Oscar Campos received an
unexpected Christmas gift from the Obama administration on Monday afternoon.
He was eating lunch with the other inmates at the Elizabeth
Detention Contract Facility, a jail for undocumented immigrants near Newark,
N.J., when an officer approached him and said, "You’re free to go."
And so the
three-week saga of his arrest and detention ended as abruptly and mysteriously as
it began.
Campos, a native of Mexico who had lived a quiet life in the
U.S. for more than two decades, was arrested earlier this month by federal
immigration officers. They brought him to the Elizabeth lockup, which holds
about 300 immigrant detainees, some of the hundreds of thousands of
undocumented people the U.S. government detains each year while deciding
whether to deport them.
Campos's
family was worried, and confused. He had always paid his taxes and followed
every law except the one that said he wasn't supposed to be here. He had built
up a landscaping business from nothing and had raised three American-born
children. His oldest child, Oscar Jr., is a college student majoring in
criminal justice who hopes to join the New Jersey state police.
The one blemish on Campos's record
was an outstanding order of deportation. Back in 1995, immigration authorities
caught him trying to re-enter the U.S. after a visit to his parents in Mexico
and sent him back across the border. After several months, he slipped back into
the U.S.
According
to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, that incident made Campos a “priority
for removal.” But a lot has happened since then. Two years ago, the Obama
administration released a memo urging
federal officers to avoid detaining and deporting otherwise law-abiding
undocumented immigrants, especially young people and parents of children who
are U.S. citizens.
Campos seemed to fit that description. As Derek DeCosmo, the
immigration lawyer who took up his case, put it: "You have had three kids
born here. You’ve started your business. It’s a business you’ve paid taxes on.
ICE might say he broke the law and is absconding, but from Oscar's perspective,
that’s out of line."
Last week,
Campos’s family and supporters held a prayer vigil and a small rally outside
the Elizabeth detention center, and on Sunday, HuffPost published a story about his situation. The next day, Campos says, he was
approached by a detention officer who told him, “I saw your picture on the
Internet.” A few hours later, he was standing outside the center, reunited with
his family.
On Tuesday, as he recounted the experience, he paused to search
for the correct pronunciation of a word we hear a lot this time of year:
"I think that was a -- how you say -- miracle."
"This is the best Christmas present I have in my
life," he added.
Harold Ort, a spokesman for the New Jersey branch of ICE, did
not attribute Campos's release to divine intervention, or to the rally and
media coverage, for that matter. "After evaluating his case, and reviewing
the totality of the circumstances, ICE released Mr. Campos from custody
yesterday," Ort wrote in an email Tuesday.
The agency also granted Campos a stay of removal, he said.
Campos will be allowed to remain in the U.S. for at least a year, which should
be enough time for him to make the case to the government that he should be
allowed to stay for the rest of his life. In July, Oscar Jr. will turn 21 and
become eligible to apply for permanent residency status for his father.
Approximately
34,000 undocumented immigrants, many of them law-abiding, willspend the holidays in detention centers around the country this year. Campos
said he will be praying for them.
"I see so many people in my detention center," he
said. "They suffer too."
No comments:
Post a Comment