“A Particularly Serious Crime”
Machado was just five years old in 1990 when she was brought to the United States by her mother, who was desperate to escape the civil war raging in their home country of El Salvador; she wanted a better life for her two young daughters. In 2015, she was picked up in a traffic stop in Arkansas which triggered her deportation based on a felony conviction from a decade earlier. Machado’s story reveals a radical shift that had been happening since the mid-1990s. Unprecedented numbers of immigrants were being caught in a system that penalized people with mandatory deportations for relatively low-level crimes. Machado does not fit easily into the Manichean distinction made by President Obama in 2014 between “felons” on the one hand and “families” on the other. Machado, like so many others, is both.