A protest against ICE in 2013. Bonnie Gutierrez / Flickr
By Nick Tabor, Jacobin
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From the time that she fled from El Salvador and was picked up at the US border, Ana Silvia Orellana Urias wore an ankle monitor so the immigration police could track her between check-in dates. On January 2, when immigration agents surrounded her house and she awoke to them banging on the door, she was living just outside Atlanta with her four children. The agents said they'd only come because of her ankle monitor. She was confused - she'd just changed the batteries. When she tried to call her lawyer, an agent reportedly seized her phone.
Then they rounded up Urias and her children and sent them to a jail in south Texas, where she said an agent tried to make her sign a paper agreeing to be deported.
Hers is one of twenty-eight families the federal government arrested over New Year's weekend, in a series of deportation raids intended to scare off other would-be asylum seekers from Central America. News of similar arrests has trickled in since, and the secretary of homeland security has pledged to keep them up indefinitely.
In reaction to the roundups, activists across the country have launched a social media campaign, "Know Your Rights" workshops, and street protests in at least ten cities. On the legal front, attorneys have set up a makeshift bureau in the Texas jail where deportees are being housed and halted the deportation of a dozen families. Other attorneys are investigating possible civil rights abuses during the raids.
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