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ICE arrests Burlington high school student

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Alan Vargas Mendez showed up at the Alamance County Criminal Courts Building on Feb. 8 for one of a number of court hearings that have come along with his dealings with law enforcement over the last year and a half.

Vargas Mendez, 18, a junior at Cummings High School, had gotten into a fight in 2015 at age 16 and caused property damage. Last summer, at 17, he was among three teenagers charged for their alleged involvement in a series of car break-ins in the parking lot of Aldi. Earlier this year, he was charged with underage drinking.

At a court appearance that he had no reason to doubt would be routine, Vargas Mendez was met inside the Graham court building that morning by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. Now, he’s in ICE custody in the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Ga., and it’s unknown what will become of him.

VARGAS MENDEZ IS among two known Alamance County residents ICE arrested in the last month upon their showing up for court. A third was arrested in the same manner in early January.

His mother, who asked not to be identified for fear of being deported, recalls receiving a phone call from him at 11:40 a.m. Feb. 8, at which time he told her that ICE agents had taken him from court.

As a member of the U.S. Latino community that has been fearful for its fate since the changing of executive power in January, she has been made afraid by the rumors of deportation raids, and now that fear had been realized.

“No, I don’t know why,” she answered when asked why ICE may have targeted her 18-year-old. “But I imagine the reason is because he wasn’t born here.”

She came to Burlington from Mexico with 6-year-old Alan, following in the footsteps of her sister. Her father had left her as a child, she recalled, and she later found herself as a single mother in Mexico with a young son who had never known his father, either.

“There is a lot of poverty,” Vargas Mendez’s mother said of Mexico. “There was no work. It was primarily for my son. He had no future there, and [here] he would have an opportunity.”

They rode to the United States in a car, and having no immigration documents, didn’t enter through a border patrol checkpoint, she explained through Bob Martin, a retired Alamance County attorney and current adjunct professor at Elon University.

Though undocumented, she has worked cleaning offices for years, supporting Vargas Mendez and her 10-year-old son and 5-year-old daughter, both born in the United States.

“All this time, I have worked,” she said, sitting in the living room of her neatly kept trailer in Burlington, the walls lined with school photos of her three children, including a once-smiling Alan. The corners of the room hid toys belonging to her youngest children.

“I don’t ask anything of the government because I work,” she said. “Every year, I pay taxes.”

She said she tried time after time to intervene when her son began keeping bad company. At one point, she decided to leave Vargas Mendez in the Alamance County jail as a lesson, even though she could afford bond.

Now that he may not be coming back, however, she says she would give anything to have him in her house again.

“I do not know if I’ll get to see him again,” she said. “And it hurts me very much. If they send him to Mexico, it’s very likely I will never see him.”