An Iowa teen about to graduate from high school was instead sent back to Mexico — and killed weeks after he arrived in the nation he left at age 3.
Manuel Antonio Cano-Pacheco, 19, was killed while eating with his cousin’s friend in Zacatecas, a state in northwest Mexico where he’d arrived three weeks earlier.
He previously qualified for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, an Obama-era policy that barred so-called Dreamers of a certain age from being deported, his mother told the Des Moines Register.
But an immigration judge pulled his status under the program, which President Trump announced an end to last year, after he was charged in April with drunk driving and had two past misdemeanor convictions, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement representative told the newspaper.
He’d come to the U.S. without a visa at age 3, his friends and family said, but fell into a bad way after his father was sent to jail on drug charges nearly three years ago.
“He got into really bad depression,” his friend, Juan Verduzco, said to the Des Moines Register. “Things were going downhill. I didn’t know what to do about it.”
Cano-Pacheco got to drinking, had to switch high schools and started working as his girlfriend gave birth to their son.
The ICE representative stressed to the Des Moines Register that Cano-Pacheco voluntarily opted to be escorted back to his Mexico at the border with Laredo, Texas. Doing so would’ve left open the door to coming back into the U.S. with a visa, ICE noted.
But Cano-Pacheco’s throat was slit some three weeks after his late April arrival in Zacatecas, the newspaper reported, where gang violence runs rampant.
“He was in the wrong place at the wrong time,”
NY Daily News
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