Many nights, the best Lupita Contreras-Cervantes can do to try and cope with everything life’s throwing at her is to sit on her front porch and cry. If she’s lucky, there’ll be the comfort of a friend’s shoulder to lean on. Often, there’s not even that. Life has frequently been hard, but the trauma she and her family now face is crushing in a way they’ve never experienced.
Lupita fell in love with her husband Jose 13 years ago – and they have created a loving and beautiful family in a close-knit community. Lupita and her three children, ages 9, 8, and 1, are U.S. citizens, but Jose, who came to the U.S. as a child and has lived here almost two decades, is not. Their family has faced many hardships together, including Jose’s devastating diagnosis of a rare form of cancer just a year ago. Jose, Lupita, and the children were braced to fight this next hardship together when the unthinkable happened: Jose was turned over to immigration by local police after they stopped him for allegedly going a few miles over the speed limit.
ICE has stolen precious time from the Contreras-Cervantes family. An adventurous and caring father, husband, caretaker, and neighbor has been cruelly ripped from his home, his absence felt every day. And, frighteningly, while in immigration detention, Jose has had his life-saving medical care disrupted in ways that could be disastrous.
The blame belongs to the Trump administration, which recently issued a directive that attempts to mandate that immigrants such as Jose -- a long-time Michigan resident who came to the U.S. at age 14 and has lived here for almost two decades – be locked up for months or even years without even a chance to ask an immigration judge for release while their immigration cases wind their way through the immigration courts. We’ve just filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of Jose and seven other detained immigrants being illegally denied their constitutional right to due process.
This new ICE directive is one of the most dangerous and far-reaching abuses of power that we’ve seen in this administration’s mass deportation campaign. If unchecked, it will affect thousands, possibly millions of people. This directive is specifically designed to force people to give up their claims for immigration relief and leave their families behind. The Administration’s goal is to break people’s spirits—to lock people up and make them so desperate that they agree to leave their loved ones.
The cruelty of this new directive is not an accident. Cruelty is the point. This is family separation with a different name. But the administration has underestimated the power of family, and how hard parents are going to fight to come home to their kids. The administration has also underestimated our Constitution, which guarantees due process and guarantees it for everyone.
The scope of this injustice, and the massive trauma it is creating for countless immigrants and their families, is why Lupita, despite the tremendous hardships she and her family are facing, wants to share her family’s story. Doing so, she hopes, will help put an end to the cruelty so many others are facing.
What can you do? Take a moment and share Lupita and Jose’s story however you can– with a friend or family member or on social media. People need to know that ICE’s new directive is illegal so they can get the legal help they need to go home to their families.
Volunteer lawyers are needed to bring habeas cases to ensure the immigrants who are being illegally detained without a bond hearing get a bond hearing, and can get released. Ideally, the same lawyer will do both the habeas case and any subsequent bond hearing in immigration court. If you are a lawyer, and you've been wondering what you can do in this moment to make a difference, sign up here!
View the full press release here.
View the press conference here.