They Were Deported by Trump. Now Biden Wants to Bring Them Back.

Rochester, who drives a tractor-trailer for UPS, voted for Trump in 2016. He says he liked Trump’s law-and-order message and never imagined that his wife, a stay-at-home mother with no criminal record, would be treated as one of the bad immigrants Trump vowed to remove. But he and his wife grew more and more suspicious when Trump ordered that any undocumented immigrant could be deported and immigration officials became more aggressive. González Carmona had crossed the border without papers almost two decades earlier. Based on bad advice from a lawyer, Rochester said she decided to get ahead of the authorities by agreeing to travel to Mexico alone, believing she would be returning to the United States quickly.

Shortly after she left, a new lawyer they hired to handle González Carmona’s return discovered an old document about a formal deportation that she was unaware of when she was at the height of a huge migrant on the border 18 years earlier arrested and deported had been influx under President Clinton. According to a longstanding law, she was banned from entering the USA for 10 years.

Six months after she left in 2018, 5-year-old Ashton was diagnosed with cancer. He had a kidney removed and underwent radiation and chemotherapy for 10 months. González Carmona was stranded in Mérida, southeastern Mexico. The family photos from this period show Ashton, bone-thin and tied to a tangle of tubes in a hospital bed, with Rochester holding up a mobile tablet and his wife watching their son from a distance.

She asked the Trump administration for emergency clearance known as humanitarian parole to return to care for Ashton. On August 31, 2018, an immigration officer informed her in writing that there was no “urgent humanitarian reason or significant public benefit” to grant her request.

“I can’t stand thinking about the things Ashton used to ask me when he was sick, why she wasn’t there,” said Rochester.

Ashton’s cancer has not recurred, and his father says he understands better that González Carmona “made a mistake” that prevented her from being with them. As US citizens, father and son can travel to Mexico and have done so several times a year to see them.

However, Rochester says he and his son will be punished. “We are citizens,” he said, “and we have to choose between our wife and mother or our country.”

Rochester and his wife prepare a new application for humanitarian parole. Federal officials have extensive powers to grant probations that allow foreigners to enter the country for a short period of time without granting immigration status. A task force that Biden set up to reunite families separated from Trump on the southwest border as part of a zero-tolerance policy is issuing suspended sentences to bring parents to their children. Administrative officials said the task force is a test bed for wider use of suspended sentences to bring together more families of deported immigrants.

With multiple federal agencies involved, work to organize the review process is slow, officials said, and no deadline has been set for announcements. But the goal is clear: “We are striving to bring back people who shouldn’t have been deported,” said a senior immigration officer involved in the planning, who was not authorized to speak publicly about ongoing discussions.

To this day, the government remains a top priority for military families and veterans after Biden promised to help them during his campaign last year. Espinosa, the homeland security spokeswoman, said her agency was also working to create easier routes to naturalization – the process of acquiring US citizenship – for these families. Although the estimates are inaccurate, officials say at least 11,800 active service members have close relatives facing deportation and hundreds of veterans have been expelled.

The government has already kept Biden’s promise in a prominent case. On May 8, Alejandra Juarez, a Mexican woman forced to leave the country in 2018, was reunited with her family near Orlando, Florida. Her husband, Temo Juarez, served in the Marines and is an Iraq combat veteran, and he and their two daughters are American citizens. Juarez benefited from years of advocacy from Florida Congressman Darren Soto, a Democrat, and starring her daughter Estela, then 11, at the Democratic National Convention last year.

In a June 9 letter, more than 80 immigrant rights organizations called on Homeland Security Minister Alejandro Mayorkas to create a centralized review bureau for veterans and other groups. Lawyers have compared their proposal to recent efforts to overturn and redeem wrongful convictions in the criminal justice system.

“We are not asking for special treatment,” said Nayna Gupta, an attorney at the National Immigrant Justice Center who leads the deportation review effort. “It just means that the law does what it should.”

In addition to suspended sentences, officials are considering resuming deportation cases in court to give immigrants one more chance and offer exemptions to remove barriers that prevent immigrants from obtaining legal green cards from family members. With Biden already facing allegations from Republicans letting in swarms of criminals on the southwest border, senior officials expect intense opposition and are working to arm the review process, which relies on established executive agencies, against legal challenges.

Mayorkas has instructed officials to carefully investigate claims made by immigrants who said they were deported as punishment for political activity. “Retaliation in response to the constitutionally protected right to speak is simply unacceptable,” Mayorkas said in April at a conference at the law school of the University of California in Los Angeles.

Argentinian Claudio Rojas was deported by Trump immigration officials in 2019, shortly after a film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival depicting the bold resistance he helped organize years earlier at a detention center in South Florida. Filmmakers have gathered to urge Rojas to return.

One question for Biden government officials is whether they will also extend return opportunities to those deported under Obama, when Biden was vice president and activists cursed Obama as “the deportation chief”.