Pelaez gets reprieve from deportation

A Miami high school honours student who faced imminent deportation to Colombia has won a two-year reprieve after 2,000 fellow students took to the city's streets to protest her removal from the US, federal authorities said on Wednesday. The plight of Daniela Pelaez, 18, a North Miami High School senior and valedictorian, has put a spotlight on US immigration policy like few other individual cases in recent history. The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency said it would defer action for two years in potential removal proceedings against Pelaez, who was born in Colombia and brought by her parents to the US when she was four. The decision is in line with a move by the Obama administration last summer when it said it was easing US deportation policies to keep low-priority cases from resulting in removal. Against national interest "This is so mindless," US vice-president Joe Biden said of the threatened deportation of Pelaez, who had been ordered to leave the country by March 28. Instead, she now looks set to graduate at the top of her class of more than 820 seniors. "Why ... would you want to take a kid with this talent and this capacity and deport her? It's against our national interest," Biden told CNN. Pelaez, who has applied for entrance to several top-ranking US universities, was brought to the Miami area from Barranquilla, Colombia, by her parents. She was denied a green card despite her brother obtaining citizenship and her father, with whom she lives, obtaining legal residency. Top priority ICE cited "prosecutorial discretion" for its decision to defer the deportation of Pelaez after at least 2,000 students were joined by teachers and community activists last Friday in a street protest and outpouring of support for the young woman. Many see Pelaez as a poster child for passage of the so-called Dream Act and deep-rooted immigration reforms. Several politicians including Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the Cuban-born Florida congresswoman who chairs the House Foreign Relations Committee, also wrote letters to ICE on her behalf. Pelaez visited some of those politicians in Washington on Wednesday to thank them for their support. In a decision announced last August, US Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said the government had created an inter-agency working group to conduct a review of all deportation cases "to ensure they constitute our highest priorities." Democratic congressional leaders praised the move and said it would ease the way for individuals who came to the US illegally as children and have spent years in the country to stay and work legally.