Friends and family who were hoping that Gunnison’s Edwin Flores would be home for the holidays were dealt a blow over the past week. Flores, who was detained by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement in September, was deported to Mexico.
Flores had been living in the Gunnison area for more than 20 years. In 2014, was granted what is called “withholding of removal” status. That kind of relief is granted by the government to individuals who fear persecution in their country of origin. For Flores, that country is El Salvador.
That status requires annual check-ins, so this fall Flores reported to ICE in Aurora as he’d done for the past decade. This time, though, he was detained and he was in custody for four months, despite the best efforts of his attorney, Leanne Reetz Hightower, and hard work from family and friends.
Hightower said that last week, Flores “was taken in the middle of the night across the border to Mexico with no identification. The Mexican government then transferred him to the Salvadoran consulate in Tabasco, Mexico.”
She called the situation a “grave miscarriage of justice.”
Flores, reached through the text messaging platform called WhatsApp, said that he is sleeping in an abandoned garage with no running water and no toilet. He said he still has a lung infection from sleeping on a concrete floor for four months at an ICE intake facility. But those factors aren’t what keep him up at night: it’s thinking about his children and how he won’t be with them during the holidays and for the foreseeable future.
“More than anything, I am sad for my kids,” he said. “I love my children and have worked all my life for them.”
Flores has five children owns two businesses in Gunnison, including Facing Fear Tattoo and Samurai Construction. He started the construction business as a way to find employment for his sons, said his good friend in Gunnison, Aaron Perry.
It was Perry who had taken Flores to Aurora for that annual check-in, the day that turned so many lives upside down.
“ICE knows they made a mistake by arresting me under no charges and pushing me out of the country is one way to get away with (the) injustice, sadly,” Flores said. “The Mexican government put me in the street a week ago with nothing. No ID or money because ICE took all my IDs and personal stuff and lied to me. They told me I was on a transfer to Colorado and three hours later they pushed me into Mexico.”
Reetz Hightower filed a habeas petition and the government had until Dec. 19 to respond to that. The assistant United States attorney requested that the petition be dismissed because Flores is “no longer in ICE custody,” but Reetz Hightower declined to do that. Four new claims are being added to the petition, she said, including that the government violated the Administrative Procedure Act and violated Flores’s right to due process through the Fifth Amendment.
Reetz Hightower said that Flores has no criminal record to speak of. “Not even a parking ticket,” she said.
Flores was released in the southern Mexico city of Villahermosa, which is only about 170 miles from the border with Guatemala. He’s planning to file for asylum in Mexico.
“I (have to) push to survive in this place,” he said. “I just pray I don’t get killed by the cartels.”
He’s hoping that the legal system in the United States will sort out his case, eventually.
“I love the United States and the people,” Flores said. “But the system is crooked. I hope God shows up so I can get back.”
Chad Richardson can be reached at crichardson@orourkemediagroup.com.
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