Gladys and Nelson Gonzalez have called the United States home since 1989. Their three daughters, now grown, were all born and raised in California.
“For nearly four decades, they have built a life here — raising three daughters, giving back to their community, and recently welcoming their first grandchild,” their daughter Stephanie Gonzalez wrote on a GoFundMe page for the family. “Now, they are being treated as criminals.”
Last month, the parents checked in at an immigration court in Santa Ana, just “like they have been doing since 2000,” Stephanie wrote in an email to CNN.
But this check-in ended with a much different outcome.
The couple was arrested and handcuffed during their February 21 appointment and put in federal custody, where they spent three weeks before being deported to Colombia.
“We didn’t expect that they would be apprehended and held in custody. And again, it’s not really unique to them anymore. It’s happening across the country,” Crooms told CNN, pointing to recent immigration policy changes in the US two months into the current administration.
The Gonzalezes spent many years searching for a viable path to citizenship, paid their taxes and never had any trouble with the law, according to Crooms and their daughters.
Ideally, the couple would have been given time to get their affairs in order and say goodbye to their daughters and grandchild, according to Crooms. But that didn’t happen.
“We had to go and pick up their car from the parking lot and didn’t get to say goodbye,” Stephanie said.
Saying they supposedly “broke the law” and worked illegally for decades is disregarding the economic benefits their cheap labor brought to US corporations, who no longer had to pay American wages. If we then them away we are turning our backs on our own corporations.
This is how you get people to stop showing up to their hearings.
That’s the point. Show up deportation. Don’t show up anything that points them to you=deportation.
Don’t show up, now you’re a criminal and we can say we’re deporting known criminals
They were calling you that already
Where are they sending these people? They don’t have a home in another country.
They are being sent to a place that is both as horrible as the Nazis want and as far away from legal representation as the Nazis find convenient.
It’s Nazis doing this, so there should be no question that it’s horrible and wrong. But, unlike the Nazis, they didn’t get legal clearance first before they could do these horrible things. That means there is a chance to fight that.
Rebellions are built on Hope
They have been sent to one of the most brutal areas in the US for prisoners, Louisiana. Just look up Angola Prision. Long history of treating prisoners like animals down there.
Edit: I don’t think they are going to angola but its representative of the attitude you will find in that state.
El Salvador
And so begins the “one drop” Nazi policy.
These people weren’t deported because they weren’t white, they were deported because they had enough “not white “blood for the current Nazi administration to report them because they made the Nazis look bad
They were deported, because they were in the country illegally and were ordered to leave 25 years ago.
False but also,
If you don’t like being called a Nazi, stop spreading Nazi lies
“In 2000, the immigration court found no legal reason that would allow Gladys and Nelson to stay in the United States and they were issued a voluntary departure order, which gives people a certain amount of time to leave the country at their own expense to avoid a deportation order, according to ICE.”
Who was President in 2000? 🤔
According to trump supporters, it would be Obama.
LOL. Truth.
Q. "Who is my neighbor?
“These non-citizens have a right to live in the US!!”
I know people who have become citizens it takes a while but 40 years is nuts. There is definitely more to this story that isn’t being reported.
They couldn’t get citizenship during all those 35 years?
I suggest that you research the process of obtaining a green card and, after that, attaining actual citizenship – including all of the rights one is granted in the meantime, before you make any judgment against these people.
What the government is currently doing, is not only expressly and extraordinarily illegal, it is forbidden by international law. And it’s forbidden by international law because of what the fucking Nazis did. And what the Nazis did, the Trump administration is very much trying to do, in full force.
If you have any doubts about this or questions about this, you clearly have an IQ under 20.
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So what should they have done in there intervening 25 years after receiving a voluntary departure order? Just hope it goes away or is never enforced?
At last 25 years, there has been a path of reasonable and legal recourse. Just because you wish to ignore that, doesn’t make it true.
I mean, they exhausted all their options over the last 21 years and were told in 2018 they should get ready to depart. They then stayed another 4 years anyways after they exhausted all their options and knew if it was going to be enforced they were going to be deported.
The only reason they can claim about raising a family is specifically because the system gave them an huge amount of time to sort things out. But that doesn’t mean the time is, or should be, indefinite.
For all the people literally being grabbed off the streets for a traffic ticket or an op ed article, a couple being given 21 years of litigation and almost 40 years of time here to sort out their status before ignoring the unfavorable outcome doesn’t sound like this just dropped out of the sky.
I suggest these two should have done that before coming here illegally.
The United States, starting centuries before it was founded, and continuing for centuries afterward, has been founded on the undebatable strength of industry we have gained from immigration. This entire country is built from immigration – mostly because those who came before committed in massive genocide against the natives of this land.
So when you question the value of any incoming immigrant, just remember that nobody ever had to endure such shitty fascist in dignity until shitty fascists made it a thing.
And, as someone who is continuing the shitty, fascist viewpoint that nearly destroyed the United States in the 1920s and 1930s, you are advocating for that same amount of undemocratic, un-American, absolutely fucking shitty fascist bullshit that, nearly a century ago, we very well knew was shitty, fascist, bullshit that would terror our country apart.
And you are no better, because the only reason you would endorse this shitty, fascist, bullshit is because you are so stupid that you have yet to learn why it is ultimately self-destructive.
Man, this idiot didn’t deserve the amount of thought you put into this reply. 😂
It takes lots of fluff to properly ignore the topic at hand.
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Right, and the court told them nu uh. Dumbass.
Nobody is ignoring your Nazi rhetoric. Hence the down votes.
Another criminal huh?
So you are here illegally too then? Or should legal immigration receive the same benefits as illegal?
What do illegal jmmigrants do to you? Seriously ask yourself what the impact of these people existing is on your daily life. The folks in this article specifically, came here, got jobs, paid taxes on their wages, and took those wages and contributed to their local economy. How is that any different than me just because I was born here?
They’re willing to do jobs we aren’t because they don’t grow up with the quality of life and/or safety we were lucky enough to get handed just for popping out in the right place. Despite what you’ve been told they commonly are subject to payroll tax. Most of them are desperately trying to obtain paperwork, but our government says no over and over again. The fucking melting pot, right?
You’ve been propagandized to think immigrants did something to you. They didn’t. The end game is going to be you and I shooting at each other in a civil war because the rich people said immigrants are bad. Please wake up. Please everybody wake up.
My problem with illegal immigrants is that they exist in the first place.
If you want to come here, work, and contribute to society, then why the fuck shouldn’t you be let in?
So you’re 100% in support of jailing business owners who hire illegal immigrants, right? After all, to truly solve the supply problem, you need to end demand.
Immigrants who are in the country illegally:
- Don’t pay all taxes.
- Depress wages, because they are willing to work for less
- Reduce housing supply for citizens and legal immigrants.
- Mess up infrastructure planning, because they don’t exist in government databases - so you plan for fewer people than you should.
- Make police work harder, because again - they don’t exist in official databases. And if they are witnesses or victims - they are less likely to report crimes.
- They can have problems insuring their vehicles - so their victims could have problems getting paid in case of a crash.
And the positive side:
- If you’re a greedy capitalist who wants to exploit their workers by paying them less than a minimum wage, forcing them to work overtime, not offering paid vacations and health insurance and ignoring work safety laws - then undocumented immigrants are what you need.
Clearly, the easiest way to solve all of these problems would be to make them tax paying citizens as quickly as possible.
But that would upset the xenophobic racists…
Or maybe they pay more taxes because they may get taxes withheld from their pay but can’t file for a refund without risking their freedom.
Or maybe the US should support human rights by not involving immigration where it doesn’t belong. We want all people here to have healthcare and car insurance and job safety and at least a minimum wage, and wtf does immigration status have to do with any of that? By tying those together you’re not only making government more complicated but you’re in collusion with exploitive companies in creating an underclass class of people with limited human rights who can be exploited at will
So you’d be all for seizing businesses and jailing business owners who hire undocumented immigrants? Guess which political party these business owners usually belong to?
You have been fed propaganda to hate undocumented immigrants by the right wing, but those same people want an underclass of vulnerable workers to exploit.
Ask yourself why all of these illegal immigrant chaos never focuses on the businesses hiring them? If you truly wanted to “solve the problem”, then you’d want to cut off the demand.
So, if you get disappeared, should we assume that you deserve it?
Yes, that Snoo tattoo you’ve been trying to cover up is clearly gang insignia
A informative video which I recommend most should watch.
Cute, however my mother legally immigrated to the US. I’m eligible for citizenship by descent in the country she came from. I’m not just moving there, I’m applying through proper channels with a formal passport application process. See the difference?
I finally get it. Because you have the privilege to do these things, it’s now okay to drop all humanity and support fascists. I knew there was something missing in my logic.
Yeah, it’s tough for most criminals to follow logic.
Please go away
Okay, so just trying to understand your point here. So question, if a person (or yourself) immigrated legally, and was a green card holder/legal citizen, you are saying they should have nothing to fear as them being deported would never happen?
This article is about a couple who didn’t have any green, gold, platinum or any other card after decades. Even for four years after getting the news. I despise the current administration and hope Cheeto has a debilitating stroke today, but that doesn’t mean I’m for illegal immigration. An no, any green card holder shouldn’t be disappeared nor college students.
Okay, and are you aware of Mahmoud Khalil the Columbia graduate and green-card holder, held in Louisiana by immigration agents.
I wish I could link to the segment on Last Week Tonight but the episode is not available on YouTube yet. I suggest if you have access to watch it
Relevant lines from that episode.
The Trump administration’s controversial arrest and attempt to deport Columbia University graduate student and pro-Palestine activist Mahmoud Khalil this month prompted a viscerally personal reaction from John Oliver in this week’s monologue for Last Week Tonight.
“Maybe you feel different about the Israel-Palestine conflict than Khalil does. Maybe you don’t agree with the things that I’ve said about it,” Oliver said. “But if someone can be deported as a green card holder for speech in support of Palestine, or anything this administration objects to—that should chill you to the bone.”
Article from the Guardian for more context.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/mar/19/mahmoud-khalil-statement
Question, what problem do illegal immigrants cause in your mind?
Forget the law (much like this administration does frequently) and tell us what problem this crack down is solving? What problem are these people causing, that affects your day to day life?
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I’m not surprised. I have no idea what their specific situation was, but I’ve known a couple people going through the green card process. And each was its own brand of long, painful, and expensive.
You forgot to insult the commenter asking the question.
Dumbass
I’m not sure it would have mattered.
That was my question too. Did they get denaturalize?
