The mother of a 9-year-old girl killed in a rollover accident in April on Interstate 17 has been taken into custody by immigration authorities and now faces deportation in addition to criminal charges.
Brenda Liliana Rivera-Estrada, 30, was taken into custody April 16, four days after the April 12 rollover accident, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials announced May 18.
ICE officers encountered Rivera-Estrada at the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office jail the day she was booked on criminal charges, ICE officials said.
Rivera-Estrada, who is originally from Mexico, entered the United States legally on Feb. 14, 2009, in Nogales as a non-immigrant border-crosser with authorization to remain in the United States up to 30 days, ICE officials said. She has remained in the United States after that period, ICE officials said.
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Alejandro Almeida, ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations deputy field office director, said the identification and arrest of Rivera-Estrada "underscores the importance" of an ICE program that seeks to initiate deportation proceedings against noncitizens held in local, state and federal jails.
Immigration courts will determine whether she is eligible to remain in the United States, Almeida said.
Rivera-Estrada was facing charges of manslaughter and child abuse in the death of her 9-year-old daughter, who died in a rollover crash involving her family on Interstate 17 northbound near Peoria Avenue in north Phoenix, according to the Arizona Department of Public Safety.
The 9-year-old, who police have not identified, was sharing a seatbelt with a sibling at the time of the accident, which happened about 7:30 a.m., according to DPS spokesperson Sgt. Kameron Lee. The girl was dead at the scene.
Rivera-Estrada’s three other children survived the accident, though all of them, including the mother, were treated and released from a hospital, Lee said. The other children are an 11-year-old boy, a 3-year-old boy and a 1-year-old girl, according to Lee.
ICE officials said in a May 18 post on X that police arrested Rivera-Estrada on manslaughter and child abuse charges, "but Maricopa county prosecutors declined to file charges."
The Maricopa County Attorney's Office disputed ICE's claim in a May 19 post on X.
"This is incorrect. We did not decline to prosecute. The case was furthered for additional investigation, including getting DUI lab results and completing a collision analysis," the county attorney's office's X post said.
Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell, a Republican, "has said this many times: we have one chance to get this right. Complex cases like this routinely take time to gather the evidence needed to prove a case beyond a reasonable doubt," the post said.
