Margarita Avila, 50, is among the tens of thousands of immigrants in the U.S. targeted for deportation in President Donald Trump’s second term. Trump has said his administration is going after “the worst of the worst” in an attempt to deport 1 million immigrants annually. But six months into Trump’s second administration, at least 70% of the more than 56,000 immigrants detained across the country didn’t have a criminal record, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonprofit that collects and analyzes federal government data.
Margarita requested asylum in the U.S. more than a decade ago and her case has been pending ever since. Meanwhile, she and José have grown their family in Texas, and like many other immigrants, they have put down deep roots. They bought a house in Houston’s Independence Heights neighborhood, started a landscaping business that grew to hundreds of customers, and had five U.S.-born sons who are American citizens.
But on March 12, their fortunes changed.
According to a police report, Margarita was cutting weeds in a residential area in Spring, about 10 feet from a postal worker who was delivering to a community mailbox and asked Margarita to turn off the weed eater until she finished.
Margarita couldn’t hear her over the machine, the police report says, so the postal worker yelled to get her attention. The worker, who claimed Margarita hit her with the weed eater, called the police. When Margarita produced a Belize identification card, the deputy took her to jail on suspicion of assault — a charge that was later dropped. But it was too late — within a day, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement plucked her from the Harris County Jail.
As her family celebrated Mother’s Day without her, Margarita pondered whether to fight her deportation order and stay in the detention center cell for months, or sign her voluntary deportation papers and be sent thousands of miles away from her children and husband.
Because of their various immigration statuses — some undocumented, some pending asylum, some U.S. citizens — Margarita’s deportation would make it difficult and in some cases impossible to see her close-knit family. Her husband would have to decide whether to stay in the U.S. with their two youngest children or follow his wife to Belize so they can raise the boys together in a country Isaac and Jeremiah have never known. For the oldest children born in Belize, it could mean not seeing their mother for years because they don’t have permanent legal status.
“I feel like I’m in a lose-lose situation because if she’s deported, I can’t visit her because I wouldn’t be able to come back,” said Lisbet, 31, who has three children and can’t easily travel outside of the U.S. because of her temporary protected status under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. “I have my own family here to think about.”
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