Local Elmer Reynoso faces deportation as ICE increases raids on families and communities. Now, locals are rallying to get him back with his family
Above: Bruno Hinojosa speaks at a June 20 press conference and rally in front of the federal building in downtown Asheville, calling for ICE to stop its plans to deport local Elmer Reynoso.
On the morning June 1, Elmer Reynoso left for work.
“All of a sudden many cars were following him,” Fatima Aguilar, his partner, recalls in a written statement to the Blade. “Without thinking about it, he kept driving. Then, they turned on their lights and pulled him over at a gas station.”
“At 8:40, he called me, sad. He said, ‘Baby, they got me,’” Aguilar recalls. “I asked, ‘Who?’ He told me, ‘Immigration.’ He told me he had a deportation order.”
“At this moment, I felt my soul break into pieces,” Aguilar writes. “But I but began to pray, asking strength from the Father. And I began to feel a little calmer, but with this sadness that I am not going to see him this afternoon or the following day.”
Reynoso, 18, first came to the U.S. two years ago, when he was 16, fleeing from an abusive home environment and endemic gang violence in Guatemala. He sought refuge in the U.S., where his mother and other family members had lived since 2005. He went to Erwin High School, but dropped out to work. He was a main source of support for his family, including Aguilar and, as of two months ago, their son.
Reynoso was one of a wave of teenagers and children coming to the U.S. due to violence in Central America. Guatemala in particular suffered from a bloody civil war over three decades that included widespread atrocities carries out by the U.S.-backed government. Last year, the Obama administration shifted the focus of federal deportation efforts to primarily target those with violent criminal histories or terrorist connections.
Reynoso has no criminal record. He missed an immigration hearing due, according to his family and immigrants’ rights advocates, to a lack of transportation or funds for a lawyer. However, since January 1, ICE has repeatedly ramped up its deportation efforts at families and those who came to the U.S. as minors fleeing violence in their home countries.
On June 7, locals delivered hundreds of postcards to Rep. Mark Meadows’ office (the congressman replied he was looking into Reynoso’s case). Yesterday, representatives of a number of local groups, along with members of Reynoso’s family, held a small rally in front of the Federal Courthouse in downtown Asheville. Reynoso, they pointed out, was unable to spend Father’s Day with his son.
“One of our community members was kidnapped by immigration, he was taken away from his family while he was driving to work,” Bruno Hinojosa, of the immigrants’ rights group Compañeros Inmigrantes de las Montañas en Accion, said. “We are asking for our local agencies our local government officials, to also participate and help us in intervening in Elmer’s case by calling Mark Meadows and asking him to intervene and to also call immigration and DHS on Elmer’s behalf.”
“We know that ICE breaks it’s own rules,” he continued, as the agency has “committed to focusing on high priority cases and has created guidelines to indicate who would be low priority and Elmer fits who would be in those low criteria. He has a partner who is nursing, he is the father of a two-month old U.S. citizen son, who he is financially supporting. He has a younger U.S. citizen sibling who he is supporting as well. He entered the U.S. as an adolescent and he is fearful of his life if forced to return to his home country.”
The efforts to free Reynoso has a petition and a funding drive to help support his family.
The assembled representatives of the groups there, Hinojosa said, to assert that “this activity needs to stop, it’s harming the community at large, it’s bringing fear back to our members and it’s breaking families apart.”
“We don’t know if he’ll come home or be sent back,” Aguilar said, speaking through an interpreter. “They don’t understand how they’ve broken our hearts.”
“Who among us here is not an immigrant themselves? If not you, one of your family members from the past,” Greg Wilson, of the Circle of Mercy congregation, said. “You came here, you fled persecution and to make your family’s life better. I don’t understand why our government and our elected officials profess a belief in family values and they’re here separating a U.S. citizen from his father who’s their primary means of support.”
“Elmer poses no threat and is providing for his family,” Wilson continued.
“He found a way to look for a better life, to come here and to take care of and to be with me,” Aura Reynoso-Ramos, Elmer Reynoso’s mother, said. “I don’t want him to suffer. I really need him to be taken out of detention and to come home. His younger brothers are also so sad about what’s happening.”
“He’s not done anything wrong, he’s just working hard for a better life,” she continued.
“Elmer’s compelling story highlights all that is wrong with our current immigration system,” Amanda Hendler-Voss, co-pastor of Land of Sky United Church of Christ, said. “Under very few circumstnaces wuld a 16-year-old boy choose to flee his homeland and make a harrowing journey to a country far away. Yet youth make this trip every single day because they have no other hope.”
“Like many immigrants Elmer did not fully understand our complex immigration system, which I’m not sure I fully understand myself,” she continued. “Splitting this family apart is not only traumatic, it actually harms the wider community of Western North Carolina. It spread the fear that prevents the Latino community from civic engagement.”
The results could be seen, she added, in the lack of Latino Council and commission members, and the result was “an entire community that is woven into the fabric of our lives here in WNC is rendered silent and pushed to the edges because of fear of ICE,” often for simple mis-steps in the process rather than any actual offense.
“These kinds of arrests fuel the anti-immigrant sentiment in our own community, with high school students mimicking the one-dimensional bigotry they are seeing in the Presidential campaign,” she continued. “It’s a broken system, we all know it.”
Reynoso was, at the point, held in a detention center in Ocilla, Ga. could face deportation as soon as tomorrow, June 22, Nuestro Centro volunteer Julie Wilson said, and encouraged locals to call their elected officials, whom she called on to intervene.
“Our community needs you, we need you to be our voice,” she said.
“We want liberation, not deportation, because people come to this country looking for a better life,” Hinojosa concluded. “People need to step up in local offices, they need to start listening to their constituents.”
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