The Trump administration’s unshackled Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has deported a Lutheran minister and her husband to Colombia, leaving behind their daughter and young granddaughter, as well as a devastated community that rallied to the family’s aid.
This family’s nightmare began just weeks ago, when ICE agents took the couple’s daughter, Paula Hincapie-Rendón, into custody as her young daughter sat in their car. This should never have happened in the first place, because, as a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipient, she’s supposed to be shielded from deportation. ICE agents didn’t care.
These out-of-control agents then maliciously used Hincapie-Rendón to arrest her parents, Carlos Hincapie and Betty Rendón, a cancer survivor and a “Lutheran minister who was set to start her doctorate at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago in June,” the Chicago Sun Times reported. They’ve lived here for 15 years, have no criminal record, and shouldn’t have been a priority for arrest either, but ICE didn’t care.
The faith community in Racine, Wisconsin, where Rendón is a pastor, held a vigil outside the detention facility where she was being jailed, while others collected 13,000 signatures calling for her release from detention, adding to the 65 organizations that also voiced their support. ICE didn’t care.
Hincapie-Rendón is now unsure of when she’ll see her parents again. As a DACA recipient, she can’t leave the country. She “made a public plea to release her parents, saying she is a single mother who relies on them to help raise her daughter. She said at a recent rally that she feels like she is living in a ‘nightmare.’ She declined a separate interview,” the Chicago Tribune reported.
“We are hurt, we are bothered, and we are angry,” said Rev. Ruben Duran of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. “We won’t let it paralyze us. On the contrary, we want to function as a driving force that is working to ask for justice and liberty for her.” Will this family’s deportation make us safer? Will it make us more prosperous? Will it make us greater? No, no, and no. The cruelty is the point. The cruelty has always been the point.
“Rest easy, fellow Chicagoans. We no longer have to live in fear of Betty Rendón Madrid,” wrote Chicago Tribune columnist Rex Huppke. “Thanks to the heroic work of agents from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Rendón Madrid has been deported from Chicago to her native Colombia. She sought asylum in the United States in 2006, was denied asylum in 2008 and then, as the years went on, became the one thing Americans fear most: a Lutheran student pastor with no criminal record.”
