Houston Independent School District teacher & mother of 2 faces deportation to Haiti
At ICE?s processing center on Export Plaza Drive the chief export is illegal immigrants.
News cameras have never been allowed beyond the barbed wire surrounding the 900 bed facility until Thursday.
The reason is an interview with 28-year-old Marie Baptiste.
She occupies one of the beds.
?I?m supposed to be going back home, but what is home. I don?t know what home is,? said Baptiste.
Home, for the first nine years of her life was Haiti.
She said she fled the strife ridden country in 1989 with her parents, who were detained in Miami.
KHOU - TV
Marie Baptiste, 28
Baptiste hasn?t seen them since. ?I don?t know how I came here illegally, because I was brought here as a child.
Baptiste was raised by an aunt in Houston and earned a degree in biology.
HISD hired her this year to teach science at Woodson Middle School.
She?s also married to a U.S. citizen and has two children.
And Baptiste said it was a doctor?s appointment for one of those children made her 10 minutes late for an asylum hearing before an immigration judge. ?I was there with my baby, and my baby?s father and a doctor?s note with my child, and I didn?t get to see the judge or say anything to the judge. He just closed my case, and that was it.?
But he did more than close the case; he issued a final order of removal.
Lawrence Rushton is Baptiste?s immigration attorney. ?She does have a compelling case. She has children that were born here. She has a husband who is a U.S. citizen and who does have an approved visa petition that was filed on her behalf.?
ICE paints an entirely different picture.
It says Baptiste is a fugitive.
That the fact she?s married with children is irrelevant.
A law is a law says ICE, and the plan to follow the law by the book.
?They tell me you?re going back to Haiti Friday. Okay, so how can I go back to Haiti? I have no warning,? said Baptiste.
?They might as well put a lethal injection in my vein and send me in peace, because either way, I?m going to see God, said Baptiste