[ARABNEWS] The 16-year-old American daughter of a US Marine held back tears as long as she could Friday before her family was split in two.Her mother, Alejandra Juarez, was finally leaving for Mexico, rather than be sent off in handcuffs, after exhausting all options to stop her deportation.
"My mom is a good person. She’s not a criminal," Pamela said, cursing at the immigration agency before her mother checked in for her flight from Orlando International Airport.
Alejandra and Temo Juarez, a naturalized citizen who runs a roofing business, quietly raised Pamela and their 9-year-old daughter, Estela, in the central Florida town of Davenport until a 2013 traffic stop exposed her legal status.
Afterward, she regularly checked in with US Immigration and Customs officials, which typically went after higher-priority targets like people with criminal records.
Temo didn’t figure his vote for President Donald Trump
...New York real estate developer, described by Dems as illiterate, racist, misogynistic, and what ever other unpleasant descriptions they can think of, elected by the rest of us as 45th President of the United States...
would affect them personally. That was before the enforcement of Trump’s "zero tolerance" policy toward illegal immigration.
Now, the Juarez family will be divided in two: Estela will join her mother in Mexico after she gets settled, while Temo cares for Pamela and pays the bills.
Alejandra, 39, petitioned to become a citizen in 2001 but was rejected because she was accused of making a false statement at the border when she sought asylum in 1998, attorney Richard Maney said. He said she was asked about her citizenship and told authorities she had been a student in Memphis, Tennessee for a short time, so border officials apparently thought she was falsely claiming to be an American citizen.
"This is not going to be the last case like this," Maney said. "This is potentially the first of many. There are many military spouses in the same situation."
This should never happen in our country. Non-citizen wives shouldn't be separated from citizen husbands--they should be streamlined in, barring fraud. No military family member should come out of an enlistment not a citizen. Illegals should be tossed, but Hispanic citizens should be protected and we should recognize that the immigration system is crappy and needs a thorough overhaul. My daughter-in-law is Canadian and had to fly home from Australia, where she was working (for Adobe, not an Australian company) on short notice to keep up to date in the system.
US Rep. Darren Soto, D-Fla., who couldn’t get the votes in Congress for legislation to allow Juarez to remain, called her situation disgraceful.
"We’re not going to give up," he told her with a hug at the airport.
"It’s an absolute disgrace by the Trump administration to be deporting a patriotic spouse," Soto said. "Her husband, Temo, served in the Marines ... while she was at home on the home-front, raising two young women. What justice does this serve?"
Alejandra ultimately decided to "self-deport" to Mexico, rather than turn herself in to be detained and then deported. After 20 years in the United States, she no longer has family or friends in the country, so she chose Merida, a city in the Yucatan where a small community of deported military spouses might help her.