Federal government's "one-way airline" sends deported immigrants back home
By Anna Gorman
Los Angeles Times
Immigration agents arrested him at his Houston apartment last month. Now, the government was flying him and 115 other undocumented immigrants back to Central America. Some had just crossed the border. Others, like Fuentes, had spent years in the United States and held jobs, owned cars and started families.
Like Fuentes, most of the deportees have mixed feelings about being sent home. They are angry about being deported but relieved to be out of detention. They are excited to return to their roots but frustrated by the country's lack of work. They are anxious to be reunited with relatives in El Salvador but distraught about leaving spouses and children behind in the U.S.
"It's very, very hard for me," Fuentes said as he leaned his head back against the seat. "I feel bad, very bad. I feel happiness because I am going to see my children again. I haven't seen them in eight years. But I feel sadness because I left my children behind."
The federal government has stepped up its immigration enforcement in recent years, resulting in record numbers of detainees. Authorities are trying to free up bed space by deporting undocumented immigrants quickly and efficiently.
Their primary tool is a fleet of planes used to send home nearly 72,000 undocumented immigrants, including about 14,100 criminals, to Central and South America in the 2007 fiscal year. That compares with 50,000 immigrants, including about 9,600 criminals, removed the year before. The government has ended the practice of "catch and release" and instead is focused on "catch and return," said Michael Pitts, chief of the flight operations unit for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
"It's a one-way airline," Pitts said.
Fuentes' journey began late on the night of Feb. 19 at a detention center in Willacy, Texas, when guards told him he was being deported. Early the next morning, Fuentes boarded a bus.
About 7 a.m., his bus pulled alongside a Boeing 737 plane parked in an empty airstrip in Harlingen, Texas.
No convicted criminals or gang members were on the flight. They are deported separately.
These deportees get some sympathy from the immigration agents. "We don't treat them as criminals. We treat them as compassionate as we can," Frank Filippone, the ICE officer in charge during the flight, said before leaving Texas. "They are here to make a better life for themselves or to send money back."
That's what motivated Fuentes to leave his family and pay a coyote $6,500 to make the months-long and dangerous trip north through Guatemala and Mexico and across the border. He had divorced his wife and spent his savings fighting for custody of his two children, Denisse, 3, and Harold, 2. He won, put them in the care of his parents, and went north to earn money to support them.
In Texas, Fuentes worked as a machinist, earning about $100 a day. Each month, he sent home about $500. "I want my children to be professionals," he said. "Earning $5 a day in my country, I couldn't do that. That's why I came."
But a few years after settling in Houston, he met and married a Colombian woman who has a green card. Fuentes became a stepfather to her daughter, Natalie, and the couple had a son, Sebastian. Both children are U.S. citizens by birth.
For several years, Fuentes had temporary legal status granted to many Salvadorans. But on the morning of Jan. 10, immigration agents showed up at his door. They told him he had a deportation order for failing to appear at an immigration-court hearing in 2006. Fuentes told them he had moved and never received the notice.
Now, he sat aboard the government flight back to El Salvador, with a bag lunch of orange juice, a bologna sandwich and potato chips on the tray table in front of him.
"They say I'm illegal," he said. "What can I do?"
As the plane touched down in El Salvador, several passengers applauded and cheered.
Then, one by one, they walked down the stairs. One passenger kissed his hand and touched it to the ground. Another shouted, "Ay el calor" — Oh the heat.
Salvadoran police guided them into a narrow, cramped room, where Fuentes and the others sat in plastic chairs and ate a plate of pupusas and salsa.
Carlos Rivas, assistant chief for repatriation for the Salvadoran government, told them they would talk to a migration officer and undergo a criminal check. Then they would receive their personal property and could go home.
When Fuentes' name was called, he walked into an office and sat down at a desk.
"What are you going to do here?" a woman asked him. "Are you going to try to return?"
"I don't know. I have work here, in jewelry."
Fuentes walked into another office, where a woman sat with a locked metal box full of $1 bills for bus rides home.
"Is your family coming to pick you up?"
"They are coming for me, but if you want to give me money, that's not a problem," he said with a smile.
Fuentes was met by his parents.
"Welcome home," his father said.
Tears rolled down his face and he stood up, smiled broadly and hugged them each.
"I love you, Papi," he said in English and then, catching himself, repeated in Spanish. "Oh, man! I missed you so much."
His father reintroduced him to his son, Harold, 10, who was just a toddler when Fuentes left for the United States.
"How big you are!" he said, lifting Harold off the ground and spinning him around. "Give me a kiss. You're so handsome!"
Fuentes hopped in the back of a red pickup truck for the bumpy ride home to his house in a neighborhood called "The Mexicans." Four nieces and nephews he had never met came running out of the concrete, graffiti-covered house.
His 11-year-old daughter, Denisse, who was barely 4 when her father left for the U.S., walked out of the house with a nervous smile. She stood nearly as tall as him.
"How are you my daughter, my precious?" Fuentes said before taking her into his arms. She buried her head in his shoulder. But when her grandmother told her to give him a kiss, she turned her head shyly.
"I understand," Fuentes said. "It's been a long time."
His mother, Maria Lidia Zometa, said she doesn't know what the family is going to do without the money he sent home. Since Fuentes was arrested, the family has already felt the pinch. The house was filled with furniture purchased with money from Fuentes — a dining-room table, couches, a television and a washing machine.
Fuentes' father owns a jewelry shop, but gang members have robbed him three times. To help out with the bills, his mother borrowed money to start a small store in front of their house. There, she sells diapers, eggs, sodas, chips and napkins.
"These months have been difficult," Zometa said. "I have seven grandchildren to support. It's not easy. ... Life is expensive here."
After a long night of telling stories, dancing and eating food from the popular Pollo Campero, Fuentes woke at 9 a.m. and walked five blocks to his father's shop. Working, he said, would take his mind off what happened to him and the decisions he had to make.
He wants to stay in El Salvador and make up lost time with Harold and Denisse. But he also can't imagine living without his wife and children. And now, Texas feels more like home than San Salvador. Maybe his wife, Natalie and Sebastian could join him here while he saves money for the journey.
"I'll go back because I love USA," he said. "They don't love me but I love USA."
Special correspondent Alex Renderos contributed to this report.
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