American exilesby digby
Tragically, there are probably going to be a lot more of them. It’s shameful that the government is wasting time and money on this:
Standing outside his new home sloped on a bumpy street, Jorge Garcia turns his head and gazes down the block of a working-class city about an hour west of Mexico City.
Roving vendors hawk everything from tamales to gasoline, yelling out the names of their products. A few houses down, a rooster crows. His new neighbors glance at him warily.
“I feel like I’m lost,” Garcia says, his eyes taking in the valley and hills of the city of Nicolás Romero on a Friday morning in January. “I don’t fit in here, at all.”
Two weeks earlier, Garcia was deported from Michigan to Mexico after living in the U.S. for 30 years, forced to leave behind his family, friends, and a solid job in landscaping. Now, the married father of two finds himself alone in an unfamiliar country, with an uncertain future.
“Since I’ve got here, I haven’t had a good night’s sleep,” he explains, fingers fidgeting with each other as he speaks. “It’s like my body wants to rest, but I’m not able to with all this thought I’ve got on my mind and the stress. … During the night, out of nowhere in my sleep, I start thinking about the whole situation and I lose my sleep.”
Garcia recites a Hail Mary and the Lord’s Prayer every night before bed, but it’s not enough to calm him down.
“I just keep tossing and turning. Tossing and turning.”
After the Free Press reported on his deportation on Jan. 15, Garcia became a symbol for immigrant advocates who say his removal is an example of the government’s overzealous crackdown on illegal immigrants. He was only 10 years old when an aunt brought him to the U.S. without authorization. Now 39, he had lived his entire adult life in the U.S. before his removal.
Super low unemployment. This man has no criminal record. He’s got a family of Americans. What, other than plain old bigotry can possibly justify this?