Fearing deportation, one San Jose family looks to Canada

Update, March 31: Fernando Carrillo is to be released from detention, and he’ll be allowed to remain in the U.S. under a withholding of removal order.

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SAN JOSE — If her husband is deported, Lourdes Barraza is set on moving the entire family — to Canada. She can’t bear the thought of moving their girls to his native Mexico, a place she fears.

With a judge’s decision imminent on her husband Fernando Carrillo’s immigration case, Barraza wonders if she and her three daughters, all U.S. citizens, will have to leave the only country they’ve known to be with him.

But would Canada accept them?

The family is part of a wave of people — concerned about an uncertain future in the U.S. under the Trump administration’s hardline immigration policy — who are looking for refuge in other countries, especially Canada, flooding its border in staggering numbers with the hope of starting fresh.

But Canadian immigration officials — overwhelmed by the need for resources and an unprecedented backlog of asylum requests — are pumping the brakes and in recent months have warned people to think twice before rushing to cross the northern border.

“There’s no way I could take my daughters to Mexico,” said Barraza, 37, whose husband was arrested by immigration officers in October after dropping off one of their daughters at her San Jose daycare. “If it was just me and Fernando, we could go and start anywhere. But we’re talking about taking our kids out of the country that they were born in and that they’ve known. That’s my anxiety more than anything as a mother.”

So Barraza is prepared to leave San Jose and apply for permanent residency in Victoria, British Columbia, a place they only know through online searches as a safe, picturesque, affordable city with good schools on Canada’s Pacific coast.

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In 2017, Canadian officials processed a total of 50,400 asylum claims, compared with 24,000 claims in 2016 and 16,100 in 2015, according to data from the Canadian government. By February of this year, officials had processed nearly 8,000 claims.

“It’s a massive increase of individuals seeking asylum in Canada since the start of Trump’s administration,” said Sarah Pierce, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think-tank in Washington, D.C.. “It’s a lot more about the rhetoric of the (Trump) administration than it is about its policy.”

Still, getting asylum in Canada is far from a guarantee, Pierce said.

People fleeing war and persecution in their home countries often look for safe haven in the U.S. and Canada and file for asylum. The Canadian government grants this protection to people who would be in significant danger — of torture or murder, for example — if they had to return home. But proving that is difficult, especially for Mexicans, who can’t always show they’re in grave danger if they return to Mexico.

Barraza said she doesn’t want her daughters exposed to corruption and violence in Mexico, which experienced a record high murder rate in 2017. But the family isn’t seeking asylum in Canada, just a chance to apply for permanent residency. In that case, potential immigrants must show they have certain professional skills that would make them assets to Canada’s economy, according to Rudolf Kischer, an immigration lawyer in Vancouver.

Carrillo — a cable TV installer with a drunken-driving conviction and prior deportations on his record — complicates things, he said, because Canada generally isn’t welcoming of people who were in the U.S. illegally.

Most U.S. expats who file asylum claims or who apply for residency in Canada face an uphill battle. “The unfortunate thing is I think a lot of those people are misinformed,” Kischer said.

Carrillo, who’s lived in the U.S. illegally for nearly 15 years, is detained at the West County Detention Center in Richmond, where he awaits his fate. He and Barraza married in 2012 after the birth of two of their children in the U.S., but he has run into trouble with immigration authorities repeatedly after he had tried to enter the country on a tourist visa years before with a one-way ticket.

For now, the family remains in limbo, scraping to get by without him and anxiously wondering, will they stay or will they go?

“Even though we’re anxious to know, obviously there’s that fear that it’s not going to be the answer that we want or that we know we deserve,” Barraza said.

A spokesman with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said Carrillo has been deported to Mexico three times since 2003. On one occasion, Carrillo was caught attempting to cross the border to get to his family with fraudulent identification. If Judge Joseph Park rules against him, he’d be deported to Mexico and the family would then have to make arrangements to move to Canada.

Carrillo’s case has received significant attention over the past several months — with hundreds of community members rallying on his behalf — making him the latest paradigm of the country’s polarizing immigration debate. Those who favor stricter immigration enforcement say Carrillo is exactly the kind of person who should be deported under the Trump administration, while advocates argue that hardworking immigrants like Carrillo often get caught up in the country’s deportation machine over small crimes.

“ICE focuses its enforcement resources on individuals who pose a threat to national security, public safety and border security,” the agency said in a statement. “However, as ICE leadership has made clear, ICE will not exempt classes or categories of removable aliens from potential enforcement.”

Barraza said her husband’s detainment has taken a toll on her daughters, ages 4, 11 and 15. She’s taken up graveyard shifts at the Santa Cruz County Probation Department’s juvenile hall so she can take care of her 4-year-old daughter, Ana, who begs not to go back to the daycare, near where ICE agents arrested her father after following him from home. Overwhelmed with depression and anxiety, the couple’s 15-year-old daughter, Isabella, left school and enrolled in a home-study program.

Barraza acknowledges her husband’s mistakes and past deportations but asks critics who believe he should be deported to understand that “every situation is different.”

“They don’t know the dangers that exist in these countries,” she said. “If (undocumented immigrants) risk coming here, it’s a necessity.”

The Trump administration has doubled down on detaining and deporting undocumented immigrants, causing many families to come up with emergency plans — including leaving the country. While families like Barraza’s dream about starting over in Canada, they are learning the welcome mat at the northern border may be much more difficult to reach then they imagined.

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Opinion: Christians must fight Trump attempt to monopolize faith Of course, they’d prefer to stay home in San Jose, Barraza said, but realize Canada “would be an opportunity to start new.”

What her husband really wants, Barraza said, is a place where he’s able to “live without fear.”

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