Mexico

Couple Reunites After Winding Immigration Ordeal

When Jose Luis Chavez Camacho was deported in 2007, his American-citizen wife, Carolina fell into a deep depression.

"I lost everything," Carolina Chavez said. "The house, the car, our storage unit – everything."

For two years she says lived in a homeless shelter by night, Best Buy stores by day.

"I watched Oprah," Carolina recalled, saying the program lifted her spirits and reminded her of what was important in her life. "You keep your eye on the prize, right? You keep climbing that mountain."

For Carolina, though, her mountain saw more than her fair share of peaks and valleys. The case against her husband started many years before they were married.

Jose Luis Chavez Camacho came to the United States from Mexico with his mother when he was just 11 years old. By age 14, he had dropped out of high school, working two jobs to support his mother -  who had been diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. In 1996, at age 20, his life would forever change.

Luis said while he was in a park, police officers approached him and arrested him.

"Because I fit the description of someone who was breaking into cars, that’s why they arrested me," he said. He was booked into jail and charging documents show he was given an additional charge of "possession of a controlled substance" with intent to sell.

He said police told him he was picked out of a line-up, that others in the detention facility had claimed he was a drug dealer.

Even though Luis denied the charges, he said his public defenders told him it would be easier to plead guilty and fight the charges once he was back in Mexico. Within a week he was convicted and then spent the next eight months in an immigration detention center, before finally being deported back to Mexico.

When he returned again just two days later, crossing the border illegally, he returned to his home in San Bernardino County. That’s when Carolina said she wanted to help her friend find justice.

"I thought it was terrible, really, how things happened for him," she said. Carolina was previously married with two children and would later marry Luis in March of 2000.

The couple remembered the next seven years as happy ones, normal ones, seeing their own ups and downs. In 2007, as the couple awaited their first child together, Carolina was rushed to the hospital. She was forced to give birth to their daughter, who had died in her womb. It was the beginning of a deep depression for Carolina, which intensified just three months later.

"I remember I got up early on a Sunday morning to play soccer with some friends," Luis remembers. "She was asleep and I left a note for her that I didn’t want to wake her because she looked so peaceful."

But Luis would not return.

"I was pulled over by the police," he said. "Because he said my windows were tinted too dark." Luis was taken to a detention facility in Downtown Los Angeles and placed in a holding cell.

"They said, 'Well, we got bad news for you,'" he said, his voice shaking. "'Immigration put a hold on you. They want to see you.'”

Carolina said their real story began at that moment. She had made a career in finance with Wells Fargo before her depression started. She gave that up and nearly gave up her life when Luis was deported. The housing market has busted and Carolina soon found herself living on the street, often sleeping under highway overpasses.

"They wouldn’t let you stay in the shelter during the day," she said,  which is what lead her to Best Buy stores and to the next chapter of her life. Carolina said she started to spend afternoons in the local library, searching law books and Google to understand her husband’s case and somehow reverse the charges against him.

"I had to go back and try to get that vacated because that was a total injustice on so many levels," she said. Money was tight, but she said she would help fill out paperwork for broker friends, turning every penny over to attorneys to help her understand the complicated immigration system.

"Whatever money they would give me I’d give to an attorney,"Carolina remembered. "Honestly? About $80,000 to date."

All this time Luis remained in Mexico, believing that if he had a chance to fix his case, he couldn’t attempt another illegal crossing back into the States.

"If there was a chance for me to do something about my case to prove all this stuff was wrong then we had to do it the right way," he said.

Carolina said she read and re-read her husband’s case files and believed he was denied due process. She said he was convicted too quickly, that his public defender made broken promises about how the case would progress, leading him to sign a guilty plea and ultimately his own deportation orders.

It took almost three years, but in February 2010, Carolina finally got her case in front of a San Bernardino Superior Court judge who vacated the criminal case against her husband.

"If you’ve ever done anything in your life that you can look back on and say 'oh my gosh, what an accomplishment,' that was the moment.,” she said.

The couple’s first hurdle had been won, but Luis’ case in state courts was far different than his case in the federal system. The next step would be to vacate his deportation order – something Carolina said half-a-dozen immigration attorneys said would be next-to-impossible.

Instantly she heard her mantra come back – climb the mountain, get to the finish – and instantly she returned to her local library to start the research again.

"I just started studying everything in the library," she said. Carolina said that while a dozen attorneys seemed to just take her money and run, she learned a little nugget from each of them, which helped her take small steps forward.

Then fate took a larger step for her.

"I was sitting at a Metrolink station in Corona and I think I was crying or something and a woman asked me what was wrong and I told her my whole story," she said. Turned out the woman worked for the Department of Homeland Security and explained to Carolina the steps she’d need to take to vacate the deportation order for Luis – filing a "motion to reopen" the case.

The case would stall, though. Carolina said the first attorney she found to submit the motion to reopen the case didn’t explain it well enough to the Executive Office of Immigration Review and it was denied. With only one more shot to make it happen, Carolina begged the judge’s assistant for the name of an attorney who had success in that courtroom. She found her in San Francisco.

"I told her I saved every email from 1997," Carolina said of her first meeting with the new attorney. "And I sent 250 emails to my Congressional leaders and everybody that would listen."

In August of 2014, the motion to reopen the case was granted – on the caveat that Luis return from Mexico to be present for the next hearing.

And so began the next challenge – bringing Luis home. Carolina says her Googling led her to the head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement at the time, Thomas Winkowski. In an email response, he told her, "Carolina, thank you for your email. Just wondering how you came across my email address? I’ll have my staff work with you."

It was an unprecedented move for ICE – returning an undocumented immigrant to the U.S. legally – but it finally happened for Luis in October 2014.

"I knew I was going to be whole again," Carolina said of the moment she heard Luis was coming home. "I was going to be a wife again, I was going to be a woman again."

On April 20, the journey to bring Luis home – and keep him here – ended, as the couple exited federal immigration court in San Francisco triumphant.

"This woman has fought for me so much," Luis sid. "She has shown me left and right that there’s really a God and there’s really love out there."

Luis now has the opportunity to apply for permanent residence and in five years, U.S. citizenship.

"I cherish this," Carolina said. "I would not give up on my husband. I had my eyes on the prize and it’s here now."

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