West Liberty soccer player deported less than a week after being detained by ICE

Pascual Pedro lived in Iowa for seven years, growing up here after immigrating to the United States when he was 13. Last Tuesday, he was detained at a regular check-in appointment at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Office in Cedar Rapids. Less than a week later, and before his lawyer had time to file a single document with ICE officials regarding his order of removal, he was deported to Guatemala, where he was born.

“This is a travesty, there was no due process and our message is bring him back now,“ Father Guillermo Treviño Jr., the parish priest of St. Joseph Catholic Church in West Liberty and Pedro’s godfather, said in a statement.

Pedro, now 20, was marked for expedited removal when he arrived in the United States with his father in 2018, but was allowed to stay under supervised released. His father was deported, and Pedro moved in with his grandparents, who have lived in the United States since 1991. He attended his annual check-in meetings with ICE, had no criminal record, and had previously been approved for a work permit.

Community members who knew Pedro through his years of playing soccer for West Liberty High School, through his church attendance at St. Joseph, through his job working for his grandfather’s siding company — for which Pedro had been approved for a work permit — and through other avenues, rallied when they heard Pedro had been detained.

Pedro’s family quickly got connected with an immigration attorney, Tim Farmer, who worked to put together a 135-page request for a stay of removal that he intended to file Monday morning. The document included letters of support from community members, including Pedro’s former teachers and friends at West Liberty High School, Father Treviño and the Bishop of the Diocese of Davenport, West Liberty Mayor Mark Smith and several others. It also included a petition with more than 1,600 signatures, asking for Pedro to be released.

A vigil was held last Tuesday night, the same day Pedro was detained, outside the Muscatine County Jail. Another vigil was held in St. Joseph Catholic Church on Sunday.

At the time of Sunday’s vigil, Pedro’s grandparents and lawyer had already lost contact with him. He had been transferred over the weekend from the Muscatine County Jail to a detention center in Pine Prairie, Louisiana, according to a news release issued by Escucha Mi Voz, an Iowa City nonprofit that works with immigrants.

Around the time Farmer arrived at the ICE offices in Omaha to file the stay of removal, Pedro was calling his family from an airport in Guatemala City, his plane having just landed, the release states.

“They just moved really quick. I honestly think that’s part of the strategy: move so quick that people don’t have time to respond,” Farmer said. “It was such a tight timeline in this case. He got detained on a Tuesday, and in order for us to have gotten this application filed on time, we would have had to file it on Thursday, with the Fourth of July and everything … The holiday actually worked against us, because we probably could have filed it on Friday if not for the holiday.”

Pedro’s grandfather, Francisco Pedro, said Monday afternoon that he had spoken to Pascual’s mother on the phone. She was working on finding a way to pick him up from the airport.

Escucha Mi Voz had previously planned to bus Pascual’s friends and family to Davenport on Thursday. They were going to visit the offices of Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks and Sen. Joni Ernst to ask the lawmakers to intervene in Pascual’s case.

The visit still is going forward, despite Pascual’s deportation. The nonprofit also is planning a demonstration in front of the Cedar Rapids ICE office, 3351 S Square D Dr. SW, Wednesday at 10 a.m., to ask ICE officials to “bring him home,” according to the release.

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