AURORA, Colo. – An undocumented mother of four who has spent much of the past two decades in Aurora has been deported and removed from the country by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The lawyer for Maria de Jesus Jimenez-Sanchez confirmed to Denver7 Tuesday that she was deported on April 18 – five days after she was originally detained in Centennial by ICE agents.
Her lawyer, Lakewood attorney Jennifer Kain-Rios, says that Jimenez-Sanchez is the mother to four children, including a 15-year-old developmentally-disabled daughter.
ICE says that Jimenez-Sanchez, whose real name is Karen Araujo-Jimenez, first entered the U.S. illegally in October 1999, and that she was immediately confronted by federal agents and voluntarily returned to Mexico the same day.
She was then caught posing as another person while trying to enter the U.S. in Douglas, Arizona in May 2001, according to ICE spokesman Carl Rusnok, and was again deported immediately.
Jimenez-Sanchez was taken into custody by ICE again in December 2012, when she was pulled over and cited for driving without a license.
She spent six months in ICE custody. In May 2013, according to ICE, an immigration judge upheld a previous removal order for her and ordered her to be deported by the Department of Homeland Security.
But she had been granted a one-year stay of deportation a month earlier. The stays were extended for another year in May 2014, March 2015 and March 2016, Rusnok said, but her latest stay request was denied March 14 of this year.
But she was picked up again last Wednesday when she showed up for a routine immigration check-in despite knowing her latest stay request had been denied, according to Kain-Rios.
Kain-Rios said she could not divulge where Jimenez-Sanchez had been deported to, but said she had been in communication with the woman since she was deported.
Kain-Rios says Jimenez-Sanchez is trying to decide whether to continue fighting to be in the U.S. Many of her stays had been granted because she was caring and helping educate her disabled daughter, Kain-Rios says.
Her case is the third high-profile case involving women scheduled to be deported out of the Denver area. Jeanette Vizguerra and Ingrid LaTorre are both in sanctuary at Denver-area churches to stave off their deportations.
The cases come amid an increased effort by immigration officials under the Trump administration to deport people living in the country illegally no matter if they’ve been convicted of a violent crime or not.
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