After decades in US, a migrant’s anxious wait for deportation ruling
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NEW YORK — Juan Reyna spent 25 years living and working in the United States, but his life was turned upside down last January when police stopped the Mexican immigrant outside San Antonio, Texas.
The 48-year-old was taken to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) center in nearby Pearsall where he has spent a year fighting the US government’s attempts to deport him.
Reyna is an undocumented migrant, one of the roughly 11 million in America that President Joe Biden proposed legalizing when he entered the White House.
But a year after Biden took office, the Democrat’s efforts to grant them citizenship — part of his broader pledge for a more humanitarian, compassionate immigration policy — are stalled in Congress.
Reyna, meanwhile, is left nervously awaiting a decision on his appeal against deportation.
“Sometimes I feel depressed, frustrated,” Reyna told AFP by phone from the ICE detention center ahead of the judge’s ruling, set for January 27.
“I am not a danger to society. I am not a threat to this country,” he insisted. “I have worked for this country that has given me many things.”
Reyna crossed the Rio Grande into the United States in 1996 and has spent more than half his life in America.
Despite not possessing legal papers, he has not stopped working during that time and had been holding down two jobs — as a carpenter and welder — when he was arrested.
Reyna has embraced American life. He bought a house and a car. He married his wife Guadalupe in 2016 and took on the role of father for her two children aged 13 and nine.
A judge ordered Reyna’s expulsion on December 3, ruling that he had failed to prove that the children would suffer “exceptional and extremely unusual hardship” if he was deported, according to his lawyer, Kathrine Russell of non-governmental immigrant rights group RAICES.
“My children love him. They consider him their father,” said Guadalupe Martinez, 32, who is also undocumented and is not protected from deportation despite her kids being born in the United States.
“It’s been a tough battle for my children and for me both psychologically and economically. The little we have built has been here,” she told AFP by telephone.
Reyna’s family is not alone.
At the end of December there were nearly 1.6 million active cases in immigration courts, according to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC).
Throughout 2021, US judges issued almost 15,500 deportation orders, says TRAC.
Almost 21,000 people were in ICE centers in the middle of December, up eight percent year-on-year. Three quarters of them have no criminal records, according to TRAC.
‘Not a threat’
Reyna cleans bathrooms in the ICE detention center for $3 an hour.
He reveals he has suffered some racism during detention but says he is “thankful to this country that has treated me well.”
Biden’s immigration reforms were included in his $1.75 trillion “Build Back Better” plan that was dealt a fatal blow last month by Senator Joe Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat who said he could not back the measure.
The plan would have allowed undocumented workers to acquire work permits and driver’s licenses and to travel abroad.
It also would have protected those who have lived in the United States for more than 10 years from deportation.
Reyna hopes that a September announcement by Department of Homeland Security chief Alejandro Mayorkas will be enough to persuade the judge to rule in his favor.
Mayorkas instructed police and ICE officers to focus on undocumented migrants who had committed serious crimes and those who entered the country illegally only recently.
