Family divided by death, borders and bad immigration policy
The three Molina children lost their father in a hit-and-run accident in downtown Stamford in April. They were separated from their mother 11 years ago by America’s hit-andrun approach to immigration policy.
Two months after Ronald (Rony) Molina’s death at 52, his kids are seeking a humanitarian visa to bring their mother back home from Guatemala. Alex, 21, had to suspend his graduate studies at Yale University, while Ronald Steve, 19, was able to finish his freshman year at University of Connecticut in Stamford. Evelin just graduated from Norwalk Community College. These should be days of celebration. Instead, they are working to save their father’s struggling landscaping business, which paved their way to college.
Everybody, including Rony’s customers, reminds them of what a loving and lovely guy he was. The man who was all heart had his own transplanted into the body of a stranger. One final act of grace.
The five were all together for only a brief time. Sandra was a teenager when she gave birth to Evelin in Guatemala 29 years ago. Evelin stayed there with her grandparents while Sandra chased the American dream. She married Rony, they had two boys and settled in Stamford. After becoming a U.S. citizen in 2009, Rony returned to his native Guatemala to adopt Evelin and bring her back to their home on Cold Spring Road.
“I hadn’t seen my mom for many, many years, so that was a big day for me,” Evelin, 29, says while on a break from the Greenwich salon where she works as a hairdresser.
The reunion was brief. While Ronald and the kids were legal residents, Sandra was not. She hired a lawyer who advised her to return to Guatemala in 2010 and follow protocol to become a citizen. It backfired when she was denied re-entry.
Then, Evelin recalls, “Mom got really desperate — she went crazy.”
So desperate that she got caught trying to cross the border and was detained in Arizona. Sandra was barred from returning to the United States for 10 years. Bad immigration laws weren’t born in the USA under Trump. This happened during the Obama years, following a sloppy policy launched during the Clinton administration.
‘Heartbreak of the border’
The family was the subject of a 2012 Associated Press feature about the uptick in parents being deported. A decade later, nothing has really changed. Yet immigrants remain not just the bedrock of the Main Street economy, but of leadership at Fortune 500 companies.
“The heartbreak of the border.” New Haven attorney Glenn Formica, who is handling Sandra’s case pro bono, repeats the phrase like the refrain of a corrido. “The heartbreak of the border.”
Since then, the kids only saw their mom on annual visits to Mexico, where she moved to escape gangs in Guatemala that try to exploit women with what they presume are rich American spouses (Sandra told the AP a decade ago of her brother being held for ransom to extort money from her family).
The occasional visits are costly, but not as costly as bringing Rony’s body back to his hometown so a second funeral could be held.
“To ship a dead body is really, really expensive, in the thousands,” Alex says. So they set up a GoFundMe campaign to return him to Carchá, where they were reunited with their mother.
“We carried his casket all the way over to the cemetery,” Alex says. “That was painful, I had marks afterward.”
‘Using my college savings’
Alex has been carrying the weight of his father’s business as well.
He gets up at about 6:30 every morning, talks to the All Seasons Landscaping crew and checks on the equipment. Then he puts on a suit and drives to his Manhasset, N.Y., administrative internship in the Family Medicine Department at Northwell Health. Clients and crew members interrupt his shift with calls and texts before he makes the drive back to Stamford and connects dots.
Alex finds the time to laugh at one of the consequences of his overstuffed schedule: “Then essentially I’m really hungry. I only eat breakfast.”
He’s also trying to carry on with a rehab project his father initiated as a real estate investment, “with basically everything he had,” Alex says, somehow finding the resolve to laugh again.
“Basically we have debt. I’m using my college savings to fix up the property. Then basically I’ll just figure out my $80,000 in student loans after that.”
The landscaping business wasn’t quite making a profit, so Alex rebooted it. His father’s paper schedules and ledgers were all digitized.
As he talks from the Cold Spring home, Alex’s gaze falls on a painting of a white horse he once gave his father. It’s one of the 50 or so images of steeds in the home Alex describes as looking like a cabin because of his father’s penchant for woodwork. The only thing missing is a real horse. I ask Alex if he ever saw Rony on horseback, and he is reminded of his father teaching him to ride as a boy in Guatemala.
The only criticism I hear of Rony is when his son describes trying to translate business notes in “handwriting that isn’t that legible.”
These days, clients tell Alex about how Rony would brag about the kids.
“That’s something I didn’t know,” he says. “How proud he was.”
Rony built a loyal customer base, primarily in Greenwich, Stamford and Norwalk. When the kids were young, clients would give him school supplies every fall. One customer has been sending money for groceries since Rony’s death.
Alex pledges to pay it forward in the future. It sounds like he’s already done that. After graduating from Brigham Young in three years, he started pursuing his master’s degree in health care management at Yale. His passion comes from the time he spent after school at Westhill High volunteering at Sunrise Senior Living.
“It opened my eyes to the field of health care,” says Alex, who was Westhill’s 2018 class president. “I fell in love with interacting with patients and improving their quality of life and care.”
‘She is four-wheel drive’
If Sandra could finally return to Stamford, she could take over the business and let her children move on with their lives. Evelin says her mother is capable of handling everything from the paperwork to the lawn work.
“She is four-wheel drive,” she jokes.
Evelin could also be describing herself as she expresses determination to bring her mother back to Stamford. The office of U.S. Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., has been notified of their case. A spokesperson confirmed they are involved but could not comment on an active case. Formica, the lawyer, has no updates from immigration officials.
“I don’t want to disappoint her,” Evelin says of her mother.
They may have been apart for most of Evelin’s 29 years, but Sandra shaped her daughter’s journey. When Evelin was young, Mom took her to the salon she worked at in Guatemala. During their first years apart, Evelin went to cosmetology school in Guatemala as a teenager. Sandra presented her with a first set of professional scissors when they were reunited in Stamford.
The thing about scissors is they can sever, but also create new beauty.
While she hopes for a miracle, Sandra is cutting hair in Mexico. Evelin aspires to use her studies in business administration at NCC to open her own salon someday.
It’s nice to imagine her mom there as well. After all, that’s the way American dreams should work.