BREAKING: Donald Trump's ICE enforcers carry out a horrifying new fascist operation by arresting and deporting a 19-year-old star soccer player — just days after he graduated from high school.
We can't let them sweep this story under the rug...
Emerson Colindres Baquedano, the teenager in question, has no criminal record but the Trump administration has abruptly sent him back to his birthplace of Honduras. He arrived in the United States when he was eight-years-old alongside his mother and sister.
His mother, Ada Bell Baquedano-Amador, told The Cincinnati Enquire that the recent graduate has spent most of his life in Cincinnati. In what has become a disturbingly common trend, he was arrested after showing up for a supposedly routine ICE check-in. He had been previously given an ankle monitor at age 17 and made to regularly check-in under a Biden-era policy.
Baquedano-Amador tried to apply for asylum in the past to escape gang violence, but was eventually denied.
After he was detained, Colindres was held at the Butler County Jail in Ohio and was likely moved to another ICE facility after that. Throughout the traumatic ordeal, his friends and family were kept ignorant of his location. He was ultimately removed from the country on June 18th.
According to Baquedano-Amador, her son has never been back to Honduras before. Not only that, but he was abandoned in Honduras four hours away from his only relatives in the country.
"How is my son going to make it over there?” she said. "He doesn’t know anything, and the country where we come from is very insecure."
She and her daughter have been given 30 days to leave the United States.
"Sadly, he’s not the only one. I think there are a lot of Emersons in the same situation right now," Colindres’ soccer coach Bryan Williams told NBC News. "They’re all the same story, someone who was here doing everything they were asked, trying to make a better life for themselves and their family, and now they’re being detained somewhere."
He said that Colindres was hoping to continue his exceptionally promising soccer career at the university level.
"He had a dream to play at the next level in soccer and eventually play professionally," said his teammate Preston Robinson. "You could tell by the amount of effort he put in and how good he was, it was definitely possible for him."
This is what Trump's bigoted policies look like in practice. No Americans are helped by this cruelty but a young life has been derailed, possibly destroyed, and a family has been torn apart. Innocent people are being ground to dust by the MAGA political machine. Enough is enough.
