A Mexican father once tried to slip into the U.S. with his teenage son and no papers. The two were caught and released pending a hearing. The father gave up and went home. Friends told the son to skip the hearing, since he’d be ordered deported either way, and try his luck staying here.
Now the son is in his 30s and living in Northeast Ohio, still without documents. His record’s clean except for that deportation order. He has an undocumented wife and a little boy, who has birthright citizenship and a heart defect getting treatment here.
“I don’t want them worrying,” says the man’s lawyer, Patrick Espinoza of the Painesville firm Sus Abogados Latinos (Your Latino Lawyers). “These are not the people who should be targeted.”…