{UAH} HARVARD GRAD SELF-DEPORTS TO MEXICO

‘I have no criminal record’: Harvard grad brought to US as child self-deports to Mexico

Story by Josh Marcus

10h 

An undocumented Harvard University graduate who had been living in the U.S. since he was a small child recently decided to self-deport to Mexico amid the Trump administration’s wide-ranging immigration crackdown.

Francisco Hernandez-Corona, 34, had been living in Texas until about a month ago with his husband, a U.S. citizen.

With the new administration in power, however, he soon grew so afraid of being picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents that he stopped driving and wouldn’t answer the door.

The psychology graduate feared being detained because of a traffic stop by a cooperating local police department, as many immigrants have, or being sent against his will to an unfamiliar third country with poor human rights conditions like El Salvador.

There, U.S. deportees are housed in a mega-prison with little hope of release from a facility which has been compared to a “tropical gulag.”

“We started seeing ICE everywhere and people sent to El Salvador,” Hernandez-Corona told NBC News.

Francisco Hernandez-Corona previously sought protection under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (NewsNation screengrab)

The move back to Mexico was all the more striking because Hernandez-Corona said he would not typically be a top priority for deportation.

“I have no criminal record,” he told NewsNation. “I have a work permit, right? I wasn’t in a situation where I felt like I’m going to be deported tomorrow.”

Still, despite getting married and settling in Texas, Hernandez-Corona was always at some level of risk.

At the age of 10, his father arranged for him to be smuggled across the border, and Hernandez-Corona later applied for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which staves off deportation but doesn’t grant full legal status.

Hernandez-Corona later declined to renew his DACA status, instead seeking a visa through another program, which was not granted in time.

Though the Harvard grad paid for his own airfare to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, the Trump administration has offered undocumented migrants who self-deport $1,000, government-paid flights, and the chance to later legally apply for U.S. status.

Last week, the administration said its first such repatriation flight took place, sending 68 migrants back to Colombia and Honduras.

The Independent has always had a global perspective. Built on a firm foundation of superb international reporting and analysis, The Independent now enjoys a reach that was inconceivable when it was launched as an upstart player in the British news industry. For the first time since the end of the Second World War, and across the world, pluralism, reason, a progressive and humanitarian agenda, and internationalism – Independent values – are under threat. Yet we, The Independent, continue to grow.

EM    On the 49th Parallel          

                 Thé Mulindwas Communication Group
"With Yoweri Museveni, Ssabassajja and Dr. Kiiza Besigye, Uganda is in anarchy"
                    Kuungana Mulindwa Mawasiliano Kikundi
"Pamoja na Yoweri Museveni, Ssabassajja na Dk. Kiiza Besigye, Uganda ni katika machafuko