A Douglas County teacher who was arrested by immigration authorities last month has been removed from the United States and returned to her home nation of Peru.
Marina Ortiz and her family agreed to voluntarily depart the U.S. earlier this month, ending their detention in a family facility in Dilley, Texas, according to an email sent to parents by her former school. A voluntary departure is a less punitive version of a deportation that immigrants in federal detention can request from an immigration judge.
People who pursue voluntary departures are typically required to leave within two weeks of a judge accepting the request, and they leave directly from detention.
“Unfortunately, this decision means that Mrs. Ortiz and her family will not be permitted to return to Colorado prior to leaving the United States,” Stacy Bush, the principal of Parker’s Global Village Academy, wrote in a Nov. 7 email obtained by The Denver Post.
Ortiz taught fifth grade at the school.
“This entire ordeal has been devastating, and we know our students and families care deeply for her,” Bush wrote. “We have no choice but to accept the Ortiz family’s decision about how to resolve this issue in the manner they think is in their best interest.”
As of Monday afternoon, Ortiz was no longer visible in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s online detainee database. ICE representatives did not return a message seeking comment Monday afternoon. In a statement to Fox 31, the agency confirmed that Ortiz requested and was granted a voluntary departure on Nov. 5.
The agency said she’d been released by immigration authorities after she entered the country in December 2022, and that she and her family left the country Nov. 13.
Ortiz was arrested with her family by ICE during a routine immigration appointment in late October. The school previously said she had legal authorization to work in the country through spring 2029.
The family was subsequently transferred to the Texas detention center. After the arrest, school officials said they’d worked with attorneys to “understand the underlying issues involved in this situation and to determine whether there were any possible avenues for (Ortiz’s) return to Colorado.”
Ultimately, Bush wrote, Ortiz and her family decided to request a voluntary departure. They join a surge of immigrants, in Colorado and across the United States, who’ve requested voluntary departures as a means of exiting detention.
The executive director of Global Village Academy Collaborative did not return messages seeking comment Monday. A spokeswoman for the Douglas County School District referred comment to the school.
In a statement included in the school’s Nov. 7 email, Ortiz said her arrest and detention had taken a “terrible” emotional toll — “a life-or-death experience I never imagined.”
“But your support has kept me from giving up. You gave me not just a job, but stability and a community,” she wrote. “To the parents, students, and teachers who cared for us — thank you from the bottom of my heart. You gave me hope when I needed it most.”