From Paul Welch, Office of Social Action Ministry

From Paul Welch, Office of Social Action Ministry

In January, Delmy Rendón smashed her car into a deer on a rural highway in Upstate New York, near the Canadian border. Delmy has a husband and 3 daughters. Skarleth and Lexi are 9 and 6 years old. Lexi, the preschooler,  was born in the U.S.

She did what any Spanish-speaking immigrant would do. Instead of calling 911, she knocked on the door of the nearest house for help. The residents were not kind, her mother said.

That moment set off a sequence of events that landed Rendón in a Louisiana detention center. Rendón was on a path to U.S. legal residency in a new, safer and more prosperous country.

Instead, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement put her on a route back to Guatemala without her family. After Rendón’s arrest, border patrol agents tracked her husband down at work and arrested him, too. When he refused to go without his daughters, officers went to West Carthage Elementary School and detained them, too, their grandmother said. 

The three spent the night in a house near Buffalo under ICE watch. Delmy’s mother traveled to help Delmy’s fractured family. “We don’t deserve this,” she told Syracuse.com in Spanish. “There’s a lot of fear and that’s why people haven’t wanted to speak out. But my love as a mother is so big. I feel like I have to scream: Delmy’s not a criminal.”

Needed: Good Samaritans!

email pwelch@syrdio.org