Arizona immigration attorney and US citizen told to self-deport
“Morally reprehensible,” she said
TUCSON, AZ (AZFamily) —An Arizona immigration attorney and U.S.-born citizen said she received an email from the Department of Homeland Security advising her to self-deport.
Pamela Rioles Saeed is an immigration attorney based in Tucson. On April 11, she got an email from DHS saying her parole had been terminated and she needed to return to her home country. But Rioles Saeed was born in Boston. She only represents immigrants seeking asylum.
The attorney says many of her clients have received the email and she wonders if because she regularly gets emails from that same DHS email domain, if her email was mistakenly added. “They saw my email address in a database of people who may or may not hold different immigration statuses, and they sent me the email too,” said Rioles Saeed. “I think there was maybe some recklessness or some indiscretion in how these emails were sent out.”
She worries that if it happened to her, it could happen to others who are less knowledgeable about their legal status. “Most of my clients are actually just seeking protection from their home country, whether that’s the government themselves that they believe will harm them, for example, the Taliban in Afghanistan, or a group in the country that the government is not going to stop. So also, ISIS,” she said.
Many Afghans currently seeking asylum worked with U.S. troops throughout the war until the U.S. withdrew and the Taliban took over in 2021. “That’s the kind of people that they are sending these notices to. Some of my clients even have asylum already. They’ve already won their cases and they are still being told to leave the country,” she said.
Rioles Saeed says she has the protection of being a U.S.-born citizen and the luxury of knowing how wrong this is from a legal standpoint. But she says, many people, even those who got this by mistake, might not. “There’s no right to indigent counsel in immigration proceedings. If you can’t afford an attorney, you will not have one, and that is very frightening to many many people,” she said.
She also says the email is a huge violation of due process. “Part of due process is notice. How can it be notice if it was sent to citizens and non-citizens alike? How can you know if you really need to leave the country if they don’t even know who they sent this to?” she said.
CBP has acknowledged that some people got this email by mistake. Arizona’s Family reached out to DHS for a comment, but we have not yet heard back.
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