Immigrant built a life, a family in Charlotte for 17 years. Now she’s being deported.

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Norma Contreras dutifully reported Sept. 21 to Charlotte’s office of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which ICE required the undocumented immigrant to do as she fought to stay in the U.S.

Contreras’ minister husband and her three children, a Charlotte family for 17 years, haven’t seen her since. Contreras is being held in Georgia awaiting deportation to her native Honduras.

That a woman with a work permit, clean criminal record and community support could be uprooted without warning is among the starkest examples of changes to federal immigration policy under President Donald Trump.

Under former President Barack Obama, immigrants like Contreras, who had been previously deported in 2009 but had no criminal record, could typically stay. Under Trump, who promised to swiftly deport “bad hombres,” that exemption vanished.

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Contreras’ supporters have said she’s been a model citizen, even if she didn’t have the papers making her one. Her husband and children said her deportation would shatter their family.

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Contreras first came to the U.S. in 1999 to escape gang violence in Honduras but was turned back at the Mexican border. In 2001 she returned, this time with two children. She was deported in 2009 but came back the same year. In 2010, ICE released her under a renewable order of supervision.

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Regional ICE spokesman Bryan Cox confirmed Contreras’ Sept. 21 arrest. Since her return to the U.S. following her 2009 deportation, a felony, “she has received all appropriate legal process before the federal immigration courts, which denied her appeals,” he said in a statement.

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