The Trump administration has ordered another American citizen to leave the country immediately.
Pamela Rioles Saeed, an immigration attorney in Arizona, received an email from Customs and Border Protection telling her that her parole was revoked and she must leave the United States within seven days, she told KNXV-TV. Rioles Saeed is a Boston-born American citizen and is not on parole.
“I thought this was for one of my clients, but then I saw that it was addressed only to me,” she told KNXV-TV.
Rioles Saeed is at least the second American immigration attorney to report receiving an email from the Department of Homeland Security in the last week. On April 11, American citizen and Massachusetts-based immigration lawyer Nicole Micheroni received an email telling her to leave the country immediately or risk being “subject to potential law enforcement actions that will result in your removal from the United States.” Micheroni also thought the email was meant for one of her clients, she told NBC Boston.
The DHS recently sent out a number of parole termination notices in an effort to get immigrants to self-deport as soon as possible, a number of news outlets have reported. Saeed said that another attorney in her chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association had told her other lawyers in his office had received similar notices.
Some of the emails may have been sent to “unintended recipients,” such as lawyers representing those immigrants, by mistake, DHS said in separate statements to NBC Boston and KNXV-TV.
Rioles Saeed said she will ignore the statement for now and urged other American citizens who receive the message to do the same. “There is a true recklessness coming from the government and shows an intimidating attitude towards our immigrant clients,” she told KNXV-TV.
The threatening messages come amid the Trump administration’s aggressive and unlawful deportation efforts, which include revoking nearly 1,000 international student visas and disobeying court orders to deport more than 200 Venezuelan immigrants to a Salvadoran megaprison. The president has even publicly pondered the possibility of deporting American citizens to El Salvador—an illegal (and terrifying) but increasingly imminent possibility.