A 39-year-old DACA recipient and married father of three from Kansas City, Kansas, was deported last month after he left the U.S. and traveled to Mexico to visit his grandfather’s grave, according to a federal lawsuit filed Wednesday.
Evenezer Cortez-Martinez was detained March 23 at the Dallas Fort Worth International Airport as he was making his way back into the U.S., the lawsuit states.
Martinez traveled to Mexico on March 20. Upon his return he arrived at DFW, where U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agents stopped him from boarding his connecting flight home to Kansas City, claiming he had a removal order filed in June 2024, the lawsuit says.
Cortez-Martinez was deported immediately to Mexico City.
According to Cortez-Martinez’s lawyer, Rekha Sharma-Crawford, her client was unaware of a removal order filed in 2024 given he has been a DACA recipient since 2014 and had successfully renewed his permit every two years. Cortez-Martinez was brought to the U.S. as a 4-year-old child.
Sharma-Crawford told CBS News her client applied for and obtained permission to travel outside of the U.S. through the Advance Parole process. This allows DACA recipients in the U.S. to temporarily travel outside of the country and return without a visa.
CBS News has reached out to DHS and CBP for comment on the case.
Sharma-Crawford is part of the legal team that filed a federal lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas Wednesday on behalf of Cortez-Martinez, suing the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and CBP.
The lawsuit argues Cortez-Martinez cannot be barred without a formal removal hearing before an immigration judge given his DACA status and valid Advance Parole documents.
According to court documents, the CBP officer denied Cortez-Martinez’s entry as he was “ordered removed in absentia” on June 11, 2024, and the advance parole document “was issued in error.”
Sharma-Crawford told CBS News in a statement Friday that his removal was “extremely out of the norm.”
“Regulations don’t permit for someone who is on Advance Parole to be subjected to expedited processing, but in terms of how advance parole works, even if someone has a removal order, that doesn’t prevent them from traveling out of the country and returning,” Sharma-Crawford said. “That’s the piece that is so jarring.”
Sharma-Crawford is urging other dreamers not to travel outside of the U.S. under the Trump administration. “If you don’t have to travel right now, you should probably not travel. It’s just too uncertain, it’s just too unknown.”
Cortez-Martinez is currently staying with an uncle in Mexico City while his wife and three children remain in Kansas City.
The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals immigration policy was established in 2012 under the Obama administration to protect unauthorized immigrants brought into the U.S. as children. As of September 2024, there were about 538,000 immigrants, known as dreamers, enrolled in DACA.
In January, a federal appeals court declared DACA unlawful, but kept the policy in place.
