Immigrant Crackdown: Man Leaves Home, Family After 30 Years In US

Patrons at the Detroit Metro Airport witnessed an emotional scene Monday as a man said goodbye to his wife and two children near the entrance of the airport security gate.

The moment was witnessed just before Jorge Garcia, 39, was deported to Mexico as part of President Donald Trump's crackdown on illegal immigration, USA Today reported.

Garcia arrived in the United States as a 10-year-old, when he was brought to the country by an undocumented family member 30 years ago. His wife and children are U.S. citizens. Garcia, who was residing in Lincoln Park, Michigan, with them, was ordered to return to Mexico in November.

According to a report in Detroit Free Press, Garcia had requested the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials to allow him time till a new Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) legislation was passed by the government before deporting him.

But his plea was turned down.

"I feel kind of sad. I got to leave my family behind, knowing that they're probably going to have a hard time adjusting. Me not being there for them for who knows how long. It's just hard," Garcia told Detroit Free Press on Sunday.

Garcia’s case is the latest in the list of incidents involving immigrants facing deportation or arrests as the Trump administration strives to keep them out of the country.

Recently, the government asked nearly 2,00,000 people from El Salvador to leave within 18 months. Homeland security officials on Jan. 8 said they were terminating the Temporary Protected Status for Salvadorans, who were allowed to live and work legally in the U.S. after a pair of earthquakes struck the Central American nation in 2001.

The administration had earlier ended TPS for 45,000 immigrants from Haiti and 2,500 others from Nicaragua. The U.S. even withdrew itself from the UN Global Compact on Migration — an international pact for improving global migration and refugee issues.

The administration began its crackdown on undocumented immigrants soon after Trump took office. In fact, it was one of his campaign promises. According to an end-of-year data released by the Department of Homeland Security in December, immigrants detained on administrative grounds rose manifold since Trump entered the White House in January.

The number of immigrants arrested for administrative violations from the beginning of Trump’s stint as president rose to 1,10,568 from 77,806 during the same period the previous year — an increase of 40 percent. Overall, ICE and Enforcement and Removal Operations officials conducted 143,470 arrests and 226,119 removals in Fiscal Year 2017.

“We’ve got 20,000 employees that do their job very well,” said ICE’s Acting Director Thomas Homan, “and the numbers show they operated at perfection this year under the president’s mandates.”