No empathy for woman facing potential deportation

My first thought reading about the plight of Maria Barrera (May 28) was that this was another aberration of our justice system, more specifically, our immigration policy.

However, after reading the article I found that I could not sympathize with her or the pending threat of deportation. She entered this country illegally as a 22-year-old adult. She married either a citizen or someone with a green card and subsequently had two children, both U.S. citizens. She had her first “major brush with the federal government” in 2006 and later in 2011.

In other words, she was identified 11 years ago and had ample time to correct her immigration status. Now she is claiming bad legal advice for her predicament and is scrambling for legal resolution.

I’m not really sure what The Bee’s intent was in writing this article, whether it was a human interest piece or to lambaste the new administration, but for all the faults of our immigration policy, this matter was not created by it.

I repeat, as harsh as it might seem, I have little empathy for this individual when the problem should and could have been corrected many years ago.

This story was originally published June 7, 2017 at 12:54 PM with the headline "No empathy for woman facing potential deportation."