Kimberly Pineda-Chavez has turned 19 while awaiting her fate in a federal immigration detention center in South Georgia. Fellow detainees helped the Collins Hill High School student celebrate last month by singing “Happy Birthday” in Spanish.
Outside the sprawling complex in Ocilla, the Buford woman's deportation case is attracting national attention while underscoring the link between Georgia and the on-again-off-again humanitarian crisis on the U.S.-Mexican border. The impassioned debate over her case also comes amid a presidential election riven by what to do about the estimated 11 million immigrants living illegally in the U.S.
Pineda-Chavez is among hundreds of people who have been arrested in Georgia and other states this year as part of a crackdown against the waves of Central Americans immigrants illegally entering the country. Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have called for an end to the raids, while Republican frontrunner Donald Trump is campaigning on ousting all immigrants with no legal status here.
In recent weeks, The Guardian, the Los Angeles Times and Univision have published pieces about Pineda-Chavez' plight. And activists have created two online petitions to free her, including one on the liberal website MoveOn.org. It has attracted more than 25,000 signatures from people across the nation and even overseas.
Pineda-Chavez' complicated case is triggering headlines, partly because of her harrowing story. In a telephone interview from the Irwin County Detention Center this week, she described how she fled Honduras in 2014 at age 17 to escape gangsters who threatened to make her and her younger sister their "sexual property." Immigration authorities apprehended the sisters at the southwest border in September of that year, but they were allowed to stay in the U.S. while they underwent deportation proceedings.
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