Gladys and Nelson Gonzalez have called the United States home since 1989. Their three daughters, now grown, were all born and raised in California.
“For nearly four decades, they have built a life here — raising three daughters, giving back to their community, and recently welcoming their first grandchild,” their daughter Stephanie Gonzalez wrote on a GoFundMe page for the family. “Now, they are being treated as criminals.”
Last month, the parents checked in at an immigration court in Santa Ana, just “like they have been doing since 2000,” Stephanie wrote in an email to CNN.
But this check-in ended with a much different outcome.
The couple was arrested and handcuffed during their February 21 appointment and put in federal custody, where they spent three weeks before being deported to Colombia.
“We didn’t expect that they would be apprehended and held in custody. And again, it’s not really unique to them anymore. It’s happening across the country,” Crooms told CNN, pointing to recent immigration policy changes in the US two months into the current administration.
The Gonzalezes spent many years searching for a viable path to citizenship, paid their taxes and never had any trouble with the law, according to Crooms and their daughters.
Ideally, the couple would have been given time to get their affairs in order and say goodbye to their daughters and grandchild, according to Crooms. But that didn’t happen.
“We had to go and pick up their car from the parking lot and didn’t get to say goodbye,” Stephanie said.
So what should they have done in there intervening 25 years after receiving a voluntary departure order? Just hope it goes away or is never enforced?
At last 25 years, there has been a path of reasonable and legal recourse. Just because you wish to ignore that, doesn’t make it true.
I mean, they exhausted all their options over the last 21 years and were told in 2018 they should get ready to depart. They then stayed another 4 years anyways after they exhausted all their options and knew if it was going to be enforced they were going to be deported.
The only reason they can claim about raising a family is specifically because the system gave them an huge amount of time to sort things out. But that doesn’t mean the time is, or should be, indefinite.
For all the people literally being grabbed off the streets for a traffic ticket or an op ed article, a couple being given 21 years of litigation and almost 40 years of time here to sort out their status before ignoring the unfavorable outcome doesn’t sound like this just dropped out of the sky.