LIVERMORE — Miguel López spent his 47th birthday last month in Mexico away from his children and the house he owns in Livermore.
His wife was by his side, but his contact with his kids is now mostly by video – including a FaceTime call on his daughter’s 24th birthday – with some of them finding it too painful to visit him in person.
After being deported two months ago, he has no idea if or when he’ll be able to come back to the Tri-Valley, a place he’s called home for 29 years.
“There’s nothing I can do,” López said in a video call interview from Mexico last week. “I pray every night that I can go back tomorrow, or one of these days. I’m waiting for a miracle.”
He has been working toward permanent residency in the U.S. since 2007, when immigration officials first tried to remove him from the country. Although he has no serious criminal past, López was detained during a routine immigration checkup with Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials in May while showing up to a court status hearing.
ICE held him for 10 days, until he was finally deported on June 7 to Tijuana, hours before a federal judge granted an order allowing him to stay in the U.S.
He has since relocated to his childhood home just outside of Mexico City to live with his father. At that modest home in Chimalhuacán, in the State of Mexico and part of Mexico City’s expanded metropolitan area, he spends most of his time looking for a job, cleaning and recleaning his room, washing his clothes and calling his wife, Rosa López, daily. His video calls to his family usually end in tears, he says.
“I tell them I miss them, I love them, and I want to be right there next to them,” he said. “I want to hug them.”
Things are much quieter around their Livermore house now that her husband isn’t around, Rosa López said. Their two dogs — a 5-year-old white-haired AmStaff Pitbull named Luna and a chirpy, 6-year-old black-haired Chihuahua named Lexi — would usually jump up, barking to greet him when he got home from his job as a welder at a local winery.
Dinner was waiting for him, and the family would gather around the table at the tan-painted, four-bedroom home decorated with family portraits and nestled on a corner lot in the Tri-Valley suburb. They’d normally chat and joke and talk about their day, or watch TV, or plot out weekend trips to go camping or fishing, family members recalled at an interview at the home this past week.
Ordering mostly takeout these days, Miguel López said he misses his wife’s cooking. Rosa acknowledges she likely saw him for the last time in a while on his birthday on July 29th — “it’s tough coming home without him” — and worries about his safety in a town where his brother was killed in a shooting years ago.
“If I call him and he doesn’t answer me, I get anxiety,” she said. “I was really worried when he was there for a week by himself.”
She has other worries at home. Since their marriage in 2001, Miguel has been the sole breadwinner of their household — and money is getting tight.
After nine years as a welder at Wente Vineyards, Miguel is struggling to find work that pays more than $60 or $70 a week in Mexico. Usually, he’d work five or six days a week, especially during Wente’s busy harvest season, which is coming up. But without a car in Mexico, “it’s been kind of hard,” he said. “I’ve been working 29 years, every day. … I get pretty bored.”
For now, the family is largely surviving on the $57,000 they received in donations from a GoFundMe account, and have used the funds to pay their mortgage until December. But, “bills aren’t going to wait,” Rosa said. “I know money is going to run out.”
“I’ve never felt like this before. I’m scared of a lot of things,” she said. “I constantly feel like my heart’s going to come out of my chest, that I can’t breathe.”
Meanwhile, Miguel is inching closer to getting another day in U.S. court that could change his life, with a hearing scheduled in October. If things go his way, a Northern California District Court judge could reverse the government’s previous decision to revoke the green card he received in 2012 by claiming he earlier made a false claim to citizenship, which would help pave the way for him to remain in the U.S.
The distance has been especially hard on his children.
His youngest son, Julian López, just began his senior year at Granada High School, where he’ll play cornerback on the football team without his biggest fan in the stands. His daughter, Stephanie López, visited him in Mexico for Father’s Day weeks after he was deported, but she said she refuses to return to see him “unless I’m bringing him back with me.”
His eldest son, Angel López, has been using his wages as a mechanic to help with the house payments. He said his first reaction to his father’s detainment was anger, followed by pain that made it too much to see his dad even on video calls.
“I was pretty mad. I didn’t know how to deal with it at first,” he said through tears. “I try to stay busy.”
His mother has tried to stay positive.
“We are very close, and I think this has brought us closer together,” Rosa López said. “We just have that missing piece.”
