Liany and Maria Villacis, 22-year-old twins with active Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) status, are dangerously close to losing both of their parents to Donald Trump’s immoral mass deportation force. In 2001, the family sought political asylum in the U.S. after they started receiving death threats in Colombia and “unsettling snapshots of the girls at play.” While they arrived to the U.S. with valid visas, they eventually had their political asylum applications denied. Still, they were allowed to stay here, so long as they continued checking in regularly with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). But “after this year’s meeting, they came home one short”:
On Nov. 15, Juan was detained and sent to the Bergen County Jail in New Jersey to await deportation to his native Ecuador in the coming weeks. His wife was allowed to go home, but under supervision and with orders to return this week to prove she has purchased a one-way ticket back to Colombia for mid-January. Their lawyer, Jillian Hopman, was stunned by what she saw as a heartless bureaucracy going after low-hanging fruit rather than the “bad hombres” of legend.
“For a family that does everything together, this is heartbreaking,” Hopman said. “Juan’s mother’s health has seriously deteriorated, and he is the one who cares for her. His wife has all kinds of medical problems, including complex cysts in her breasts. ICE did not care about any of this. Juan could have won the Nobel Prize and taken a bullet for Mike Pence. All he has become is a statistic.”
A statistic from what advocates have termed a “silent raid,” when undocumented immigrants, just trying to follow the rules by checking in with immigration officials, instead get arrested. Despite the administration saying that “bad hombres” would be the priority, these kinds of sweeps have surged since Trump’s inauguration, because they’re the easiest for immigration officials to prey on. And they’re among the most cruel and heartless kinds of arrests. According to Hopman, Juan wasn’t even allowed to give his girls and wife, also Liany, a hug good bye before being taken away. “They told us they no longer provide that courtesy,” the attorney told the New York Times, “because they don’t like emotional scenes.”
Adding to the chaos is the fact that Donald Trump has also ended the DACA program, meaning that if Congress doesn’t pass the bipartisan DREAM Act soon—advocates have stressed the need to pass it by December—Liany and Maria’s futures could be at risk, despite having grown up in the United States. And while the family has attempted to gain legal status for Juan through his elderly mother, a U.S. citizen, “there is nearly a five-year backlog of cases.” The family doesn’t have five years to spare, or even five weeks:
Now is the time of year when Juan would have hauled out the Christmas decorations and strung up the lights around the porch of the family’s Dutch Colonial-style home just off the elevated train on Jamaica Avenue in Queens. Instead, it is dark. Inside, his electric drum kit and saxophone rest against a wall, silent. Just the sight of them moved his wife to tears the day she returned home without him.
“Our family life was broken abruptly,” she said. “It’s like half of my heart was cut out. We always made the effort to keep our family united. We did everything to educate our daughters. Juan is his mother’s only hope. We worked hard and paid taxes. What did we do wrong to deserve this?”
She has prided herself on never missing appointments and doing whatever the authorities asked. One request she has yet to fulfill is buying her ticket to Colombia.
“I know I have to get it,” she said. “But I have the hope that someone will notice our case and say no, this can’t happen. Hope is the last thing you lose.”
Advocates are sounding like a broken record at this point, but it must be repeated: when Donald Trump tells you he’s targeting “bad hombres” for deportation, he’s lying to you. The people getting swept up are everyday people just trying to work, to survive, and to thrive. People like these parents, who stand to get deported to two different countries. “My dad is a great man,” Liany told Spanish-language NY1 Noticias,” and someone who has always loved this country. When we call our mom we ask her: Mom, what are we going to do? And she says: we’ll draw our strength from our memories and all the good things this country has given us.”