Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Wife of man deported after 30 years invited to State of Union
Cindy Garcia has had a long, exhausting and lifechanging few days. And by all appearances, the whirlwind is going to continue.
On Monday, she watched immigration agents escort Jorge Garcia, her husband of 15 years, through the security gates at Detroit Metropolitan Airport, deporting him to Mexico after nearly three decades living and raising a family in Michigan.
Video of Cindy Garcia and the couple’s two adolescent children sobbing as they said goodbye grabbed national headlines.
Supporters held up the family’s experience as an example of the far-reaching effects of President Donald Trump’s crackdown on undocumented immigration.
By Thursday, Garcia and her children had flown to New York City for an interview on ABC’s “The View.” Flanked by Whoopi Goldberg and her co-hosts, they explained through tears that Jorge Garcia, a 39-yearold landscaper, had been brought to the country as a boy by a relative and had fought unsuccessfully for years to gain legal status.
Now, Cindy Garcia headed to Washington.
Rep. Debbie Dingell, DMich., whose district encompasses is the Garcias’ home in the Detroit suburbs, invited Garcia to be her guest at Trump’s Jan. 30 State of the Union address. Garcia gladly accepted. “She said she was saddened to see what was going on with my husband,” Garcia told The Washington Post. “When she called me and told me, I was overwhelmed.”
The family’s story, Dingell said, “is both a symptom of a long-broken immigration system and a new rash immigration policy that does not recognize the difference between a hardworking family man and a criminal.”
Garcia’s trip to the Capitol comes as debate in Congress over immigration reform has reached crisis levels. Republicans and Democrats fought Friday over whether to include in the government spending bill protections for young immigrants brought to the country as children illegally.
Cindy Garcia said she’s eager to sit in the same room as the president and Congress for one of the most closely watched political events of the year.
“I hope that when they see me, they can connect and feel what we’re dealing with,” she said, “that they have some type of compassion, if not for me, then for the children who were separated from their dad.”
Garcia, her 15-year-old daughter and her 12-yearold son flew to New York this week and sat down for an interview with “The View.”
In the segment, Garcia described how the deportation proceedings against her husband loomed over the family for years, then accelerated at the end of 2017.