BACK FROM DEPORTATION, DAD ‘CAN PRESS PLAY AGAIN’
‘Living on pause’ for 2½ years, father sent to El Salvador returns home — for good
For his third-grade graduation in May, 9-year-old Walter Escobar donned a purple bow tie and once again asked the question that had come to define his young life: When would his father come home to Pearland?
“Will Daddy be here for my next graduation?” he pleaded.
He had already missed Walter’s first- and second-grade years. Carmen, now 4, babbled nonstop and no longer toddled around in diapers. She was a little girl, not the baby her father had known. Rose Escobar hugged her earnest little boy, who in his father’s absence had vowed to be “man of the house.”
“He wishes that he could be here with you, papito, you know that, right?” she said.
Two and a half years since their lives were upended, when Jose Escobar was arrested at a routine 2017 check-in with immigration authorities and deported to El Salvador in the middle of the night, Walter finally was granted his wish.
On Monday night, his father arrived at Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport with a visa in hand — home at last, and for good this time.
“I have so much in my head right now,” said a visibly emotional Escobar. “I see it as I was living on pause mode, like someone pressed pause on the television, and right now I can press play again.”
It was the end of a journey that the young family at times thought they would never survive — causing clumps of Rose’s thick, dark hair to fall out from stress — and all of it made them wonder: What, actually, had been the point?
After years of bureaucracy, the government in June agreed to grant Escobar a waiver for his deportation order and unlawful presence here and approved him for a visa as the spouse of an American. He can now apply for a green card, then citizenship. It was all a procedure that could have been completed with Escobar in the United States, but President Donald Trump’s administration didn’t respond to a legal petition to allow it, said Raed Gonzalez, the family’s immigration attorney.
“They destroyed this family’s life,” he said. “This wasn’t necessary.”
The 33-year-old father had been one of the first high-profile arrests of Trump’s White House, coming shortly after sweeping executive orders in February 2017 made every immigrant here illegally a priority for deportation. The federal government has the capacity to deport at most about 400,000 immigrants annually and during President Barack Obama’s later years had focused largely on violent offenders and serious criminals.
Escobar had lost his legal status in a paperwork error as a teen, but since 2012 had been checking in regularly with immigration authorities, who granted him provisional protection from deportation and a temporary work permit he faithfully renewed. He had no criminal record, paid his taxes and had an American wife — his childhood sweetheart — and two small U.S. citizen children.
Then came his annual appointment on Feb. 22, 2017.
“We’re just doing what President Trump wants us to do with the new rules,” a federal agent told Rose, a receptionist at Texas Children’s Hospital, as they handcuffed Escobar and said they were deporting him to El Salvador, a country he had not seen since he was 13. “Tell your husband goodbye.”
Days later, despite a legal appeal and a congressional inquiry into his case, immigration agents put Escobar on a plane. He arrived in San Salvador still in the work uniform he had worn to attend the appointment and with only $20 in his pocket.
For more than two years, he has holed up in the home of an elderly aunt in a gang-riddled port town near El Salvador’s border with Honduras. From 1,900 miles away, he tried to parent through Facetime as he sunk at times into a depression, watching his family struggle and his children grow up without him.
Such scenarios have played out across the country since 2017 as immigrants who have been here illegally for years, many with deep roots and American children, were arrested at courthouses, outside their homes and even as they were completing interviews for green cards.
In 2018, Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested nearly 11,000 immigrants who were classified as “non-criminal” and without pending charges in the interior of the country, compared with about 4,000 such arrests during Obama’s last year in office, said Sarah Pierce, an analyst with the Migration Policy Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C.
Trump last week again renewed threats to launch more large-scale immigration raids targeting certain families after July Fourth if Congress did not soon come up with a solution. He had hastily canceled such an operation in June after widespread outrage and chaos, and it was unclear where the government would quickly find capacity to detain significantly more adult migrants.
A record influx in May of nearly 133,000 immigrants crossing the southern border illegally has strained federal agencies and ICE is already holding thousands more immigrants than for which it is funded.
But such presidential pronouncements — regardless of their veracity — stoke widespread fear that anyone could be next, families separated and lives ripped apart at any moment. After all, Escobar’s family had thought they were playing by the rules. They had tried everything to fix his case.
He joined his mother in Houston as a teen, qualifying for a temporary protected status for people fleeing widespread disasters in certain countries. His mother thought his permit would automatically renew when she reapplied for hers, but it did not. The family moved and he didn’t receive paperwork, which led to his status being revoked.
By the time Escobar figured that out, it was too late. The government had already initiated removal proceedings against him. His lawyer at the time told him not to show up at the court hearing or he would be deported. In his absence, the judge ordered him removed in 2006.
Not knowing what to do, he continued living his life, marrying Rose and working construction. Walter was born. They had good jobs. They were happy. Then in June 2011, immigration agents stopped Escobar as he pulled out of his driveway to go to work.
Rose went into overdrive, rallying media and congressional attention. With the help of U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, a Houston Democrat, Obama’s government released Escobar on an order of supervision after seven months in detention. He could work here legally for now as long as he checked in every year and committed no crimes. It was part of a wave of reprieves after Obama said he wanted to focus resources on deporting violent criminals.
After Escobar was released, he had to repair the mini-blinds in the front window of their two-story house. They were jagged and bent from Walter, who as a toddler tugged desperately on them waiting for his father to come home.
In 2017, it was as if someone had pressed replay. Though he had followed the rules, the Trump administration revoked that temporary protection.
Escobar’s attorney asked the government to postpone his deportation until he could seek the waivers that would allow him to stay. But the administration did not.
Despite Escobar’s marriage to an American, his unlawful presence here meant he could not apply for a legal status until those waivers had been approved.
“This administration’s mindset is that their primary focus is on increasing the numbers of removals, even past the point of logic,” said Pierce, the migration analyst. “Past administrations acknowledged that someone might be removable, but might have a legal avenue to stay in the country, and if they do, they should be allowed to pursue it, if anything, for efficiency’s sake.”
Last month, U.S. Rep. Al Green, a Houston Democrat who has visited Escobar in El Salvador three times, called him while his family was there on vacation.
“He asked if we were sitting down or standing up,” Escobar said. “He said our papers had been approved.”
He was coming home. On Monday, Escobar stood flanked by Green, who flew with him from El Salvador because he said he didn’t want anything to at the last minute go wrong. Escobar’s wife and children, his lawyer and other supporters held balloons shaped like butterflies, a symbol, they said, of migration.
“Welcome back to your home where you deserve to be,” said Cesar Espinosa, executive director of the immigrant advocacy group FIEL Houston.
Rose Escobar told other families with deported relatives to use their voice and urged lawmakers to listen.
“We need you to be the voices for other Escobars, children who need their daddy, children who need their mommy,” she said.
As the weeks turned into months, then years, she said friends and strangers gently urged her to think of moving on. To forget.
“People kept saying, ‘It’s taking so long, you should just give up,’ ” she said. “I would always say, ‘He’s coming home. Soon, in God’s time.’ ”