A family from Colombia whose arrest by ICE prompted a protest in Durango is reportedly preparing to self-deport.
Fernando Jaramillo Solano and his son and daughter, both minors, were arrested by ICE agents on Oct. 27 while en route to school. Their detention in a Durango ICE facility led to a peaceful protest outside, which ended after federal agents used pepper spray and rubber bullets to disperse the gathering and then transported the three detainees to Texas.
Jaramillo Solano’s wife and the children’s mother, Estella Patino Bustamante, told the Durango City Council Tuesday that she hopes for a thorough investigation of the entire matter.
Speaking through an interpreter and frequently breaking down in tears, she said her 12-year-old daughter Jana told her by phone that an ICE agent groped her while she was being transported.
Bustamante said Jana kept asking her, “We are not mean, we’re not bad, . . .Mom, what have we done? And why did somebody touch my breast?”
Bustamante also said her son told her he and his father were treated badly, beaten, and detained in Durango without anything for more than a day but chips and water.
ICE has denied the allegations.
“I don’t want this to happen to anyone else,” Bustamante said, crying. “I don’t want this to happen to any other children. I want to ask you to please investigate in a deep manner because I feel so bad when I hear my children asking and I don’t want this to happen to any other kid.”
The city council did pass a resolution calling for a probe into the actions of the federal agents.
Jaramillo Solano and his children are still in Texas but have signed papers to self-deport back to Colombia, from where they had been seeking asylum.
In a statement, Compañeros: Four Corners Immigrant Center said the family is exhausted.
“Fernando has now signed for voluntary departure, and the family is waiting to be returned to Colombia in hopes of regaining even a portion of the freedom that was taken from them,” the Compañeros statement said.
“According to Estella, the mental, physical, and emotional trauma they have endured has left them unable to continue fighting their case. They are exhausted and devastated, and their 12-year-old daughter is experiencing acute psychological distress. She has also shared that she does not trust the mental-health professionals available to her in detention, which makes it even more urgent that all three family members be released immediately.”
Colorado Sen. John Hickenlooper said in a statement that the detainees are being forced “to make an impossible choice: leave their wife and mother behind and return to a country where they don’t feel safe; or remain indefinitely isolated in detention.”
Compañeros said that the Department of Homeland Security still could release the family. According to numerous reports, Jaramillo-Solano was not the person ICE was originally seeking.
ICE representatives now say that he is still undocumented and entered the country illegally, according to reporting by the Denver news station Fox 31. However, others say the family has a legal asylum case pending.
“We want to remind the community that the immediate release of the Jaramillo Solano family remains fully within the discretionary authority of DHS,” said the Compañeros statement. “DHS has the ability to release the family at any moment if it chooses to do so. For this reason, we ask community members to contact their legislators today and urge them to request the family’s immediate release.”
A GoFundMe page is raising money for Patino Bustamante to fight the detention legally and reunite her family.
Patino Bustamante told the city council, “We are not criminals. We are hard-working people. We believe in God and God sees everything.
“I want justice for my husband and my children and other childrens in this situation. We came to a country so that we could be protected and we’re not.”
