Jorge Garcia of Michigan apparently doesn’t have a criminal record. He does, however, have a wife and two children, all of whom are American citizens.
Yesterday, however, he had to say goodbye to them. As USA Today reported, Garcia, an undocumented immigrant who was brought to the United States from Mexico at age 10, was deported after three decades of life in the United States.
His arms wrapped around his wife and two teenage children, Jorge Garcia’s eyes welled up Monday as he looked into their eyes one last time near the entrance to the airport security gate.
His wife, Cindy Garcia, cried out while his daughter, Soleil, 15, sobbed into Garcia’s shoulder as they hugged, with two U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents keeping a close eye on them.
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After 30 years of living in the United States, Jorge Garcia, a 39-year-old landscaper from Lincoln Park, Mich., was deported on the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday to Mexico, a move his supporters say is another example of immigrants being unfairly targeted under the Trump administration.
The article added that the Obama administration had given Garcia several stays of removal, but “because of the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration, in November Jorge Garcia was ordered to return to Mexico.”
This is obviously a very sad story and the deportation of a man who doesn’t match the president’s description of a “bad hombre.”
But I mention this in part to put a human face on an important story, and in part because it’s a story that’s likely to get worse before it gets better. With Trump taking steps to end DACA, putting Dreamers’ futures in jeopardy, and then rejecting proposed solutions, it’s alarmingly easy to imagine yesterday’s scene with Jorge Garcia playing out, over and over again, in communities across the country in the very near future.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
