Pizza guy free from immigration jail

An Ecuadorean immigrant who has been freed by a US judge said yesterday he thought he would lose his daughters and his wife when he was detained while delivering pizza to a Brooklyn Army installation nearly two months ago.

‘‘I thought the world was coming to an end for me,’’ Pablo Villavicencio, speaking in Spanish outside his Long Island home, said the morning after his release from immigration detention.

‘‘I thought I was losing everything, that my dream of having my family always together was coming to an end,’’ he said.

Villavicencio, 35, was arrested on June 1 while making a delivery to the garrison in Fort Hamilton, Brooklyn. When he arrived, guards requested identification, and he produced a city identification card.

A background check showed he had been ordered to leave the United States in 2010 but stayed.

US District Judge Paul Crotty said on Wednesday that Villavicencio, who was being held at a New Jersey lockup, can remain in the United States while he exhausts his right to try to gain legal status.

‘‘Although he stayed in the United States unlawfully and is currently subject to a final order of removal, he has otherwise been a model citizen,’’ the judge wrote.

‘‘Thank God the judge made a very fair and right decision’’ and told immigration officials that they ‘‘could not deport me from the country because I have been a model citizen for the nation, for my state, for my city and for my daughters and my marriage,’’ said Villavicencio. ‘‘God makes justice.’’

Villavicencio applied to stay in the US after he married a US citizen, with whom he has two daughters, ages 4 and 2.

The judge cited those children and said they also are US citizens.

‘‘He has no criminal history,’’ the judge wrote. ‘‘He has paid his taxes. And he has worked diligently to provide for his family.’’

‘‘You feel happy that your family is reunited but you are left disappointed and sad that many other families are in the same situation,’’ said Villavicencio’s wife, Sandra Chica.

‘‘We, who lived it and know what it is like, we don’t wish this to happen to anybody.’’

‘‘I thought the world was coming to an end for me.’’ Pablo Villavicencio, released detainee

AP Pablo Villavicencio, centre, is helped into an SUV, where his wife, Sandra Chica, right, and their daughters await after he was released from the Hudson County Correctional Facility.