4 Year-Old US Citizen “Trapped” in Guatemala

Her name is Emily Ruiz, a US born citizen from Long Island. She was on a return trip from Guatemala where she had traveled with her grandfather. The plane she was on was diverted to Dulles International Airport because of a storm. Immigration officers there detained her grandfather and because of an immigration infraction more than 20 years old he was refused entry to the country. Now 4 year old Emily and her grandfather are back in Guatemala and her parents, both undocumented, are trying to get her back to the US. The New York Times describes their dilemma.

The Ruizes find themselves on the front lines of a heated immigration debate: how to treat families in which the parents are here illegally, while their children, born in the United States, are citizens.

The story is further complicated by the  immigrations officials’ side of the story. They claim that Emily’s father, Leonel Ruiz, was given the opportunity to pick his daughter up at the airport but he opted to have the girl return to Guatemala with her grandfather. They speculate that he feared the meeting would make him vulnerable to detention and deportation. Ruiz claims he feared that if his daughter was placed in state custody she would be given up for adoption.

“We were very worried, and my wife was crying and crying at what was happening,” Mr. Ruiz said.

He said he would have gone to pick up Emily, and was in fact preparing to do so, but was not given the chance. “If we had to go there, we would have gone there,” he said.

All of this comes amidst a wave of proposed legislation in Washington as well as in many states across the country to deny citizenship to children born of undocumented parents, essentially repealing the 14th amendment to the Constitution.

The Ruiz’ lawyer, David M. Sperling, will travel to Guatemala to bring the child back. But the case has quickly become a very real example of what could happen if legislation is approved that would curtail the rights of children born in this country to undocumented parents.

“The case is alarming because it shows what can happen once you start treating kids who are born here whose parents are undocumented with less rights than a full-blown citizen,” said Jeanne A. Butterfield, a former executive director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association who has been acting as an informal adviser to Mr. Ruiz’s lawyers.

A law that would deny citizenship to children like Emily was defeated last week in Arizona. Similar laws are planned in Kansas and California.

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