It's been nearly a month since immigration authorities detained Catalina "Xochitl" Santiago, a 28-year-old immigrant rights activist, community organizer and beneficiary of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
According to her family and attorneys, Santiago has valid DACA status, making her one of the nearly 538,000 undocumented young adults brought to the U.S. as children who are currently authorized to work and study. Under the program, DACA recipients are also supposed to be protected from immigration detention and deportation.
Santiago was detained on Aug. 3. Before boarding a domestic flight at an airport in El Paso, she was approached by two men in Border Patrol uniforms. A video posted by Movimiento Cosecha shows one of them telling Santiago they needed to question her about how she obtained her work authorization.
After that, Santiago was then taken to an immigration detention center and subjected to deportation proceedings.
“When I heard of her wrongful detention, it broke me,” her brother, José Santiago said in a virtual press call Thursday that included family, attorneys and the support of immigrant advocacy groups calling for her release. “My family couldn’t believe it. We were devastated.”
The administration of President Donald Trump has insisted DACA recipients "may be subject to arrest and deportation” because “DACA does not confer any form of legal status in this country,” according to Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin.
Originally from Mexico, Santiago grew up in South Florida, where she began cultivating her passion for helping others, according to her younger brother, José Santiago.
Santiago moved to El Paso, where she has worked with the group Movimiento Cosecha to advocate for undocumented immigrants. She settled there and married her wife, Desiree Miller, earlier this year.
Miller said she and her wife run a community garden, where they teach children and elders about agriculture and medicinal plants.
Christine Miranda, a friend and colleague of Santiago at Movimiento Cosecha, said they have worked together to organize protests and rallies across the country. They also successfully advocated for driver's licenses for undocumented immigrants in New Jersey and Massachusetts, and defended DACA during the first Trump term.
Santiago "is my best friend, my biggest supporter, and it is really difficult to know that she is suffering," Miller said.
The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment about why Santiago was detained. But the federal agency told a local TV station in El Paso that Santiago’s “criminal history includes charges for trespassing, possession of narcotics and drug paraphernalia.” While Santiago was arrested five years ago based on these allegations, she was never formally charged with anything, according to Norma Islas, one of Santiago's attorneys.
Islas and Luis Cortes, another attorney of Santiago, have filed a motion to terminate ongoing deportation proceedings against their client based on her DACA protections.
According to Cortes, his client only has “a trespassing conviction that happened during a peaceful civil disobedience action” organized as part of the youth mobilization efforts that helped keep DACA in place. “It’s not criminal behavior, it’s a civil action.”
Cortes added that the government has consistently renewed Santiago’s DACA status, a process that requires “rigorous background checks.”
Cortes labeled the remarks by DHS as an attempt to "vilify her in order to justify her detention and her arrest."
Ahead of Santiago's next immigration hearing in September, community members in El Paso and advocates in a dozen other cities across the nation have hosted at least 20 rallies and vigils demanding Santiago's release.
"We want Xochitl free," Miller said.
Santiago’s case is one of the most recent showing how increasingly DACA recipients are being detained amid Trump’s immigration crackdown efforts.
This month, Jose Valdovinos, a 27-year-old DACA recipient in Arizona, was taken into custody by immigration officers who said "DACA is no longer considered legal entry to the U.S.,” his wife, Jitzell Flores, told KYMA-DT, NBC's affiliate in Yuma, Arizona.
NBC News also reported the immigration detentions of four other DACA recipients last month.
"These are not isolated incidents. They are glaring warning signs," Deya Aldana, national campaigns director at United We Dream, the nation’s largest immigrant youth-led network, said Thursday during the virtual press call. "What we are seeing is a blatant and alarming escalation in the effort to chip away and weaken DACA."
Since 2012, when an executive action by President Barack Obama created the program, DACA opened job and educational pathways to hundreds of thousands of young people without legal immigration status, becoming one of the most successful immigrant integration policies.
Trump’s efforts to end DACA in his first term and Republican legal challenges have shut out an estimated 600,000 DACA-eligible teenagers and young adults from the program, which is currently not open to new applicants.
A court ruling this year determined that all DACA recipients can continue to renew their status as long as they meet their requirements.
"DACA is dying by a thousand paper cuts," Aldana said, "in the hopes that the American people aren’t paying attention."
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
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