Deportation of delivery driver put off

A federal judge has given a last-minute reprieve to a New York City restaurant worker who was fast-tracked for deportation this month, after he showed up at an Army base with a delivery of pasta and the wrong type of ID.

Pablo Villavicencio, along with his wife and two young American daughters, has become a live chip in the political fight over deportations since he was arrested on a years-old immigration warrant less than two weeks ago.

Saturday’s court order temporarily halting Villavicencio’s immediate removal to Ecuador means that his allies, including New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Democratic lawmakers, will have at least another month to try to free him from federal custody.

Villavicencio entered the United States illegally in 2008, in his mid-20s, according to The New York Times. He has committed no crimes since then, a spokesman for Immigration Customs and Enforcement told the newspaper, but an immigration judge ordered him to leave the country in 2010. Instead, he got married and started a family in New York. Villavicencio knew he was a fugitive, always at risk of deportation, the Times wrote. But by age 35, he had settled into a routine of family life and a job working at a Queens pizzeria.

Fort Hamilton, a small Army garrison in Brooklyn, was about an hour from the restaurant. But a sergeant there regularly placed bulk orders, the New York Post wrote, and Villavicencio was used to the trip when he pulled up to the checkpoint around lunchtime on June 1.

He later told the Post that he flashed his city ID card at the guard, as he had done before. But “there was a different security guard,” Villavicencio said, and an official began to question him — first asking for a driver’s license, then a Social Security card, then calling police to ask about his background and discovering the old ICE warrant.

On Friday, the Legal Aid Society of New York filed a petition with ICE to halt the deportation, the Times wrote. Villavicencio’s lawyer asked the agency for leniency, writing that he was his family’s main breadwinner and that his younger daughter had a congenital heart defect.

On Friday night, the Times wrote, ICE cleared Villavicencio for an immediate flight to Ecuador.

In a last-ditch attempt to keep him in the country, the lawyers asked a federal judge to temporarily block the deportation over the weekend.

The judge on Saturday ordered the federal government to submit reasons Villavicencio should be immediately deported and scheduled a hearing for July 20.