No reprieve for Oakland couple facing deportation
After a pair of canceled plane tickets and a last-ditch effort at a stay from their attorney, two longtime Bay Area residents must return to Mexico
Highland Hospital registered nurse Maria Sanchez and her husband will be on a plane Wednesday night for their native Mexico.
Their Los Angeles-based attorney, Carl Shusterman, said an associate with his firm filed a request for a stay to a deportation order on the couple’s behalf with the Department of Homeland Security on Tuesday afternoon. But the stay was quickly denied by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.
The undocumented couple had planned to leave Tuesday but canceled their flight from San Francisco International Airport to Mexico City.
Maria and Eusebio Sanchez moved to the Bay Area in the early 1990s from a small town in Mexico.
Yet after years of trying to obtain green cards to stay in the U.S. legally, their requests denied by immigration judges, then overturned through appeals,
their luck finally ran out in May when an immigration officer gave them 90 days to exit.
They had pleaded to remain in the Bay Area, at least until their secondoldest daughter graduates from UC Santa Cruz next year.
Maria, 46, rose from being a housekeeper at an East Bay nursing home to become a registered nurse at Oakland’s Highland Hospital, caring for patients with cancer, heart and kidney disease.
Her husband Eusebio, who turned 48 on Monday, graduated from construction jobs to become a full-time truck-driver for the last 12 years.
They paid taxes, obeyed the law, and sent two of their four children to college.
Shusterman said the decision by ICE was “purely discretionary.’’
Critics of illegal immigration, however, say the law must be followed, and those who immigrated illegally to the U.S. should face the repercussions. ICE has the right to deport them at any time, they say.