House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi rebuked the Trump administration on Tuesday for deporting a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipient in February.
“The Trump Administration is terrorizing patriotic young people who want nothing more than to live, work and contribute to the country they love – the only home they’ve ever known. These outstanding young men and women are American in every way but on paper,” Pelosi said in a statement released Tuesday evening. Juan Manuel Montes Bojorquez, 23, filed a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California earlier on Tuesday claiming Border Patrol did not provide a legal explanation for deporting him to Mexico in February.
The lawyers for the DACA recipient — the National Immigration Law Center, Covington and Burling LLP, the Law Offices of Stacy Tolchin, and the Law Offices of Belinda Escobosa Helzer — filed a Freedom of Information Act request on March 15 with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which Border Patrol falls under. The lawyers also requested all records related to Montes.
Per FOIA policy, agencies have 20 business days to respond. The March request went ignored, according to Montes’ team, prompting them to take legal action in court Tuesday.
The San Francisco Democrat lambasted the White House for not honoring a program created under former President Barack Obama in 2012. She said Trump has “unleashed an indiscriminate deportation dragnet of appalling inhumanity.”
