Deported woman says U.S., Mexico must work to keep families together

Published: 2007-10-18

MEXICO CITY (CNS) -- Migrant activist Elvira Arellano, who spent a year in a Chicago Methodist church to try to avoid deportation, said her personal battle to live in the United States is lost but the wider struggle for immigrants is just beginning. Speaking in Mexico, where she now lives with her 8-year-old son, who is an American citizen, Arellano said the Mexican and U.S. governments need to work harder to make immigration laws that do not break up families. "I've been deported and can't go back to the United States for 20 years. Legally there is nothing I can do about that. But I still want to go on fighting so other people don't have to go through what I've been through," Arellano told Catholic News Service Oct. 17 after an event to support her at the Mexico City offices of the Democratic Revolution Party. "We have to stop families being torn apart. We have to stop people who have worked for decades in the U.S. being sent back to Mexico and having no job and no place to live," she said. Arellano, 32, lived outside Mexico for almost a decade, and her son, Saul, has never lived in Mexico.

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