PHOENIX — For eight years, Guadalupe García de Rayos had checked in at the federal Immigration
and Customs Enforcement office here, a requirement since she was caught using a fake Social Security number during a raid in 2008 at a water park where she worked.
Lawyers from two of the nation’s leading civil rights’ groups said Ms. Rayos might be the first undocumented
immigrant to be arrested during a scheduled meeting with immigration officials since Mr. Trump took office.
“We’re living in a new era now, an era of war on immigrants,” Ms. Rayos’s lawyer, Ray A. Ybarra Maldonado, said Wednesday after leaving the building here
that houses the federal immigration agency, known by its acronym, ICE.
Mr. Trump, she said, “took the gloves off agents and has permitted these agents to go
after immigrants regardless of their ties and contributions to the United States.”
Ms. Rayos was 14 when she left Acambaro, a city in an impoverished corner of the Mexican state of Guanajuato,
and sneaked across the border into Nogales, Ariz., a three-hour drive from Phoenix.
In 2013, an immigration court ordered that she be sent back to Mexico,
but her case had been on hold since the federal authorities — under the Obama administration — decided not to act on the deportation order.
Among the 18 executive orders that he has issued since taking office on Jan. 20 is one stipulating
that undocumented immigrants convicted of any criminal offense — and even those who have not been charged but are believed to have committed “acts that constitute a chargeable criminal offense” — have become a priority for deportation.
