Real Change News | Immigrant family fights to keep it together

July 28, 2010
Vol: 17 No: 30

News

Immigrant family fights to keep it together

by: Cydney Gillis , Staff Reporter

The aftermath of being ICE’d

Gena Mejia, center, rescued her son from impending deportation, but her two grandchildren still fear that the authorities could take their father away again.

Photo by: Charles Sweney , Contributing Photographer

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It will be five years ago this August that Gena Mejia drove home from work and found two cars parked outside her home in Monroe. She turned down the drive to her house and the cars followed, blocking her way out.

When she pulled up to the house, men with guns and bulletproof vests told her to leave her keys on the dash and get out of the car. They asked her where her green card was and she said she didn’t have one – she is a naturalized U.S. citizen. Then they told her to prove it.

“They wanted to come inside my house. I said one of you come inside,” Mejia says of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents who confronted her that day. “I thought they would throw me down on the floor and kill me in my own house.”

The men showed her a picture of her son, Ceasar Keymolen, and asked if she knew his whereabouts. Keymolen wasn’t hard to find: A legal resident and working father of two, he lived in another house that Mejia owned in town, so she phoned him and, together, they went down to the Monroe police station.

From there, Mejia’s 30-year-old son was taken to ICE’s Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, where he spent an uncertain six months facing deportation [“A tale of the American gulag,” July 17-24, 2007]. Mejia managed to get him out, but, five years later, the incident still casts a long shadow over all of their lives, she says.

She had to sell the two houses in Monroe at a loss, the family’s savings were wiped out and her son lives with a bitterness that life isn’t fair for some people – a view made worse by a year of unemployment and a foreclosure that he is now facing on a home in Renton.

“My son lost his freedom, his job, medical insurance and trust in the authorities,” Mejia says. “He hasn’t been able to recover.”

The ordeal started in 2004, when Mejia and her husband moved from Bellevue to a house they bought in Monroe. It wasn’t long, she says, before the husband of the couple next door made it plain that he did not want Mexicans for neighbors, calling them names and at one point threatening her husband with a crowbar. Mejia took out a restraining order against him, but her pleas for police to enforce it fell on deaf ears, she says.

To get away from the neighbor, Mejia and her husband bought another house just outside town and let her son move into and pay the mortgage on the first one. While he was detained, he couldn’t pay the mortgage on the house in town, forcing Mejia and her husband to sell it at a loss in December of 2005, just months after Keymolen was taken away.

A law passed after 9/11 allows ICE to deport legal residents who have received a sentence of a year or more for a felony conviction. At the time, Keymolen was serving 365 days of probation on a domestic violence charge. Mejia went back to the judge in the case and got him to reduce the probation to 364 days, thereby removing ICE’s grounds to deport him.

Keymolen was lucky. There are more than 1,100 deportations every day – more than in the last year of the Bush Administration, says Charlie McAteer, a spokesperson for OneAmerica, a Seattle immigrant-rights group. President Obama made a speech July 1 endorsing immigration reform, including a path to citizenship for the nation’s 11 million undocumented residents, but legislation has yet to be introduced.

In the meantime, a new Arizona law would allow that state’s police to make immigration checks – an idea that Mejia says she finds chilling.

It was either the police or the neighbor who got ICE to take her son away, she says. Either way, she says, sheriff’s vehicles followed her and parked outside her home on several occasions during her son’s detention – a harbinger, she says, of what life would be like for Hispanics in Arizona if it prevails over the Obama Administration’s challenge in federal court.
“This thing they want to do in Arizona is exactly what happened to us,” Mejia says. “The local authorities got involved with immigration.”

Unable to fight the harassment, she and her husband sold their second home at a bargain price in 2007, losing roughly $50,000 on the deal. “We lost houses, money, a lot of tears,” Mejia says, “but I won, I kept my family together.”

The question is for how long. After his release in 2006, Keymolen went back to work as a welder, but got laid off a year ago and is now facing foreclosure on a home he shares in Renton with his sister. Mejia got divorced last year and lives in an apartment in Bellevue, but she just lost her job as an electronics inspector and is no longer in a position to help.

“We weren’t rich, but we were secure [and] we didn’t have problems with the law,” Mejia says of life before her son’s detention. Now, she says, her two grandchildren can’t sleep at night unless they’re wrapped in Keymolen’s arms. They still fear, she says, that he could be taken away at any moment.

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