Manuel Antonio Cano Pacheco, an Iowa high school student who had his Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) protections were terminated earlier this year, was murdered less than a month after he was sent back to Mexico by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE):
At a small memorial service for Manuel June 3 in Des Moines' Trinity Las Americas church, Juan Verduzco, 20, recalled the friend he made freshman year at East. Manuel was always smiling and upbeat, and never had an unkind word for anyone, Verduzco said in an interview. "He was never a person you would feel bad for," he said.
Verduzco told the Des Moines Register that Cano Pacheco slipped “into really bad depression” after his dad was imprisoned for drug offenses, making the 19-year-old high student, who also had a one-year-old baby with his girlfriend, his family’s primary breadwinner. His DACA allowed him to do that, but “that status didn’t protect Manuel when he came to immigration authorities’ attention after being stopped for speeding last fall”:
An ICE spokesperson said in a statement that a federal immigration judge terminated his DACA status because of two misdemeanor convictions.
According to the Des Moines Register, Cano Pacheco “requested and was granted voluntary departure, ‘under safeguards,’” which the Huffington Post notes “carries penalties less stiff than a formal deportation” and leaves open the chance to return legally. But he would lose his life just three weeks after leaving the only country he’d known as home since the age of three.
For many immigrants, deportation can mean death. For Cano Pacheco, misdemeanors meant death. Verduzco said that in Zacatecas, the 19-year-old “had gone out to get food with an acquaintance of his cousin's, who apparently was known to the killers, Verduzco said. ‘He was in the wrong place at the wrong time.’ Both were killed.”
“Manuel's throat was slit”:
The northwestern Mexican state of Zacatecas, where Manuel’s family came from, has reportedly become a deadly place, especially for youth. Last August, the bodies of 14 people were discovered buried in a mass grave there. The growing number of drug-war deaths make Mexico one of the most dangerous countries in the world, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Between January and May of 2017, the Mexican Attorney General's Office reported 12,238 homicides.
Deportees can become easy prey and are kidnapped in exchange for ransom. “The gangs hold the deportees until their relatives in the U.S. pay thousands of dollars for their release,” like in one man’s case, deported after a car accident. “Narciso was kidnapped, beaten and threatened with death. He was released five days later, only after his girlfriend in Ohio paid nearly $4,000 in multiple ransom payments”:
Do federal authorities take any of those dangers into consideration when deporting people who were raised here? [Shawn] Neudauer, the ICE spokesman, said deportees to Mexico are turned over to Mexican authorities. "Once turned over they are the responsibility of their own government," he said.
But clearly that government is incapable of keeping them safe.
Cano Pacheco never even had a chance to graduate from high school. His family and friends said he had dreams, attending a course at Des Moines' Central Campus in hope of eventually becoming a mechanic. “’He told me he had a scholarship to a college in Chicago for mechanics,’ Verduzco said. Instead, a Go Fund Me account recently helped pay for his funeral in Mexico.”