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| Omar Lopez hopes to avert deportation to Spain to stay here with his wife, Tali, and Mila, her infant daughter. |
Tali Lopez wants a happy ending to her “fairy tale” story.
But six months after marrying an old friend and settling in her native Buffalo, Lopez is fighting for her new husband.
Omar
Lopez, a citizen of Spain visiting here on a visa waiver, was arrested
after a traffic stop last month and has been held at the Federal
Detention Center in Batavia ever since.
Lopez is battling her
husband’s deportation – he could be forced to leave at any time – and
plans to host a public rally at 10 a.m. Tuesday in Niagara Square to
solicit support for him.
Friends and family say Lopez’s
deportation is an overreaction to a relatively minor infraction. He
overstayed his visa waiver by several months.
Even worse, they
say, the government’s prosecution is tearing apart a family with deep
roots in Buffalo. The family includes his infant stepdaughter, Mila,
whom he plans to adopt, and dozens of relatives.
“He just wants to work and support his family,” said Julie Kruger, Lopez’s lawyer.
Kruger
has appealed to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency
that detained Lopez, and hopes ICE will grant a stay that would allow
him to remain in Buffalo.
Lopez’s case is the latest in a series
of deportations across the country that immigration lawyers and other
critics say indicates the Obama administration’s hypocritical approach.
The
administration has publicly indicated it would focus deportation
efforts on criminals and other high-risk detainees, not law-abiding
visitors married to U.S. citizens.
If that’s the case, Kruger said, then why is Lopez still in custody?
“He is not an enforcement priority at all,” she said.
Lopez
is here on a visa waiver program that allows visitors from certain
countries to stay in the U.S. for 90 days. His deadline for leaving
passed last May. He elected to stay and, according to his wife, had
begun the process of applying for permanent resident status.
Tali Lopez says she and her husband met four years ago in Spain
She returned to the U.S. and he eventually followed. They decided to marry and live here.
Lopez
says her husband also decided to seek permanent residency and hired an
immigration consultant. It still took several months to complete the
paperwork, she said, and before they could finish, he was pulled over
for a traffic violation on Feb. 12.
Found to be driving without a license and in the country illegally, he was arrested and ordered detained in Batavia.
The final decision was made, not by an immigration judge, but by Michael T. Phillips, ICE’s field office director in Buffalo.
“As
a visa overstay, his case is a priority under the agency’s current
enforcement strategy, which focuses on individuals who have abused the
visa or visa waiver programs,” said ICE spokesman Khaalid Walls.
Officials also noted that, under the visa waiver program, Lopez was subject to mandatory detention.
Tali
Lopez says she has written two letters to Phillips since her husband
was sent to Batavia, and he shows no signs of altering his decision.
Still,
she holds out hope that something will change his mind. “I want him to
consider that we are, one, a family, two-thirds of which is American,”
she said of her herself and Mila. “We want, above all, to be together
and to be in this country. It’s my country. I don’t want to have to
leave it.”
Lopez says she and Mila will, if necessary, follow her
husband back to Spain. She also says she feels like she’s the one being
forced to leave.
“I don’t want to be deported,” she said. “I want to stay in the United States. I want to raise my family here.”
Source: http://www.buffalonews.com/city-region/buffalo/deportation-could-ruin-newlywed-couples-fairy-tale-20150323
