To: DHS, ERO Office of Enforcement and Removal Operations, ICE, and The North Carolina State Senate

Free Gloribel!

Keep Lourdes Gloribel's family together. Please release her from ICE detention and give her a chance to fight her case from the outside! She is an asylum seeker who has gone through hell and back and touches everyones live making the world a better place.

Why is this important?

As a community member who believes in your leadership, your institutions and believes in our community, I am writing to ask you to immediately intervene on behalf of Lourdes Gloribel Perez Andrade A#200939229, who was detained earlier this January 2019 and is in ICE Custody, currently being held in Louisiana at Jena/LaSalle Detention Facility 830 Pinehill Rd, Jena, LA 71342 (318) 992-7800. We need your advocacy for ICE to exercise prosecutorial discretion in granting parole for Lourdes Gloribel Perez Andrade. who was suddenly and traumatically taken into ICE Custody.

Lourdes Gloribel’s (Glory) story is that of extreme trauma as well as extreme resiliency. She came to the United States at the age of 14, pregnant and without her parents, seeking protection from the violence she had experienced in El Salvador. She had been living with her aunt and grandmother when gang members abducted her and sexually assaulted her. After her aunt helped her escape, she decided she could no longer safely live in her community.

After she entered the U.S., Lourdes was detained by border patrol, but released to live with her mother and attend immigration court. Following through with immigration court was important to Lourdes and her mother, but life was very difficult for both of them after her entry. Her mother was in a violent and abusive relationship that only became worse once Lourdes came into the household. A few months after entering the country Lourdes gave birth, at the age of fifteen. Her mother tried contacting Lourdes biological father, but found no help from him. Meanwhile the violence she experienced became so bad that she fled the home with her daughter and granddaughter to seek refuge at a shelter for abused women.

It was while they were living temporarily in the shelter for victims of domestic violence that Lourdes missed her court date. At the time Lourdes was consumed with problems other than court: feeding her baby, finding a home to live in, and keeping her mother out of danger. The notices for court were sent to the home she had escaped, a place she feared having any contact with that might expose her mother and her to more abuse.

The following months were tumultuous for Lourdes, now fifteen and taking care of her infant child while living a women’s shelter. Her mother, the only support in her life, gave birth to Lourdes’s brother while they were living in the shelter. By the time she and her mother got back on her feet her court date had long passed and she simply did not know what to do to fix the situation. Instead she turned her attention to raising her children, and contributing to her community as well as she could. She became a well-loved member of her community, which was devastated by her arrest and detention by immigration. She is now asking for the immigration court to reopen her case and allow her to apply for asylum so that she can be protected from returning to El Salvador.

We have letters of support form other community members, doctors, teachers and organizations in support of Glory’s freedom and reuniting with her family and her community. Can you please join us in this call to action?

CIMA (Compañeros Inmigrantes de Las Montañas en Acción), Nuestro Centro, my family and my community are asking for your support in reuniting Glory with her family. We need our representatives to do the humane thing, the right thing.