from Mexico in 1997, walking across a border checkpoint at the second attempt. She spent some time on the west coast before taking a job in Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport.
In the wake of the security clampdown after September 11, she was picked up in 2002 and found to have false documents, including a forged social-security number. After appeals she was served with a deportation notice last August but chose to take sanctuary and continue campaigning on behalf of her fellow 12-million illegal immigrants.
”For more than two decades the government accepted our cheap labour, our taxes, our social security payments, but oh no, they didn’t want to legalise us,” she said in a recent interview from the church.
The Reverend Walter Coleman, the pastor of Adalberto church who took her in, broke the news that she had been deported. ”She is free and in Tijuana. She is in good spirits. She is ready to continue the struggle against the separation of families from the other side of the border,” he said.
Arellano’s arrest came swiftly after she stepped out of the church for the first time in more than a year. At the weekend she announced that she had decided to face the risk of deportation to attend immigration rallies in California.
”From the time I took sanctuary the possibility has existed that they arrest me in the place and time they want,” she said shortly before leaving for Los Angeles.
Her case was prominently cited, both by pro- and anti-immigration advocates, during the recent congressional debate.
President George Bush proposed an amnesty for the 12-million undocumented adults, most of whom are Mexican, coupled with tighter restrictions on newcomers at the borders. But his proposals were shot down by anti-immigration factions within his own Republican party in the Senate.
In the run-up to the debate, and since, raids on illegal immigrants have steadily increased, with more than 600 being deported every week.
Saul Arellano is now in the care of Coleman’s wife, Emma Lozano, who heads an immigration rights group in Chicago. ”He’s taking it better than we thought he would,” she said. — Guardian Unlimited Â