She could have given up hope a long time ago, but Cindy Garcia is still fighting. It’s been over three months since her husband, Jorge Garcia, was swept up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), despite having no criminal record. The Garcias had spent $125,000 over the years in their unsuccessful attempts to put him on a path to legal status, but on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day this past year, ICE deported him after three decades in the U.S.:
It was also the day Cindy Garcia vowed to reunify her family and fight for all families like hers.
“ICE gave me more power and they didn’t realize it,” she said, referring to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency charged with administering federal immigration law. “I was the right spokesperson to blow up this story.”
"I can lock myself up in my room, sit and cry with a bowl of ice cream, and waste my life away,” she said in the days after his deportation. “But I don't gain anything from that, and neither do the people that need my help." She not only spoke out, she roared, sharing her story on national television as a guest on The View, speaking to the Women's March Power to the Polls event in Lansing, and going to Donald Trump’s State of the Union address as a guest of Congresswoman Debbie Dingell:
She credits organizing lessons learned as a UAW activist and public speaking training by immigrant rights organization Michigan United with teaching her how to use her family’s personal crisis to expose U.S. immigration policy’s larger political and moral problems. She started with the video taken of her and her children clinging to Jorge Garcia and saying their goodbyes at Detroit Metropolitan Airport.
“Once that went viral,” Garcia said, “people just ran with it because of our family being separated at the airport. Organizing can be used for anything in life if you use it in the right direction. I ask people, ‘What if this happened to you?’ You’ve got to get people to understand how it affects your family. Once you hit a nerve, they get an understanding.” And as Michigan Radio reports, “the Garcias have a lot of company in Michigan. According to the Michigan League for Public Policy, there are about 97,000 undocumented immigrants living in Michigan.”
The couple had been living in an uncertain limbo for years. “From 2011 to 2017, Jorge Garcia dutifully reported to Detroit’s ICE office to check in and live another year with his family, supporting them with his landscaping business and paying his taxes.” But this changed after Trump’s inauguration, when he was told last November to prepare to leave the country by January. “It was a death and we knew the death was coming,” Garcia said during an appearance on The View afterwards. But she turned that grief into action:
“Being able to speak in front of rallies, meetings and even learning to speak in front of the cameras – I’ve been doing that since 2009.”
But Cindy Garcia has often felt alone in front of those cameras, wishing more families in her situation would come forward to speak out and join her family reunification campaign.
“We’ve been the family to push it,” she said. “We’ve been trying to bring the immigration nightmare to life and make people understand the dynamics of immigration and what it means.
“Southwest Detroit is my community, but it’s been a struggle,” Garcia added.” A lot of people have not stepped up. They’re scared to come out of the shadows. It’s happened in the past. The minute they speak, immigration picks them up.”
Under this mass deportation dragnet that targets anyone regardless of how long they’ve been here or whether or not they have a criminal record, immigrant families are understandably afraid. In Mexico, Jorge Garcia is also struggling to adjust to a new life that wasn’t of his choosing, saying that "since I've got here, I haven't had a good night's sleep. It's like my body wants to rest, but I'm not able to with all this thought I've got on my mind and the stress." Part of that worry is figuring out legal options for him to be reunited with his family:
As the Garcias keep navigating that system, Cindy Garcia wants to start a new Facebook page to support those who have had a loved one deported from the United States. She’s been buoyed by the support she’s received on her personal public Facebook page (and learned to ignore the ugly comments) and wants to create a separate virtual national support group, because people often don’t understand the complex immigration system with its many rules and forms to file, and because “people are really scared.”
That includes her husband, who will need to do his part from Mexico to support the immigration forms being filed by their attorney.
But Cindy Garcia said they have come too far with too much to lose to give up now.
“I keep telling him things are going to work out,” Garcia said. “Don’t lose hope. If you give up and throw in the towel, they’ll walk all over you. Never give up hope. Always continue to fight.”