Her children crossed the border Thursday night to be with their mother.
"We don't deserve to go through this. No family deserves to go through this. It's heartbreaking. No one should feel this much pain, no one should go through this much suffering," her daughter Stephanie said Thursday.
"I'm not going to stop fighting for her."
Garcia de Rayos has two children who were born in Arizona.
She came illegally to the United States in the mid-1990s with her parents when she was 14. She was arrested in 2008 during a workplace raid and convicted one year later of felony criminal impersonation.
After her conviction she appealed a court order to voluntarily deport and lost. She became the subject of a removal order in 2013 and was placed court-ordered supervision, which required her to report on a provided schedule to an ICE office until her order of removal was "affected," or acted on.
She came illegally to the United States in the mid-1990s with her parents when she was 14. She was arrested in 2008 during a workplace raid and convicted one year later of felony criminal impersonation.
"The truth is I was there [in the United States] for my children. For a better future. To work for them. And I don't regret it, because I did it for love," she said in a news conference Thursday night from Nogales, Mexico.
"I'm going to keep fighting so that they continue to study in their country, and so that their dreams become a reality."
Whatever the reason, Garcia de Rayos, 35, said she has no regrets. Not about coming to the US as a teenager in search of a better life nearly two decades ago, or staying illegally and working under a fake Social Security number.