MIAMI, (Reuters) – A Miami high school honors student who faced imminent deportation to Colombia has won a two-year reprieve after 2,000 fellow students took to the city’s streets to protest her removal from the United States, federal authorities said yesterday.
The plight of Daniela Pelaez, 18, a North Miami High School senior and valedictorian, has put a spotlight on U.S. immigration policy like few other individual cases in recent history. The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency said it would defer action for two years in potential removal proceedings against Pelaez, who was born in Colombia and brought by her parents to the United States when she was 4.
The decision is in line with a move by the Obama administration last summer when it said it was easing U.S. deportation policies to keep low-priority cases from resulting in removal.
“This is so mindless,” U.S. Vice President Joe Biden said of the threatened deportation of Pelaez, who had been ordered to leave the country by March 28. Instead, she now looks set to graduate at the top of her class of more than 820 seniors.
“Why in God’s name would you want to take a kid with this talent and this capacity and deport her? It’s against our national interest,” Biden told CNN.
Pelaez, who has applied for entrance to several top-ranking U.S. universities, was brought to the Miami area from Barranquilla, Colombia, by her parents. She was denied a green card despite her brother obtaining citizenship and her father, with whom she lives, obtaining legal residency.
