This is a disgrace. Andres Magana Ortiz, an undocumented dad who worked his way from migrant coffee farmer to entrepreneur, lost his deportation battle after nearly three decades in the U.S. The father of three American citizens had garnered immense attention during his bid to stay in the U.S., including letters of support from Hawaii’s entire congressional delegation and Judge Stephen Reinhardt, who, though legally unable to stop Magana Ortiz’s deportation, wrote in a “scathing” opinion that “the government decision shows that even the 'good hombres' are not safe.”
Facing a deportation date in just days, Magana Ortiz “voluntarily” left Hawaii for Mexico last Friday, a decision that was anything but voluntary:
“Very, very sad and very disappointed in many ways, but there’s not much I can do,” he told Hawaii News Now from the airport. “Just follow what I have to do and hopefully, in a little bit, things can get better.”
His flight took him from Hawaii to San Francisco to Houston. From there, he flew to Morelia, a city of 785,000 in central Mexico close to the village he left when he was a teenager. He will stay with friends for the time being and try to get in touch with a distant aunt, his lone blood relative in the country, he told local media.
His oldest child, 20-year-old Victoria Magana Ledesma, told the Honolulu Star Advertiser on Saturday that the situation was “more surreal than anything else.”
“We said our goodbyes at home. My dad decided it was better for my brother and my sister to not go all the way to the airport,” Ledesma said. “I don’t feel like it’s happening. And after so much fight that we went through, for it to just end like this. I mean, it’s not necessarily ending, but it is hard to see him go.”
As the Washington Post notes, Magana Ortiz’s story was one of “rags-to-riches,” at one point even assisting the same federal government that would eventually deport him:
He started out picking coffee as a migrant worker in Kona, an area known for its coffee production. After a decade of manual labor, he saved enough money to buy his own farmland, according to Hawaii News Now.
Over the following years, he expanded his business and rose to prominence in Hawaii’s coffee industry. In 2010, he allowed the U.S. Department of Agriculture to use his farm without charge to conduct a five-year study into a destructive insect species harming Hawaii’s coffee crops, court documents show. When he left over the weekend, he was leasing 20 acres of land and helping run 15 other small farms, according to the Star Advertiser.
In the time since then, Magana Ortiz had attempted to sort out his legal status through his marriage and then through his eldest daughter, but she doesn’t turn 21 until August. Even then, Magana Ortiz could be barred from re-entering the U.S. for 10 years due to his deportation. Countless other families are facing similar devastation due to the looming deportation of their loved ones. In a little over a week, another undocumented dad of four U.S. citizens may also be ripped from his family and Ohio home of over 25 years:
[Jesus] Lara Lopez, 37, is invisible to most Americans. Like many undocumented workers, he lived under the radar, mostly working in fields picking fruits and vegetables, though today he works in a Pepperidge Farm food packaging plant. He may have packed the Pepperidge Farm goldfish in your cupboard.
He has no criminal record. With a valid work permit issued by the federal immigration officials several years ago, he has supported his family. He has paid taxes and never used public assistance for welfare, food stamps, housing or unemployment compensation.
Yet, Lara Lopez is among the tens of thousands of immigrants being swept up in President Donald Trump administration's directive to immigration authorities to deport thousands of people in the United States illegally.
"Since 2008, Jesus did everything ICE asked him to do,” said David Leopold, Lara’s attorney. “He showed up every time he was asked, and did whatever they wanted. He presented all his tax records since 2002, showing he has been a taxpayer, which is more than our president has done.”
"He held down jobs and raised a family. He never collected welfare, food stamps, unemployment compensation or housing assistance. He has never been in trouble with the law, he attends church and is the kind of person we want to live here." A petition in Lara’s support has already garnered nearly 35,000 signatures.
As both Magana Ortiz and Lara show, our nation’s immigration system is not only extraordinarily complicated, it is fundamentally broken. Both men would be more than happy to get in the back of a line in order to sort out their immigration statuses, if only a line for undocumented immigrants who have built lives and homes here existed in the first place.
The fact is that these ruthless, indiscriminate attacks on immigrant families are a stain on our nation, because immigrant families are American families. How does any of this make America stronger, or safer, or more prosperous? The answer is: it doesn’t.