This should be one of the proudest moments of Felix Garcia’s life. His eldest daughter, Belsy, has just about one year left before she graduates from Loyola University Chicago’s Stritch School of Medicine. Instead, the dad of three is sitting in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention with a deportation date just days away, on April 4. Lots of people have been talking about undocumented immigrants needing to “follow the rules,” and that’s exactly what Garcia had been doing.
For seven years, the undocumented dad checked in regularly with ICE, to show that he was working, paying his taxes, and continuing to have a clean record. Garcia hoped that after seven years of checking in the agency would at least spare him one more year here so that he could watch his daughter graduate. “If he could just be present for that moment, he’d buy his own ticket to Guatemala.” But, “the officer said no”:
For now, Garcia is at Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia, where he sleeps in a room with 60 other men. Many of the other men he’s talked to have also been in the U.S. for years and have clean criminal records.
“They are not sending only people that deserve to be sent,” Garcia said. “They are sending everybody.”
Belsy’s Loyola community has rallied behind her dad’s fight, organizing a recent rally to call on Atlanta ICE Office Director Sean Gallagher to halt Perez’s deportation. “My father considers the United States his home,” Belsy, herself a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipient and one of the estimated 100 medical Dreamers in the U.S., said earlier this month, “and he is a living example of the American Dream.” Gallagher has every power to stop this deportation, but ICE instead seems determined to turn this family’s dream into a nightmare for no other reason than because it can.
Garcia had originally fallen onto ICE’s radar in 2011, but under the Obama administration was given annual stays, as long as he continued checking in. “Garcia felt mostly safe. He started to buy houses, repair them and sell them, and then to buy land and build the houses from the ground up, teaching himself methods on YouTube and employing workers.” The came his check-in under the Trump administration:
Garcia is one of a growing number of undocumented immigrants being detained during periodic check-ins with ICE as part of President Donald Trump’s efforts to increase deportations. Like many of them, he was ordered removed by a judge but was allowed to stay in the U.S. for years as long as he appeared at appointments and otherwise kept out of trouble.
Now, these immigrants are easy pickings for removal — they walk into ICE offices for check-ins and aren’t allowed out, based on orders from years back that they can’t easily fight.
Detaining people like Garcia at check-ins is an increasingly common tactic to “rack up numbers of deportations without needing to go back into the immigration court system,” according to Charles Roth, director of litigation of the National Immigrant Justice Center, who is not representing Garcia but is familiar with his case. “What the immigration authorities tend to do is to go after the low-hanging fruit.”
The Huffington Post reports that Garcia came to the U.S. from Guatemala seeking asylum, and while “his case moved quickly through the court process,” he “didn’t have an attorney and was given only weeks to find one. He didn’t, and ultimately was ordered deported. That year, 88 percent of unrepresented asylum seekers were denied in court, versus 66 percent of those with lawyers.” Right now, there is no line for him to get into to correct it.
“[My dad] made us volunteer and he was always about us doing well in school,” said Belsy, who faces an uncertain future of her own due to DACA’s status. She hopes she can graduate and help underserved communities. “It’s been extremely hard. It’s hard to focus on your studies when your dad is in a detention center. I feel helpless.” Garcia’s advocates continue to gather signatures calling on ICE to halt his deportation. You can add your name here.