Deported nurse might be allowed back in U.S.
Bay Area woman’s case ‘Exhibit A’ in legal fight
A woman whose case drew national attention last year when immigration officials tore her from her children and her job as a nurse in Oakland and deported her to Mexico has a chance to beat the odds and return to the Bay Area, thanks to a lottery drawing and a recommendation from a U.S. consular officer.
The final decision, though, is in the hands of a Trump administration immigration agency. The agency made a preliminary decision in the woman’s favor last month, but the administration has taken a hard line on undocumented immigrants.
The woman, Maria Mendoza-Sanchez, has “become Exhibit A in the California-vs.-Trump immigration front lines,” said her immigration
lawyer, Camiel Becker of Oakland.
Mendoza-Sanchez, whose story has been covered extensively by The Chronicle, had crossed the border in 1994 without a visa to join her husband, who had entered five years earlier. She obtained work permits in the early 2000s, studied nursing at City College of San Francisco and Holy Names University in Oakland, and worked night shifts as a nurse’s assistant to support her family. The training paid off in 2015 when she landed a six-figure job as an oncology nurse at the Highland Hospital trauma center.
The couple had been applying for legal status since 2002, under a law protecting parents whose U.S.-born children would suffer exceptional hardships from their deportation. An immigration judge found them ineligible in 2013 and ordered them deported. But President Barack Obama’s administration granted them two one-year stays, then adopted rules that focused on deporting criminals and allowed the couple to remain in the U.S., renewing their work permits every six months.
That all changed with President Trump’s election. He promptly signed an executive order making virtually every undocumented immigrant a priority for removal. By August 2017, Mendoza-Sanchez and her husband, Eusebio Sanchez, were on a plane for Mexico.
They left behind three daughters, two of them nativeborn U.S. citizens and the third, Vianney, who was then 23 and a “childhood arrival” protected from deportation under a program Trump is trying to repeal.
Because young children need to be with their parents, Mendoza-Sanchez said, the couple brought a fourth child, their then-12-year-old son, Jesus, to live with them in a village south of Mexico City where Mendoza-Sanchez was born and raised. But two months later, the unfamiliar surroundings and school system there were too much, Mendoza-Sanchez said.
With the child ailing and depressed, “I had to send him back to California” to rejoin his sisters, his mother said.
Jesus and his two U.S.-born sisters, Melin and Elizabeth, have visited their parents once or twice, then returned to Oakland where Vianney looks after them. Sometimes they have brief phone conversations with their mother. For her, that’s not enough.
“It has been way more difficult than I thought at the beginning,” Mendoza-Sanchez, 47, said by phone Wednesday from Mexico. “I thought I was bearing up. I did get very depressed . ... I don’t know how to live without the kids.”
She also misses her work with cancer patients.
“I do not consider it a job, I consider it a privilege,” she said. “The feeling that comes when I see patients getting better, it’s a beautiful feeling.”
The feeling is apparently mutual. As she and her husband were about to be deported last year, hundreds of nurses, doctors, union members and other supporters, including the head of the public health authority that operates Highland Hospital, held a protest rally outside the facility, some waving signs that read, “Hands Off Maria.”
Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf said she was thinking of Mendoza-Sanchez and her abrupt removal after more than two decades of living in and contributing to the community when she warned immigrants in February of an impending raid by federal agents, provoking fury from Trump.
“Oakland is full of Marias,” Schaaf said.
Despite the Trump administration’s immigration policy, though, there’s still a chance for deportees to return legally, with skill and luck. MendozaSanchez caught a break in April when her name was one of about 65,000, out of 200,000 applicants, drawn in the H-1B visa lottery, which allows foreigners to apply for six-year work permits. Highland Hospital sponsored her application — “sent off with a prayer,” in the words of Becker, her immigration lawyer.
Also in the cheering section was Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who had objected to Mendoza-Sanchez’s deportation and sponsored a bill that would have allowed her to return. The bill had no chance of passage in a Republican Congress, but collected nearly 100,000 signatures of support online.
“I’m proud to support her H-1B application that will allow her to reunite with her children and return to her nursing job, which the hospital has been unable to fill,” Feinstein said in a statement this week.
Mendoza-Sanchez was still ineligible for a visa through normal channels, Becker said, because she had entered the U.S. illegally in 1994 with her newborn daughter — technically “alien smuggling” — and had been deported. But the government can grant waivers to skilled workers, and Mendoza-Sanchez is most of the way there.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services found her legally eligible on Oct. 2 without even asking for evidence — “miracle No. 2,” as Becker put it. The next stop was the State Department’s consular office in Mexico City, where, he said, her legal team handed over a packet of materials that included testimonials to Mendoza-Sanchez’s skills and the need for her services, and the volumes of media coverage. The team then presented her for an interview.
“It took much longer than I’ve ever heard of for this application process, but they came back and said they were recommending it for approval,” the attorney said.
Now it’s back to Citizenship and Immigration Services for a final decision on the visa. Becker said the agency usually follows the consular office recommendations, so Mendoza-Sanchez is “cautiously optimistic.” On the other hand, Customs and Immigration Services is part of the Department of Homeland Security, a vigorous participant in Trump’s immigration crackdown.
Mendoza-Sanchez’s case shows “why Trump’s ‘no-discretion, deport-everybody’ policies don’t make sense,” Becker said.
Although the H-1B visa would allow only MendozaSanchez to return, her husband might then apply for a visa to rejoin her, Becker said. One step at a time.
“I don’t want to take anything away from the country,” Mendoza-Sanchez said. “I only want to be able to work and provide for my kids. I’m doing everything I can to legally go back.”
She said the consular official told her to expect a decision within a month.
“We are hoping this happens before Christmas,” MendozaSanchez said. “Now maybe a light is shining at the end of the tunnel.”