State senator’s wife faces deportation

ATLANTA – State Sen. Curt Thompson has been a strong advocate of immigration rights, once speaking in Spanish from the steps of the Georgia Capitol against adoption of some of the nation’s strictest immigration controls.

Now Thompson’s Colombia-born wife is in hiding as federal immigration officials try to deport her.

Sascha Herrera, 28, has been in hiding since Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrived at her home Nov. 28 with an order to remove her from the United States. She was not home at the time.

Her attorney, Charles Kuck, claims she was duped by a man handling her immigration requests and that she never received the immigration notices that triggered her deportation order.

While Kuck says neither he nor Thompson knows where Herrera is, he said that she will turn herself in today.

“It’s the right thing to do. She needs to get the law to work for her,” Kuck said.

Kuck filed a petition Monday to halt her deportation order and reopen her case, arguing that a man filed an asylum petition on her behalf without her knowledge and before her husband sponsored her green card application based on their April marriage.

The deportation order stems from Herrera’s repeated failure to appear before a judge on the asylum application.