Deported grandmother had immigration, criminal history

When the grandmother of a Mira Mesa military veteran’s family was sent back to Mexico last week, her devastated family members focused on her central role helping raise two small children whose father is serving as a contractor in Afghanistan.

More details of her deportation came out this week, as immigration officials offered details of a felony welfare fraud conviction against the woman, Clarissa Arredondo, and disclosed that she had previously been deported.

Arredondo, 43, was removed to Tijuana on Friday after being detained on Valentine’s Day. Her story was featured in The San Diego Union-Tribune on Sunday and became national news. Her daughter is married to a Navy veteran, and they have daughters, 2 and 3.

Hers is one of many cases arising across the nation as supporters and detractors of President Donald Trump seek to understand his administration’s new immigration enforcement priorities and practices.

Arredondo was previously removed from the U.S. in 2005, according to Lauren Mack, spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Mack said that Arredondo tried to enter the United States at the Otay Mesa port of entry in 2005. U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers determined that Arredondo did not have authorization to enter the United States, and they sent her back to Mexico.

Mack said that border officials at that time used a process called “expedited removal,” which allowed them to determine that Arredondo was not admissible to the country without letting her see a judge.

Because that order was still on her record, when immigration officials targeted her last month, they were able to remove her again without giving her a hearing with an immigration judge.

Arredondo was targeted “based on her immigration and criminal history,” Mack said.

Trump has called for increased use of expedited removal in his recently signed executive orders ramping up immigration enforcement both at the border and inside the U.S.

Bardis Vakili, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union in San Diego, said he found the use of the expedited process in Arredondo’s case troubling.

“Any time we hear that a longtime member of our community has been ripped from her family and deported without seeing a judge, we are going to be concerned,” Vakili said in an emailed statement. “In our report ‘Discharged, Then Discarded,’ we have already documented ICE’s utter disregard for the sanctity of military families, and this incident just continues the agency’s pattern of terrorizing patriotic immigrant communities.”

In the Union-Tribune’s original story, family members said they were told by immigration officials of a long-ago case of welfare fraud, although without any details. They said they were unaware of that history. The family members declined to comment for this story, and Arredondo could not be reached.

ICE officials did not provide any information about Arredondo’s immigration history for the initial story. Even with no mention of the previous deportation, many readers were unsympathetic to Arredondo’s plight.

“In the country illegally and lied in order to get welfare benefits? No tears from me,” Josh Hutton of San Diego said on Facebook. “We can’t be told that people in the country are working and paying taxes and contributing to the economy, then be given a story like this. How many people are illegally collecting welfare and haven’t gotten caught?”

Todd Johnson wrote that San Diegans care about military veteran families but “law is law and wrong is wrong.”

The Union-Tribune was initially unable to find records of the welfare case because of a misspelling in the court records. ICE provided information that helped the newspaper find the case.

Based on records at San Diego Superior Court, Arredondo took a plea deal after being charged with misrepresenting her income level to obtain food stamps and cash assistance for her children between May 2001 and March 2003.

Arredondo pleaded guilty to the felony. She apparently paid $6,633 in restitution and served five years on probation. According to terms of her plea deal, she was permitted to petition the court to reduce the conviction to a misdemeanor. There were no documents indicating that she did so. ICE’s records indicate that the conviction remains a felony.

According to the initial documents filed by Cynthia Stewart, a public assistance fraud investigator, “less assistance would have been paid had it been known that the representations were false.”

Arredondo worked several cleaning jobs to take care of her three children as a single parent, according to her daughter, Adriana Aparicio.

“Somebody who was working a bunch of bottom-tier jobs cleaning hotels and apartments, and raising three kids with an absent father, it’s not like she was personally enriching herself on welfare,” said Ev Meade, director of the Transborder Institute at the University of San Diego. “I would find that hard to believe. She broke the law, but what did she break the law to do? It wasn’t criminal violence. It wasn’t a threat to the broader community. It was trying to provide for her kids.”

Meade said he believes people are being deported under the Trump administration who would not have been deported under former President Barack Obama — although it’s hard to tell. He said that the Department of Homeland Security has a history of not being very transparent, making it difficult to know how enforcement now differs from enforcement under previous administrations.

“We don’t often understand what the government is doing with regard to immigration because we don’t have the information that we need to make an assessment of it,” Meade said. “Since it’s behind closed doors, people can choose to believe whatever they want about it, and you can find an echo chamber for all of the wildest myths about immigration that anyone can cook up.”