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DREAMer Who Died in Border Crossing Accused by ICE of Gang Ties

HeadlineJul 28, 2017

The ICE campaign against MS-13 came as new details emerged about the 10 migrants found dead from heat exposure and asphyxiation in the back of a tractor-trailer in a Wal-Mart parking lot in San Antonio, Texas, last weekend. One of the migrants, 19-year-old Frank Fuentes, was brought to the U.S. as a toddler from Guatemala and raised in northern Virginia before he was deported last March. At the time of Fuentes’s deportation, ICE said the teenager was suspected of having ties to MS-13. His friends dispute the accusation. Fuentes’s former classmate Juan Benítez told The Washington Post, “Growing up where we grew up, it was just easier for the government to label him as a statistic and say that he was affiliated with a gang. Growing up in a rough neighborhood we stayed away from people like that. It was the only way to be safe.” Before his deportation, Fuentes was a recipient of DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which grants legal protection for some young immigrants to live and work in the United States. We’ll have more on the fight of undocumented immigrants to protect DACA later in the broadcast.

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