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Too old to qualify for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), 39-year-old Jorge Garcia was deported Monday to a country he had not stepped foot in for nearly three decades. Garcia is married to a U.S. citizen, has two U.S. citizen kids, and no criminal record. It didn’t matter to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), who told the man during his regular check-in this past November to prepare for deportation. On Martin Luther King, Jr. Day this week, his heartbroken family and supporters accompanied him to Detroit Metropolitan Airport to say goodbye:
“We did not want to put up a Christmas tree because it was way too sad to even get to that point,” Cindy Garcia told the Detroit News. “It was rough because we knew he was going to leave eventually. All we could do is make memories.”
The night before he was ordered to leave, Garcia’s friends held a farewell party for him in southwest Detroit, according to the Detroit Free Press. “I feel kind of sad,” he told the newspaper. “I got to leave my family behind, knowing that they’re probably going to have a hard time adjusting. Me not being there for them for who knows how long. It’s just hard.”
At the airport on Monday morning, a group of friends and supporters from UAW 600 and the advocacy group Michigan United turned out with Garcia and his family, some carrying signs reading “Stop Separating Families.” They watched quietly as the family said their goodbyes. Video of the tearful scene was shared widely on social media.
Garcia had begged ICE to hold off his deportation just long enough to see if Congress could act on a permanent DACA fix, but federal immigration officials refused. So after spending over $125,000 in legal fees and costs for over a decade in an attempt to find legal status, Garcia was ordered to leave despite Donald Trump’s claim that ICE was prioritizing “bad hombres” for deportation. “How do you do this on Martin Luther King Jr. Day?" Michigan United’s Erik Shelley asked Niraj Warikoo of the Detroit Free Press. "It's another example of the tone-deafness of this administration. If Jorge isn't safe, no one is safe."
According to ICE data, following Trump’s inauguration, the “arrests of immigrants without any criminal charges more than doubled over the past year.” Jesus Lara, an Ohio father of four American citizens, was deported to Mexico last July after nearly two decades in the U.S.:
Lara had no criminal record, was a taxpayer, and followed ICE’s rules by checking in regularly for years. That didn’t matter to immigration officials, who treated Lara no differently than they would someone who actually did pose a danger to public safety. Instead, ICE ordered him to leave his family and country. "These are the darkest times I've ever seen as an attorney,” said former American Immigration Lawyers Association president David Leopold, who represented Lara. “When the best and the brightest that we have to offer are taken from their homes and sent away. The law is so broken.”
Last August, Maria Mendoza-Sanchez and her husband were deported to Mexico this past August after two decades in the U.S. As was the case with Garcia and Lara, neither had criminal records. ICE again didn’t care:
San Jose Mercury News: “At the airport, the 46-year-old mother related how she had arrived in Oakland in 1994 when she was young and in love. She began working in a nursing home, where she was promoted several times, then studied to become a nurse. Eusebio had started working in construction, and later graduated to become a truck driver for the last 12 years. Asked by a reporter Wednesday night if not getting the stay of the deportation order was a failure, she said no. ‘I’m not leaving this country defeated, because I graduated from the university and that was not in my plans when I came here, or when I was a kid,’ she said.”
As immigrant rights group America’s Voice notes, marriage to a U.S. citizen is no guarantee of legal status:
Undocumented immigrants do not automatically become naturalized after marrying a US citizen; they must go through an application process that is long, arduous, and expensive. Many immigrant-citizen couples (we also call them “mixed-status families”) choose to not go through the process due to the complications and dangers that lurk. And that means that the immigrant spouse remains undocumented and subject to deportation at any time.
First off, many families don’t seek to legalize undocumented spouses simply because they cannot afford to. It’s not a process you should undertake by yourself; it’s best to hire an immigration lawyer. And that costs families thousands of dollars in legal fees, assuming that they manage to stay away from “notarios” — scammers who pretend to provide immigration assistance but instead take their clients’ money or illegally give bad legal advice.
If the family does attempt to undergo the process, there’s no guarantee that they will succeed and be able to put the undocumented spouse on the path toward legal status. The documented spouse (a US citizen or legal permanent resident) begins by sponsoring his or her undocumented partner for a green card. If the undocumented partner did not originally enter the US legally, he or she must then return to his or her home country for a screening at a US consulate.
Due to horrifically outdated immigration law, Garcia may now be barred from reentering the U.S. for a decade:
Garcia’s wife was told he would not be allowed to return home for a decade. But on Monday, she vowed to keep fighting. “We’re going to pray and get him back fast, faster than this paperwork that gave him a 10-year bar,” the mother of two said.
The gravity of his departure has left many in Metro Detroit “heartbroken,” said Mayra Valle, a family friend at the airport. “No words to explain the pain. ... Jorge was a child. He didn’t choose to go back. He never knew what was going to happen.”
The scene could become more common, some said. “We see it as a sign of more to come,” said Raquel Garcia, a volunteer with Michigan United.
As the termination of programs like Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and DACA have shown, this is a mass deportation administration that will lie to the American public as unshackled federal immigration agents sweep up parents like Garcia and children like Rosamaria Hernandez. And still, GOP legislators keep delaying the DREAM Act and actually want to give Trump even more money to terrorize even more immigrant communities? Enough.
