DREAMer Manuel Antonio Cano Pacheco Killed After Deportation

[Content Note: Nativism; violence; death.]

Manuel Antonio Cano Pacheco arrived in the United States at age 3, in the company of his parents, who were undocumented immigrants. Because he was brought here as a child, he qualified for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. But now he is dead, after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deported him from the only home he's ever really known.

Rekha Basu at the Des Moines Register: Sent Back to Mexico's Violence, Des Moines Student Dies within Weeks.

Manuel Antonio Cano Pacheco should have graduated high school in Des Moines last month. The oldest of four siblings should have walked across a stage in a cap and gown to become a proud symbol to his sister and brothers of the rewards of hard work and education.

Instead, Manuel died a brutal death alone in a foreign land...

[His DACA] status didn't protect Manuel when he came to immigration authorities' attention after being stopped for speeding last fall. An ICE spokesperson said in a statement that a federal immigration judge terminated his DACA status because of two misdemeanor convictions.

...Yes, Manuel was responsible for his own actions when he broke the law during a traumatic time [after his father was sent to prison] by driving under the influence. "I think most of this is because of his dad," [his friend Juan Verduzco] said. "That's when his college stuff, his dreams went down the drain."

No one should put others at risk by driving under the influence, though some very prominent Iowans have done so without having it derail their futures. Manuel had paid his dues for it.

And how many Iowans have been stopped for speeding without being delivered a death sentence?

That's not hyperbole. Manuel was deported to the northwestern Mexican state of Zacatecas, where his family is from, which has "become a deadly place, especially for youth," because of gang violence. Manuel's throat was slit when he went "out to get food with an acquaintance of his cousin's, who apparently was known to the killers."

Said his friend Verduzco: "He was in the wrong place at the wrong time." A place he was in because ICE put him there.

And had he not been killed mere weeks after his deportation, he would have risked abduction and possible death at the hands of gangs who are preying on U.S. deportees along the border, who "hold the deportees until their relatives in the U.S. pay thousands of dollars for their release."

Do federal authorities take any of those dangers into consideration when deporting people who were raised here? [Shawn Neudauer, ICE public affairs officer] said deportees to Mexico are turned over to Mexican authorities. "Once turned over they are the responsibility of their own government," he said.

That is sociopathic indifference to the lives of human beings. And it now official U.S. policy.

Manuel left behind a one-year-old child, his girlfriend, his parents, three siblings, extended family, and friends who loved him and depended on him.

My condolences to them. I am so sorry.

"I kind of don't believe it still," Verduzco said of the loss of his friend, who was more like a brother. "It still hasn't hit me... I don't understand."

Nor should any of us understand or accept it.

MAKE SOME NOISE.