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Maribel Trujillo, the Ohio mom of four who was allowed to return to the United States 17 months after her deportation to Mexico, said she spent a lot of the time she was apart from her family in prayer. It’s what carried her all the way through the past few weeks, when she found out she would be able to return back home for a chance to petition for asylum and to be with her family.
"The fact is that I traveled to Detroit two weeks ago without any luggage,” she said. “I only had a bag full of the prayer books that sustained me during those months.” Now back in Hamilton, Trujillo and her family surprised supporters at St. Julie Billiart Catholic Church by appearing just before Mass last Sunday.
”Women shrieked her name. ‘Maribel!' Maribel!'” the Cincinnati Enquirer reports. "Tears flowed Sunday morning. The pain and frustration of 17 months since Trujillo-Diaz had been deported to her native Mexico melted in the warmth of tight hugs and prayers of thanksgiving for her deliverance.” It’s pain that never should have happened in the first place.
Trujillo had been checking in regularly with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) when she was arrested in the weeks following Donald Trump’s inauguration. The mom of four U.S. citizens, including a young girl who suffers from seizures, didn’t have a criminal record. Her community was outraged, and loud, but ICE didn’t care about the harm her deportation would cause to her American children, and she was deported anyway.
Trujillo hasn’t been alone. “Despite tough talk on criminals,” immigrant rights advocacy group America’s Voice said, “ICE under the Trump administration has ramped up arrests and deportations of non-criminals, but barely increased the arrest and deportation of criminals.” In fact, in fiscal years 2016 to 2017, the group said, “there was a 174 percent increase” in deportations “of those with no criminal convictions.”
Mass deportation policies are traumatic for entire families. “A child separated from ‘a parent due to deportation is associated with economic hardship, housing instability, and food insecurity,’” America’s Voice continues, with research showing “children demonstrate numerous emotional and behavioral challenges, such as eating and sleeping changes, anxiety, sadness, anger, and withdrawal.”
Trujillo should never have been targeted for deportation and should have had a fair chance to make her case, and a panel of judges agreed, after “a federal appeals court in Cincinnati ordered immigration officials in January to re-examine her case,” allowing her to come back home and fight for a chance to stay here permanently. While she’s not yet in the clear—her court date isn’t for another year—it’s still a chance, a victory nonetheless.
“It is rare to have tangible (and factual!) evidence that our actions matter,” writes Rabbi Miriam Terlinchamp of Temple Sholom Cincinnati, one of Trujillo’s many supporters. “Rarer still for an asylum case to be revisited and the person returned to the United States for the duration of the case. It is in these moments that we need to show up, not just for the fight, but also for the celebration.”
Television station WCPO in Cincinnati reports that Mike Pucke, the family’s priest before his retirement, said, "There are so many men and women, fathers and mothers, good people who have been deported. When bad things happen we ask, 'Why her or him, God?' I am doing the same thing with this good thing.” But it also provides hope for other families fighting to stay together, and for those fighting to keep families together. “Returning home, to say that I am happy is not sufficient,” Trujillo said during the church service at St. Julie Billiart. “I am thankful to the Virgin Mary and all the angels both in heaven and on earth.”
