Parolee Appeals Plan to Deport Her

A woman who was imprisoned in Azusa as a sex slave during her teens, then jailed for more than two decades for helping to murder the man who raped and terrorized her, is appealing an immigration court’s decision to deport her to her native Mexico.

“I went through a lot for five years,” Maria Suarez, 44, said Monday, just days after Immigration Judge Rose Peters in Los Angeles ordered her deported.

“I felt like a rosebud coming out to see the sun, the moon, the shining, the rain, and some evil person came and snatched me off the bush ... and dropped me on the floor and stepped on me over and over and over.”

Suarez was 16 when she and her family immigrated legally to the United States from Tuxpan, Michoacan, Mexico, in 1976. About two weeks later, she was walking along a street when a woman approached and offered her work as a housekeeper. The woman later took Suarez to a house in Azusa, where she met Anselmo Covarrubias, then 68, who paid $200 for Suarez and told her she was his slave.

Covarrubias said he would kill her family if she said anything to anyone, she said. “He beat me anytime he wanted to beat me,” Suarez said. “He raped me. He told me he was a witch and nobody could do anything to him.... He told me he had the devil with him.”

Covarrubias was known in the neighborhood as a witch, according to later testimony. So when he made advances to a young neighbor, that woman’s husband, Rene Soto, feared that Covarrubias might hurt her, Suarez has said.

In 1981, Covarrubias was beaten to death with a wooden table leg. Soto and Suarez both were convicted of first-degree murder. Soto’s wife was sentenced to three years in prison.

Suarez has denied killing Covarrubias, saying she only washed and hid the murder weapon.

“When he got killed, I went into shock,” she said. “I hid the stick they killed him with, but I didn’t do it.”

Citing battered woman syndrome, state authorities paroled Suarez in December. She was immediately transferred to a federal detention facility on Terminal Island at the Port of Los Angeles. Federal law requires noncitizens convicted of violent crimes to be deported after their release from prison.

Suarez’s lawyer said that her client should be allowed to stay and care for her ailing mother, because she entered the country legally and did not kill her captor.

Rep. Hilda L. Solis (D-El Monte), a backer of Suarez, said, “Her family all lives in the United States. If she is going to be deported to Mexico, she has no one there to take her in. It will be like sending her to prison again.”