DACA recipient returns to US after judge finds she was unlawfully deported

The Department of Homeland Security permitted a Mexican woman to return Monday to the United States after a judge found her deportation was unlawful, a rare reprieve at a time when growing numbers of immigrants who arrived as children are being targeted for removal.

A federal judge had ordered DHS to facilitate Maria de Jesus Estrada Juarez’s return to the United States, after immigration officers deported her to Mexico even though she is actively enrolled in an Obama administration program that prohibits her removal because she arrived in the U.S. as a child.

Stacy Tolchin, her immigration attorney, and Ivonne Rodriguez, an advocate, confirmed Estrada had returned to California.

“This has been one of the most painful experiences of my life,” Estrada said after arriving in California. “I followed the rules. I trusted the system. And for that, I was ripped away from my daughter, Damaris, without warning. I’m home now – but what happened to me is wrong, and it should never happen to anyone.”

Estrada, 42, is one of dozens, if not hundreds, of immigrants enrolled in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program who have been arrested and, in some cases, deported, since President Donald Trump started his second term. Former DHS secretary Kristi L. Noem, who was ousted this month, alleged that most had criminal histories and were therefore eligible for removal. But congressional Democrats say Trump is targeting a group that had cleared background checks and been promised to be shielded from deportation.

President Barack Obama created the DACA program in 2012 to enable undocumented immigrants who arrived as children to apply for work permits, saying it was “the right thing to do” for children who graduated from U.S. schools, spoke fluent English and were “Americans in their heart.”

More than 800,000 ultimately applied for the special status, which transformed lives by allowing them to obtain driver’s licenses, work legally and pay resident tuition at state colleges. Many bought houses, started families and launched careers, some as doctors, lawyers, software engineers and teachers. To qualify, they had to pass background checks, pay hundreds of dollars in fees and renew the protection every two years.

But Trump and other Republicans have tried to end the program, and as the administration’s deportation campaign has ramped up, DACA recipients have been targeted. Estrada was arrested after showing up at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services for an appointment on Feb. 18. She was applying for residency after her daughter, a U.S. citizen, filed a petition on her behalf.

At the end of the meeting, she said, an officer told her they rejected her application because she was given a deportation order when she was 15. She told them she had DACA and had never heard about the order.

Minutes later she was in handcuffs.

“This is not happening,” she said she thought.

It is unclear how many DACA recipients have been arrested since Trump took office. Noem said this year that officers had arrested about 270 people in 2025. But she also sent conflicting data to House and Senate Democrats on deportations, putting the number at 174 and then 86 in separate letters.

Some DACA recipients have lost their status because they were convicted of serious crimes, and under past administrations they also could have been targeted for removal. The Biden administration, however, focused on arresting people who posed a threat to public safety. Advocates for immigrants and court records show the Trump administration is targeting a wider pool of immigrants that includes some DACA recipients with no criminal record at all.

Among those are Juan Sebastian Chavez Velasco, a 35-year-old from Colombia who works as a medical laboratory scientist, has two bachelor’s degrees and arrived with his parents at age 8. He was arrested in February in Texas while delivering breast milk to his newborn in the intensive care unit and is being detained in Laredo.

His lawyer, Jodi Goodwin, expressed concern that immigration officers tracked him down using his DACA renewal application, on which he listed his new address. Chavez and his wife, a U.S. citizen, had their third child in February and recently bought a home in Weslaco, Texas. Goodwin said Chavez has no criminal record, has never been arrested and that his DACA status was active at the time of his detention.

“They had just bought a new house right before he filed his renewal for DACA,” she said Monday. “That’s the first time they had his new address.”

How the nation’s new homeland security secretary, Markwayne Mullin, will proceed with targeting DACA recipients will be closely examined in the months ahead. The Trump administration has signaled after the killings of two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis that it will focus its enforcement efforts on undocumented immigrants with criminal records. In past remarks, Mullin has expressed compassion for the young adults known as Dreamers, saying in 2018 that they “came to our country by no fault of their own.”

“No one blames these individuals for following their parents into the U.S.,” he wrote in a column then. “However, it is important that after they turn eighteen years old, they take responsibility for themselves. Have they been positively impacting our society? Do they have a job? Did they go to school? What are they doing to better our country?”

Mullin was running for his first term in the House of Representatives when Obama created the DACA program, and, like Trump, he later criticized the president for taking action without Congress.

Trump has also sent mixed messages on his position on Dreamers. During the 2016 campaign, he promised to immediately end the program, but his administration did not act for months after he took office. Even after officials ended it in late 2017, Trump said he had a “love” for Dreamers and wanted to find a solution for them. Nonetheless, several Trump-backed proposals to grant them residency or provisional status in exchange for immigration restrictions and border wall funding during his first administration went nowhere in Congress.

A court challenge continues over Trump’s decision to end DACA, and the program’s future remains uncertain. It remains closed to new applicants but has been kept open for those who already had the status. Enrollment has declined to about 500,000, according to the most recent data.

Those who still have DACA, however, have encountered delays in renewing their applications. Democratic lawmakers have written to DHS warning that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is putting people at risk of being detained if their protections expire.

“I’ve never seen what’s happening today. Ever,” said Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, a Democrat from South Texas who has called on DHS to release Chavez and others. “It’s obviously very sad when you see kids that have been here all their lives, being incarcerated or in detention.”

Estrada arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border in 1998, at age 15, after graduating from high school in her home state of Puebla in south-central Mexico. She traveled hundreds of miles to Tijuana and crossed legally through the San Ysidro port of entry in Southern California. U.S. officers sent her back and she slipped across two weeks later.

She dreamed of a good job and trips to Disneyland, but reality as an undocumented immigrant was harsh. She worked low-wage jobs as a waitress, a pizzeria worker and a cashier at a gas station and convenience store, where she was once robbed at gunpoint.

She reenrolled in high school to improve her English and considered becoming a licensed cosmetologist but couldn’t because she was undocumented. Then in 2003, she had her daughter, Damaris, and started “thinking about her dreams.”

Obama’s DACA program allowed Estrada to work legally and obtain professional licenses. She sold car insurance. She opened a convenience store. She helped to support her grandmother in Los Angeles and her mother in Mexico.

“It was an opportunity to change my life,” she said.

After her daughter reached adulthood, she offered to sponsor her mother for permanent residency, a path to U.S. citizenship.

Since her DACA status was active, Estrada felt confident as she and Damaris attended an appointment for the application at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in February. Then the meeting took unexpected turn.

“Am I getting deported?” she asked the officer who put her in handcuffs.

She turned to Damaris, who was pale and in tears, hugged her and told her to stay strong.

“It was time for her to show who her mother was,” she said.

Over the next several hours, she said officers refused to answer questions about why she was being deported. Officers placed her arms and legs in metal shackles, fastened them with a chain around her waist, loaded her onto a bus and transported her and others from city to city, picking up people as they made their way to the border.

Hours later, she stood at the port of entry where she had initially arrived as a teen 27 years earlier.

An immigration officer rang a bell, and the door to Mexico opened. The officer told her to go.

On March 10, Estrada’s lawyer filed a lawsuit seeking her return. Government lawyers argued that they were executing a deportation order and said the judge lacked power over the case because Estrada was out of the U.S.

U.S. District Judge Dena Coggins ruled two weeks later that Estrada had suffered “extreme” harm and that officers deported her “in flagrant violation” of DACA regulations and her constitutional right to due process. The judge gave DHS seven days to facilitate her return to the U.S.

DHS called the judge’s order “yet another ruling from a Biden-appointed activist judge,” adding that Estrada “is an illegal alien from Mexico who received full due process and was issued a final order of removal.” The agency’s statement repeated Noem’s previous arguments noting that DACA in itself is not a legal status and that recipients can be removed for various reasons.

Tolchin, Estrada’s attorney, said her client never had a hearing before an immigration judge.

In an interview from her mother’s house in Puebla last week, Estrada fried tilapia in a pot on the patio, wiped her brow in the searing heat and worried.

She said she had prepared herself for the possibility that she might have to stay in Mexico. But she missed her job managing properties, her trips to Costco for her favorite croissants and the paycheck that had helped support her family. Her daughter has remained alone in Sacramento, “grieving someone who is still alive.”

Estrada said she hugged her mother and relatives goodbye in Mexico on Saturday night and made the trek northwest to Tijuana. She had not heard from DHS for a few days but still believed the administration would follow the judge’s order.

“I have belief in this system,” she said. “Year after year, I pay my taxes. I make sure that I contribute to the country.”

On Monday, an hour after The Washington Post inquired with DHS and the Justice Department about her case, authorities informed her she would be allowed back in.

She went to the San Ysidro port of entry. A door opened and she walked through it. Then, after passing through Customs and Border Protection, she met her daughter on the other side.