Gone and Not Gone: The Aftermath of a Deportation
After 33 years in the United States, Jonathan Medal is back in Nicaragua. But not even his children know.
By Andrea Salcedo
Mildred Roque-Tracey was covering the front desk at New Life Child Development Center, a preschool and daycare in Bushwick, when she witnessed a moment she is unlikely to forget.
Aide Medal-Reyes, who had come to pick up her two-year-old daughter, was sitting in the lobby holding her cell phone to her ear. She began to turn red, walked in and out of the building still holding the phone, and at some point, started crying. Roque-Tracey would later learn why. On the other line was her immigration lawyer, breaking the news that she feared the most. Twelve hours earlier, Aide still had some hope. But now it was over. Her husband had landed in Managua, Nicaragua.
“What’s going on? Why are you crying? Roque-Tracey asked her. Her husband was gone, she told Roque-Tracey. Deported.
In the shock of the moment, Aide explained the situation to Roque-Tracey. But over the next few months she would tell few people the reason for his absence. She didn’t tell her landlord. She didn’t tell her neighbors. She didn’t even tell her young children who believe–to this day–that daddy is at work. In some ways it was like he was still there.
But he was gone.
A Deportation
This wasn’t the first time Roque-Tracey had heard about parents in the school getting deported. So when she saw Aide weeping and “trying not to make a scene” that July morning, she immediately knew who could help: Father James Kelly.
Roque-Tracey grabbed Aide by the hand and escorted her to Father Kelly’s office at St. Brigid Immigration Services. Normally, the walk shouldn’t take longer than two minutes, but Aide was so visibly upset, shaking and still crying, that Roque-Tracey felt the need to accompany her.
Kelly, a veteran immigration attorney and priest who has been working with the community for the past 57 years, sat behind his desk. A yellow wall behind him displayed awards, pictures of religious figures, and old newspaper clips about his work. An iPad and a cellphone sat on his desk next to an old-fashioned office phone and a donation jar. Files and files of immigration cases sat in folders in a cabinet by his desk. If you are facing deportation, Father Kelly is the man to see.
He listened attentively as Aide, who could not stop crying, recounted the events that led to her husband’s “shipping,” as she often refers to it. He took notes.
“Don’t worry, we’re going to try to help you with your situation, Kelly told Aide, as she recounted later. “‘I know it’s very hard, but we’re going to do our best.”
Kelly quickly began to make as many phone calls as he could. He called Aide’s attorney, Michael Z. Goldman. He called the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. He alerted the daughters’ daycare and preschool about the family’s situation. He promised to do everything he could to bring her husband back, Aide recounted. He said it in Spanish: haré todo lo que esté en mis manos — “anything within my reach.”
**
Her husband’s case is not a simple one. His name is Jonathan Medal, and he crossed the U.S.-Mexico border with his mother and siblings “on or around August 2, 1985,” when he was four years old, fleeing from persecution in Nicaragua, according to his immigration records. His immigration status changed when he was ten years old. Without his knowledge, an order of voluntary departure was accepted on his behalf. An order of voluntary departure is a type of relief accepted in immigration court that allows the person to leave the U.S. without a formal deportation order, Goldman said.
“Because of his very young age, Mr. Medal did not understand the requirements for voluntary departure, and when he did not depart, his voluntary departure order became an order of deportation at 10 years old,” Mr. Medal’s lawyer argued in his “Petition for Alien Relative,” or I-130 form, which was approved by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services last year.
Medal remained in Brooklyn where he eventually met Aide at a barbecue in 2013. They dated for about a year and in 2014, their first daughter, Jaida, was born. Two years later, Gianna, their youngest daughter followed. But Medal almost didn’t witness his first daughter’s birth. In 2014, he was arrested by ICE when officers knocked on his mother’s door, using the pretense of returning his lost wallet. Medal begged them not to deport him. He didn’t speak nor read Spanish and his girlfriend was pregnant with their first child, he argued. That day, Medal was lucky. ICE officers had mercy on him and let him go. The condition? To periodically report to 26 Federal Plaza — an immigration court in lower Manhattan. And that’s what he did for four years until May 10th, when on a regular check-in appointment, ICE took him in.
“I knew that once ICE had custody of him that he wasn’t going to be released because of the Trump administration and his previous deportation order,” Aide said. “It was as if someone had died.”
When President Donald Trump was elected in 2016 and his rhetoric about immigration and immigrants inundated the media, the Medals knew they had to step up their game and work on his immigration status. Aide says she spent all of her savings — about $11,000 — on legal fees, submitting stacks of paperwork asking for her husband to stay. In early 2017, the couple met with Goldman, their immigration attorney, who advised them to get married as soon as possible. Maybe Aide’s U.S. citizenship could prevent him from getting deported, they thought. Medal wanted a less rushed and more elaborate Catholic wedding with many guests, but they were running out of time.
On Valentine’s Day of 2017, the Medals got married, at the office of the city clerk in Queens. No dinner or ceremony followed, they just had to get it done. Mr. Medal’s lawyer had filed a second “Stay of Removal” request in 2017 but it was denied once again. And it didn’t matter that Mr. Medal had an approved “Petition for Alien Relative” request, a petition in which the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services acknowledged and validated their marriage, Mr. Medal’s lawyer explained. In the end that petition didn’t guarantee Mr. Medal a right to stay. This petition is usually the first step before other legal routes can be pursued. And it also didn’t matter that they filed his I-212 application — a petition to re-apply for admission into the U.S. — after he was detained. It was up to ICE’s discretion and they said no. He was not eligible for DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, due to a 2008 arrest for Driving Under the Influence.
“When someone is detained by ICE and has a final order of removal in the Trump administration, it’s almost the end of the road,” Goldman said. “In that moment, it’s the worst news you can receive. It’s very hard to comfort someone like Aide in that particular situation because of how devastating it is and what we all know ICE’s strategy is.”
At about 10:30 a.m. on July 25 — after three months detained in Bergen County jail in New Jersey and less than a week at a detention center in New Orleans — Medal stepped foot in a country he had not visited since he was four. He carried no bags with him, just his cellphone, the clothes he was wearing the day he was detained, his keys, and his passport.
“I was feeling lost,” Medal recounted during a recent Facebook video call. “I didn’t know what to do. It was very unsafe.”
A Telephone Game, Then Silence
That same day, while Aide, Father Kelly, and Goldman — on the phone — brainstormed in the back room of Kelly’s office in Bushwick how to get Medal back to the U.S., a group of family members in Brooklyn were acting as Jonathan Medal’s fixer from afar.
Irania Medal, Jonathan’s cousin, had no time to remain in shock after Aide broke the news to her that morning. She was now on the phone with her cousin attempting to reunite him with his father, who lives about 20 minutes away from Augusto C. Sandino International Airport in Managua, where Medal had landed.
“He didn’t know where he was,” Irania Medal recounted. ‘Stay there. Don’t be afraid. Don’t move from where you are. You know how things are in Nicaragua, she told her cousin before she hung up.
And the calls, from family members who were hearing the story, kept coming.
On another line in Williamsburg, Brooklyn around 3 p.m., Lisbeth Candelaria, Jonathan Medal’s sister, broke the news to Urania Medal, his aunt.
“Aunt, they have deported my brother,” Candelaria said. “How is that possible?” Urania Medal replied, she had just returned to her house in Bushwick after church and could not believe the news. They were aware that Nicaragua had been in a political crisis for months, that marches and protests against the government sometimes turned violent, that the national police seemed to pick people up at random. Some 300 people had died and 2,000 had been injured in protests since April, according to the latest Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights report.
They had to act and they had to do it fast.
Minutes later also in Bushwick, Irania Medal was on the line with Jonathan’s father in Nicaragua. The plan was for him to pick Jonathan up at the airport, but when his father got there, Irania Medal recounted, he was nowhere to be found.
“I started to get desperate,” Irania Medal said in Spanish. She had been following the news about Nicaragua and knew that it was not a safe place for him, she said.
The family thought he was at the airport, but the authorities had put him on a bus, though he had no idea where he should go. His father had been waiting for hours at the airport but Jonathan was gone. He wound up at “El Mayoreo,” an outdoor market where locals buy fresh fruit and vegetables in the Concepción de María neighborhood — about five miles away from the airport. He looked for a phone to spend a portion of his 200 Córdobas — about 6 U.S. dollars given to him by airport authorities when he landed — to call his wife in Brooklyn.
He finally got ahold of his wife, who advised him to stay where he was. His father would come pick him up, she assured him. But Medal didn’t feel safe at the market. A man who had been deported with him told Jonathan it was common for people to get robbed in that area. The man put him on a cab back to the airport, the safest place where he could wait for his father to pick him up, Medal said. Everyone was confused, for hours.
**
In the first six hours following Medal’s deportation, his wife, Aide, had cast her net wide in an effort to find and help her husband. At least ten people, mostly family and a few community members willing to help, thus knew about her husband’s deportation.
But after that first day there was silence. Aide knew who she did not want to tell, including her landlord and her neighbors, as well as their two daughters.
To her daughters, daddy was at work. And to her neighbors and landlord, who every now and then would ask ‘Where’s your husband? We haven’t seen him in a while,’ a more elaborate lie had to be told. Her husband was in the hospital recovering from a back surgery after falling down the stairs while at work, she told everyone who asked.
If she told them the truth, she thought, her landlord might think she couldn’t afford rent and she risked getting evicted. As for her neighbors, the embarrassment was just too much to handle.
The neighbors “still ask for him and I try to cut the conversation short,” Aide said. “I feel like I’m a part of the statistics. I’m another mother whose husband has been deported, and I did everything in my power not to be part of the statistics.”
ICE has conducted 226,119 deportations in fiscal year 2017. Of those, 832 were Nicaraguan citizens, their records indicate. The removals resulting from ICE arrests increased from 65,332 in fiscal year 2016 to 81,603 in fiscal year 2017, ICE records show.
The Aftermath
Inside the Medal’s two-story building apartment in Ridgewood, Queens, traces of Jonathan Medal can still be found. Two red push-pins hold a laminated sheet with the title “10 rules for a happy marriage” on the left wall of the bathroom door. “Respect love for it’s worth. It can be one of the biggest factors in your happiness and success,” one of the rules reads. The two-bedroom apartment is painted with bright green in the living room, neon pink in the girls’ room, and bright purple in the couple’s bedroom.
On top of the couple’s white dresser, two small black frames hold pictures of them on their wedding day and in a professional studio photo shoot, holding their oldest daughter, Jaida, who is wearing pink from head to toes.
In a way, Jonathan Medal is still there.
His wife Aide was the main provider of the family, holding down two jobs as a social worker. He was a part-time carpenter and furniture mover. He didn’t mind cleaning up after his daughters, getting them ready for school and watching them while they played around the house. But the bottles of baby wash and bleach, the toothbrush, toothpaste, hairbrush and used mugs on top of the kitchen counter hint that he is no longer around.
“Everything falls on me,” Aide said.
Because of their work schedules, Jonathan spent more time with his daughters than Aide. He was the household cook. His specialty: tostones, rice, chicken and salads. In his absence, Aide, who doesn’t enjoy cooking, finds herself ordering Chinese takeout and pizza. She says she is too drained to cook dinner when she comes back home from work.
And although Medal wasn’t the main financial support of the family, the bills are starting to add up. With his part-time salary, Medal would pitch in for groceries and his daughters’ basic needs. Without his support, between childcare payments and utility bills, Aide says she owes about $2,000. Additionally, she pays $50 a week to both of her daughters’ grandmothers to take them to school, pick them up, and take care of them until she returns from work.
During a recent visit to her home, her youngest child was yelling ‘Mama! Mama! Mama!’ from the room where she was watching Dora the Explorer. “Do you see this? Aide said. “They’re either touching this, touching that, they want milk, they’re hungry, they want that — constantly. I can’t do anything.” In two visits, the girls fought over Band-Aids, bubble gum, a hairbrush, and her cellphone. Aide stopped her oldest daughter when she was poking an umbrella on her sister’s left eye. The child got a time out.
“Slowly but shortly, it’s taking a toll on me,” Aide said. “I fear that this is taking too long. It makes me angry. I have no control. I feel hopeless.”
When Mr. Medal left, his youngest daughter wasn’t walking yet. Now five months later, she is unstoppable and runs around the house with what seems like endless energy. He gets the news when he calls via Facebook video chat, which he does four or five times a week, usually before the children’s bedtime.
“Can you believe Gigi runs now?” Aide would ask her husband during one of those calls.
Not only does Aide fear her husband will miss key events in their daughters’ lives, but she also fears her youngest daughter Gianna will forget about him.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with the little one. Every man that passes by: ‘Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! She didn’t do that before,” Aide said.
And on the calls, Jaida, their oldest daughter, is constantly asking him where he is and why he hasn’t come home. Daddy’s at work, she is told. Actually, he is unemployed.
“For now, she still believes it but she does question a lot of things: ‘Mama, where is daddy? Why is daddy not here?’ She always asks the same questions.”
Andrea Salcedo can be reached at salcedonews@gmail.com |@salcedonews
