Miguel Angel Lopez has lived in the Bay Area for 27 years, and is father to three US citizens. But the “law and order” Trump administration has ignored legal orders to let him stay here, and he was just deported to Mexico.
When ICE agents showed up at an SF federal courthouse on May 27 and just started grabbing and detaining people who were showing up for their immigration cases (rather than, you know, pursuing actual criminals), one of the more heartbreaking stories was the detainment of Miguel Angel Lopez, a 27-year resident of Livermore and father the three US citizens who was simply attending a routine check-in appointment. Lopez was hauled off to a detention facility in Southern California.
A week and a half later on June 6, US District Court Judge Trina Thompson put a temporary restraining order on Lopez’s deportation, saying the federal government’s case against him was one of the Trump administration's flimsier cases that prosecuted a law-abiding resident with no criminal history. “The facts of this case highlight one of those moments,” Thompson wrote in her ruling, according to the Bay Area News Group. “The inequities seep from the pages, staining every word.”
But the typical lawless Trump administration simply ignored that order, and Lopez’s wife says he was deported to Mexico last Saturday, according to the Chronicle. His spouse Rosa Lopez says he was told to “grab his stuff” where he’d been in a Kern County facility for ten days, before being transferred to Bakersfield, and then deported to a migrant shelter in Tijuana. Rosa Lopez has since flown to Mexico to meet him there.
“On top of having to worry about paying rent for him here (in Mexico) and having to pay my stuff out there (in Northern California), it stresses me out,” Rosa Lopez told the Chronicle in a phone interview from Mexico. The deported Miguel Angel Lopez is the primary income earner in that household.
Lopez arrived in the US when he was 18, and got married to a US citizen in 2001. He’s been trying to get a green card since 2007, but that request has been tied up in the courts. Yet the whole time, Lopez has been working, paying taxes (he’s even paid off his mortgage), and has absolutely no criminal history.
President Trump has claimed the immigrants he’s been deporting are “bloodthirsty” criminals, but the administration's methods of snatching people to deport strongly indicate otherwise. ICE has been targeting people showing up for their immigration court hearings and check-ins, working manual labor shifts on farms or in sweatshops, or looking for day work in Home Depot parking lots. In other words, these deporations themselves are often more unlawful than the people being deported.
Image courtesy Lopez Family
