Durham officials and advocates are reeling after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deported a Durham-based family of four earlier this week.
The two children, Genesis Elizabeth Espinoza Pacheco and Denis Daniel Espinoza Pacheco, were students at Durham’s Burton Elementary School. They were detained on Monday with their parents, Nelson Ramon Espinoza Sierra and Dacia Mariela Pacheco Galindo, during a regular appointment with immigration authorities in Charlotte.
A spokesperson for ICE confirmed the family was deported to Honduras just two days later.
“This family was lured into the check-in office under a false pretense of safety,” Siembra NC defense manager Andreina Malki said at a press conference Thursday. Siembra, an immigrant advocacy organization, organized the conference to call attention to and condemn the deportation. “And they were ripped away from their lives, from their school, and deported in about 48 hours.”
Per Siembra, the children’s aunt, Lilian, went with the family to Monday’s appointment in Charlotte and waited outside for over 90 minutes. Then, Lilian received a call from a federal agent saying that her sister’s family had been detained. Per ICE, the family was deported on Wednesday. Lilian said she found out later, on Thursday. (She declined to speak to media during Thursday’s press conference.)
At the press conference, advocates and elected officials called the detention unwarranted and tragic.
“While this incident didn’t happen on our campus, we know we’re all impacted by what is happening to the neighbors in our community—a father, a mother, a daughter, a sister, brother,” said Durham Public Schools (DPS) Board of Education Chair Bettina Umstead. “And this overreach of federal law enforcement around immigration is impacting us all.”
Some local officials have promised to attend future immigration appointments with families. Siembra has confirmed at least 20 detentions of asylum seekers in Charlotte, the group said.
“We will be witnesses, and to the extent possible, we will document what is happening, and we will help to provide rapid response assistance,” said state senator Sophia Chitlik. “We might not be able to stop what is happening, but we can ensure that we can expose it, and we can call for the transparency that our law necessitates.”
According to Siembra, the family had been seeking asylum in the United States since 2022 and had fully “honored the conditions of their asylum case including attending regular check-ins” over the last four years.
In an emailed statement to INDY, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said that the family “was issued a final order of removal by a judge after they failed to show up for their immigration hearing,” which a spokesperson clarified in a phone call with INDY was separate from their Monday appointment in Charlotte.
In a press release on Friday morning, advocates challenged DHS’s characterization that the family had been provided with “full due process.”
“DHS is asking the public to accept due process on faith, while withholding the basic facts that would prove it,” wrote Malki. “You cannot claim due process while denying people the ability to contact their lawyers or even tell their family where they are.”
An online fundraiser to support the family had raised more than $14,000 since Thursday afternoon.
Last November, Customs and Border Protection agents detained at least a dozen people in the Triangle as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to increase deportation numbers., The operation prompted fears among members of Durham’s immigrant community, many of whom kept their kids home from school.
Durham has built a robust community response network particularly following the 2016 case of Wildin Acosta, a Riverside high school student who was detained (under the policies of then-President Obama) on his way to school.
Mika Twietmeyer, the president of the DPS educators’ union, was a teacher at Riverside when Acosta was detained. Acosta’s detention was a “wake up call,” she told INDY on Thursday, and said that the response in 2016 was “cobbled together from different groups.”
Last fall, Twietmeyer and the union pushed the school board to adopt a more robust and transparent policy regarding how the district could respond to immigration enforcement in the area (“ICE does not “raid” schools or target children,” a government spokesperson wrote via email on Thursday. Umstead also noted that DPS has not been the site of any enforcement activity).
Even before this week’s deportations, the board’s policy committee was scheduled to discuss that policy at its next meeting. But the swiftness of the deportation of the students and their parents show how difficult it may be for DPS, or other local layers of governments, to create an effective and unified response against the federal government.
“It’s devastating that they’re already gone and that there wasn’t an opportunity for us to do more to bring them back to their home in Durham,” Twietmeyer said.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
Comment on this story at [email protected].