At the risk of sounding like a broken record, it’s necessary to repeat that when Donald Trump tells us his deportation force is targeting “bad hombres” for arrest and deportation, he is lying to us. Among the tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants who have been swept up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) since he was sworn into office are Noe Carias, an evangelical pastor, and Maria Mendoza-Sanchez, a nurse at Oakland’s Highland Hospital. Neither have criminal records. Both were ordered to leave the country during their regular ICE check-ins, a disturbing practice immigrant rights advocates have called “silent raids,” and one that has surged in the Trump administration:
"I think first my lord, Jesus Christ," says the pastor, "then my wife, my children, my church. I think God is going to make a miracle to release me, set me free from this place."
Carias, 42, is being held at the Adelanto Detention Facility, in California's high desert, for crossing the border illegally in the 1990s.
The Guatemalan native had been trying to correct his immigration status since 2014, and ICE had granted him yearly stays. That ended this year at his most recent ICE check-in, when Carias was informed he would be arrested and deported.
"I've never been arrested by police," Carias said. "I'm a minister. I have my American citizen wife, being married for 14 years. I have two kids. I support the economy of this country and I paying my taxes. I never commit crime in this country."
Like Pastor Carias, Mendoza-Sanchez has been here for decades and has U.S. citizen children. And like Pastor Carias, she and her husband, also an undocumented immigrant, were instructed to get their affairs in order and prepare to leave the United States after their check-ins. “It’s supposed to be that if you assimilate to the culture of the country, you pay taxes, you work, you graduate college, you have a better chance,” Mendoza-Sanchez said. “It was supposed to be, but I did all that and I’m still in this situation. I just don’t understand.”
As the San Francisco Chronicle and others have been noting, in the past undocumented immigrants taken into custody by ICE were commonly allowed to return to their families and homes here in the U.S., so long as they checked in regularly, could show they were working and paying taxes, and staying out of trouble “while ICE focused resources on people with felony convictions and gang or terrorism ties.” But the Trump administration has thrown any prioritization out the window and an unshackled ICE is targeting immigrants just trying to follow the rules, immigrants like Pastor Carias and Mendoza-Sanchez.
“This is a very easy group of people to go after,” the American Immigration Lawyers Association’s Heather Prendergast said. “If these sorts of cases are being denied, then who gets to stay here, and who is safe? Arguably it is no one”:
Beginning in 2013, [Mendoza-Sanchez and her husband] were granted a pair of one-year stays before immigration officials, in 2015, informed them they didn’t need stays because they were low priorities for deportation, Mendoza-Sanchez said.
In the meantime, Mendoza-Sanchez obtained her nursing degree and began working at Highland Hospital. Her husband, Eusebio Sanchez, is a truck driver, and the two have seen two of their daughters earn admission to UC Santa Cruz.
After being told in May that they had to leave the country, Mendoza-Sanchez and Sanchez went into planning mode. They picked up extra work hours and shifts in a bid to save as much money as possible for their three daughters who would be left behind.
The mother said she told her children, “This is not up to me. These things are pretty much out of my control. There’s nothing I can do. I’ve done everything. You be very strong.”
Staying behind are 21-year-old Melin, who has one more year of undergraduate work to complete, as well as Vianney, 23, and Elizabeth, a 16-year-old who is going to be a junior in high school.
Vianney, a DACA recipient, will become Elizabeth’s legal guardian and the two will stay in the family home together until their other sister joins them.
The situation is much more dire for Pastor Carias, whose two U.S. citizen kids are only five and six. Research has shown that Trump’s mass deportation policies stand to damage a generation of kids—an estimated six million have at least one undocumented family member—with “children who have been separated from their parents frequently show signs of trauma, including anxiety, depression, frequent crying, disrupted eating and sleeping, and difficulties in school.” These families want to get in line in order to get papers and avoid this awful situation, but no such line exists.
“Emotionally, it’s been very hard for them,” Mrs. Carias told CBS2 News. “They cry at night. They miss their father. I miss my husband deeply.”