By Marty Graham

SAN DIEGO (Reuters) – A Mexican immigrant activist, who once famously sought refuge from deportation in a Chicago church, has been released from detention, U.S. immigration officials said on Friday, after she returned to the United States seeking to stay on humanitarian grounds.

Elvira Arellano, who was deported in 2007 after a year-long standoff, was taken into custody after she re-entered the country this week at San Diego with her two children, a teenager who is a U.S. citizen and an infant.

She led a group of dozens of mostly young undocumented immigrant deportees in crossing back into the United States, while protesting the plight of immigrants deported to a sometimes violent country where they feel like strangers.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials said she had been released on Thursday, and activists said she and her infant son had been reunited with her 15-year-old son at the home of activists who sheltered him when his mother was detained.

“She will go before an immigration judge in a month,” said Enrique Morones, an immigrant activist. “She wants to go back to Chicago soon. That’s where her son grew up and her friends are. She wants to live with her son.”

Arellano turned herself in to federal border authorities on Tuesday. Many of the deportees with her said they would have been protected in the United States and allowed to attend college with in-state tuition fees if Congress had passed the 2010 Dream Act. Others have relatives who are U.S. citizens.

Arellano attracted national attention and was named a person of the year by Time magazine for staying in the cramped storefront Adalberto United Methodist Church in Chicago for one year, invoking the traditional protection of sanctuary.

She eventually left the church with her son Saul, then 8, to join a march for immigration reform, and was deported to Mexico in August 2007.

Arellano entered the United States illegally in 1997, was returned to Mexico, then recrossed the border and was working at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport in 2002 when she was arrested in an immigration sweep.

She was convicted of working under a false Social Security number and, after several delays, ordered deported.

(Reporting by Marty Graham; Editing by Cynthia Johnston)

• Immigration Issues
• Politics & Government
• Elvira Arellano
• United States

DENVER (AP) — President Barack Obama’s surprise announcement last week that his administration would change its deportation policy to become more “humane” shows how the immigration battle has narrowed after months of congressional deadlock.

As recently as last year, immigrant rights activists, along with an unusually broad coalition of business, labor and religious groups, were united in their demand that Congress pass a sweeping bill to both remove the threat of deportation from many of the 11 million people here illegally and eventually make them citizens. But now activists just want to stop deportations.

They have pressured Obama to limit the number of people sent back overseas, which led to his administration’s announcement Thursday of a review of deportation policies after a meeting with the Hispanic Congressional Caucus. Activists also are pushing state legislatures to end participation in a program to help federal immigration authorities deport people and chaining themselves across entrances to local jails or immigration detention centers.

“We need relief and we need it soon,” said Reyna Montoya, 23, of Phoenix, whose father is fighting deportation and who co-wrote an open letter with dozens of other young activists urging immigrant rights groups to stand down on the citizenship issue. “People who are directly affected just want peace. Later on they’ll worry about becoming citizens.”

Immigrant rights groups still want to win citizenship for many who are in the U.S. without legal permission. But the shift to deportation relief shows the desperation felt by immigrant communities as deportations have continued, even as the president and many in Congress say they support changing the law to allow some of those people to stay in the U.S.

It also represents the possible splintering of the diverse coalition for an immigration bill that would overhaul the system by expanding citizenship. And the more aggressive, confrontational tactics also raise the risk of a public backlash.

“One picture of a cop with a bloody nose and it’s all over for these people,” Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors greater restrictions on immigration, said of the activists.

The change comes after many expected Congress to pass a sweeping immigration overhaul last year. Republicans have been torn between some in their base who want to step up deportations and others alarmed at how Hispanics, Asians and other fast-growing communities are increasingly leaning Democratic.

The Senate in June passed a bipartisan bill to legalize, and eventually grant citizenship to, many of the 11 million people in the U.S. illegally. But the bill died in the Republican-controlled House. Republican leaders there floated a proposal that could stop short of citizenship for many people here illegally. But Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, acknowledged it stood little chance of passing.

Meanwhile, Obama’s administration is on track to having deported 2 million people during the past six years. Critics say that’s more than President George W. Bush’s administration deported, though some who push for a tougher immigration policy argue the Obama administration’s numbers are inflated.

Obama already has eased some deportations. In 2012, as he was trying to generate enthusiasm among Hispanic voters for his re-election, Obama granted people who were brought to the country illegally as children the right to work in the United States and protection from deportation if they had graduated high school or served in the military. Advocates are pressuring the president to expand that to other people here illegally. The administration has said it cannot make sweeping changes without Congress, and it is unclear what steps it will take after its review is completed to limit deportations.

Chris Newman, legal director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, said it’s inevitable that Obama makes changes. “This is a White House that has told the immigrant rights community that they had to build up enforcement massively to create the political climate for comprehensive immigration reform,” Newman said. “Well, that gambit failed.”

Roy Beck of Numbers USA, which pushes for a more restrictive immigration policy, said expanding deportation relief could also fail. “It looks radical,” he said of the notion of sharply limiting removals.

Activists are willing to take that risk and have grown tired of waiting for Washington.

Late last year the Austin Immigrant Rights Coalition’s members acknowledged there were no hopes of a big immigration bill anytime soon. They began pushing the local sheriff’s office to end its participation in the Secure Communities program, which checks the immigration status of anyone booked into local jail and refers people here illegally to federal authorities. Last month, six coalition members were arrested after locking themselves together to block entrance to the county jail.

“We decided we needed to change our focus because this is a more winnable campaign,” Executive Director Alejandro Laceres said. Of Congress, he added, “We don’t have the luxury of moving at their pace.”

In Arizona, activists have launched a series of protests, including blocking buses transporting immigrants to courts. “We just realized we are losing too many people in our community,” Carlos Garcia of the group Puente Arizona said in a telephone interview minutes before he was arrested outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Phoenix. Worries about whether their tactics could cause a backlash “go out the window,” he added. “Our heads hurt from thinking about the politics around it.”

At the state level, activists have had notable successes. The biggest victory came last year in California when Gov. Jerry Brown signed the Trust Act, barring California police from participating in Secure Communities. Immigrant rights groups are trying to replicate that legislation in Illinois and Massachusetts.

Driving the efforts are cases like that of Abel Bautista, who was stopped for traveling 8 miles per hour over the speed limit on a Colorado interstate in 2012 and has been fighting deportation ever since. At first he was not too worried, because he expected an immigration overhaul last year to make the case moot. Now he worries about the lack of legislative action and the trauma inflicted on his three U.S. citizen children as his case drags on.

“We’re just left hanging at loose ends,” Bautista said in an interview, recounting how his children’s performance at school has deteriorated and how they sob when he leaves for court hearings. “If the community unifies and has more demonstrations, maybe they will listen to us.”

___

Follow Nicholas Riccardi on Twitter at https://twitter.com/NickRiccardi

• Politics & Government
• Immigration Issues
• Barack Obama

By Marty Graham

SAN DIEGO (Reuters) – Dozens of young, undocumented adults raised in the United States but sent back to Mexico marched over the border on Thursday as part of an ongoing protest of the plight of college-age immigrants in a sometimes violent country where they feel like strangers.

Organized by the National Immigrant Youth Alliance, the border crossing is the third in a campaign that began last July and has included journeys into Texas and Arizona.

The participants are mostly in their 20s and say they would have been protected in the U.S. and allowed to attend college with in-state tuition had Congress passed the 2010 Dream Act protecting undocumented youths brought to the U.S. as children.

“I want to come home,” said Ramon Dorado, who grew up in New Mexico. He wore his graduation cap and gown as he made the passage and spoke perfect English. “I was two weeks from graduating college when I was stopped by the Albuquerque police for a traffic violation and deported because I have no papers.”

Dorado led a group of about 40 immigrants across the border from Tijuana to the port of entry at San Diego, where they asked U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents for asylum.

An earlier group made the same trip on Monday, and a third was scheduled to come over on Sunday morning. All were deported or left the country before the June 2012 date when President Barack Obama signed an executive order deferring deportation action on such cases.

“We have seen an unprecedented number of deportations in the past few years – in a few weeks we expect to reach 2 million deportations,” said immigrant rights activist Enrique Morones, who helped to organize the protest. “People who were raised here and know no other culture, have no family in Mexico, have never been arrested, are being deported.”

Morones said that of the 35 people who applied for asylum after the earlier mass arrival on Monday, one had been granted an asylum hearing, one was returned to Mexico and the other 33 remain in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)detention.

A request for comment from ICE was referred to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which did immediately return a call from Reuters.

Last year, an immigration reform package that included a path to citizenship for the undocumented passed the U.S. Senate but stalled in the House of Representatives, where it lacked Republican support.

On Thursday, Obama directed his Department of Homeland Security to enforce immigration laws “more humanely,” the White House said.

Despite some support, congressional Republicans are divided over immigration reform and party leaders have made clear that legislation is unlikely to be taken up before the November congressional elections.

GUNFIRE AND FEAR

Because they do not qualify for deferred deportation under Obama’s rule, the group is asking for asylum based on fear that they will be harmed if they remain in Mexico, Morones said.

Miriam Rodriguez, 26, said she heard gunfire every night when she lived in the violence-torn city of Juarez, leading her to send her U.S.-born children to live with relatives in Chicago.

Dorado said he had “many bad experiences” in Mexico.

“I hope the U.S. will see this and let me go back to my family,” he said.

But Esther Valdes, an immigration attorney in San Diego, said the applicants’ chances are slim.

“The credible fear has to be found for each person individually, based on what has happened to them,” she explained. “It has to be more than a generalized fear.”

For example, Valdes said, she currently has two dozen asylum-seeking clients, including a family in which the son was killed and the daughter raped.

Rodriguez, who came to the U.S. when she was 9 years old, moved to Juarez with her children after her husband was deported there in 2011. But with their children, ages 5 and 8, now back in Chicago, she longs to be with them.

“I sent them to my sister so they can be safe and educated,” she said.

(Writing by Sharon Bernstein; Editing by Ken Wills)

• Immigration Issues
• Politics & Government
• Mexico
• Barack Obama