Alfredo Juarez Zeferino, 25, a local farmworker activist and union organizer, has decided to self-deport to Mexico after a four-month battle to be released from the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma, according to media reports.
Zeferino, who goes by “Lelo,” decided on July 14 in immigration court to depart voluntarily to Mexico, a decision he said was “tough,” according to NPR’s KUOW.
“It’s hard to fight the case from here. Everyone loses. There’s no confidence in this court,” Zeferino told the Seattle-based news station.
By choosing to leave voluntarily, Zeferino could potentially return to the U.S. legally in the future. Zeferino’s attorney, Larkin VanDerhoef, said he would have stayed in the detention facility for months had he applied for asylum, and his immigration judge said last month she didn’t have the legal jurisdiction to approve a $5,000 bond to release him, according to KUOW.
U.S. Representative Rick Larsen (WA-02) said it was a “tragedy” that Zeferino would not be able to return to his family in Skagit County.
“In arrests across the country, the Trump administration and ICE have claimed that they are going after ‘the worst of the worst.’ But like so many others who have been detained, Lelo Juarez does not represent the worst of the worst,” Larsen (WA-D) wrote in a statement.
Larsen met with Zeferino at the ICE detention facility in Tacoma on June 20 and said at the time that Zeferino “still feels resilient, still feels hopeful, but it’s taken a toll on him being in the detention facility.”
While detained, Zeferino was not able to meet with his family in the same room, only speaking through glass partitions, according to Larsen. The congressman was trying to facilitate Zeferino meeting with his family in the same room, something he hadn’t done since being incarcerated. In late June, over 1,500 people were detained in the Tacoma facility, only 10 percent of whom had legal representation, Larsen said.
ICE detained Zeferino on March 25 in Sedro-Woolley, which federal officials have said stemmed from a 2018 detention order. His family denies receiving notification of the order.
Zeferino immigrated from Mexico to Washington as a child and grew up to become a labor and immigrant advocate, co-founding Familias Unidas por la Justicia and serving on the defunct Bellingham Immigration Advisory Board.
The Bellingham Police Department turned him over to ICE for driving the wrong way on a one-way street when he was 15. His family later sued the city of Bellingham for racial bias and was awarded $100,000 in damages.
Zeferino’s detention sparked protests and made international headlines. His hearing ended on July 14 with supporters reportedly gathered outside of the Tacoma detention facility.
