Attorneys unable to locate mother and two children detained by ICE in San Francisco

Noman Sabit: Immigration attorneys were scrambling Thursday to find a Bay Area mother and her two young children, one of whom has severe disabilities, after she were arrested by federal immigration officers in San Francisco this week.

Lesly Rodriguez Gutierrez was arrested Tuesday evening after reporting for her check-in at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office on Tehama Street, said Nikolas De Bremaeker, an immigration attorney with Centro Legal de la Raza. A Colombian asylum-seeker, Gutierrez was with her two children, ages 5 and 7, when all three were detained, De Bremaeker said. The 7-year-old boy is deaf and did not have his hearing aids with him, according to De Bremaeker.

"This child is being sent around the country without the assisted equipment that he desperately needs," De Bremaeker told the Chronicle on Thursday.

Immigration attorneys have not been able to contact or locate Gutierrez and her children. ICE officials have given attorneys and Gutierrez's family confusing and false information about which detention center Gutierrez was sent to, said De Bremaeker.

De Bremaeker suspects ICE officials swiftly moved Gutierrez out of California to prevent attorneys from filing a habeas corpus petition, a legal procedure attorneys have used to free people like Gutierrez whose detention they believe was unlawful and arbitrary. Attorneys must know a detainees' physical location in order to file the petition, he said. ICE spokespeople did not immediately respond to the Chronicle's request about Gutierrez's whereabouts and detainment. Gutierrez did not appear on the ICE Online Detainee Locator System on Thursday afternoon.

One of Gutierrez's family members told the Chronicle that Gutierrez contacted them on Thursday, saying she and her children were en route to Colombia, which attorneys were not aware of.

"This obfuscation, this false information, these different stories for different people - it's just chaos at best and intentional," De Bremaeker said. "The fact that she has a severely disabled child … is very strong humanitarian grounds to not deport a 7-year-old."

Officials from the 7-year-old boys' school wrote letters of support that would be included in Gutierrez's immigration court paperwork, calling for the release of the boy and his family.

"I respectfully and urgently urge all parties involved to consider the profound education and humanitarian stakes for this child. (He) belongs in a classroom where he can thrive, communicate and grow," wrote Leeza Williams, a teacher at the California School for the Deaf in Fremont.

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