Christmas touched down at 4:27 p.m. Saturday. Moments later, Maria Mendoza-Sanchez stepped off a plane from Mexico — a huge gift to her four children, the oncology staff at Highland Hospital in Oakland, and the greater Bay Area that had been rooting for her return.

After an agonizing two hours to clear customs, Mendoza-Sanchez walked into a news conference with all four of her children, carrying two bouquets of flowers and wearing a smart navy blue skirt suit with black patent-leather high heels.

“Thank you all for being here this afternoon,” she said. “I am very happy to be here. I am very happy to be back.”

Mendoza-Sanchez, 47, an undocumented immigrant who had been deported from Oakland in 2017, splitting her family in two and disrupting everything she had achieved in her career as a caregiver, was home — this time for at least a few years. A work visa she had been fighting for since 2002 had finally been approved by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and she came back to America to a hero’s welcome.

Her four children, three of them American-born, arrived early to be reunited with their mother. Left behind in Mexico was Mendoza-Sanchez’s husband and father of her children, Eusebio Sanchez, who had also been deported.

As she spoke, Mendoza-Sanchez dabbed tears from her eyes. Her children stood off to the side, with daughter Melin, 22, holding a handmade sign with hearts on it reading, “We Love You Mom.”

“I’ve met so many people who tell me that my mom is an amazing woman,” said daughter Vianney, 24, also tearing up. As the eldest, she had been the surrogate parent in the household, and as such, “I made sure I was the first one to get the hug,” she said.

Mendoza-Sanchez would still be in Mexico with her husband but for one piece of good luck in her long ordeal. Her name was one of 65,000 selected in a visa lottery. Because she had originally entered the country illegally, she was still ineligible for a visa through normal channels. So she applied for a waiver available only to skilled workers, based on her nursing degree and her job helping treat cancer patients at Highland, a public hospital operated by Alameda County.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services denied her appeal for a waiver. So she took her case to the State Department’s consular office in Mexico City. The State Department granted her appeal for a waiver, and Immigration services relented, granting her a three-year H-1B work visa in November, with the possibility of a three-year extension.

Her visa is sponsored by her employer, Alameda Health Services. She will get her job back. The timing has not been determined, but Mendoza-Sanchez would probably be good to go tomorrow.

“Being a nurse is not a job for me,” she said. “It’s a privilege.”

It had been a fight to get that privilege back, nine months in the appeal process alone. Asked whether she would give any advice to other deportees, Mendoza-Sanchez answered, “Don’t give up hope until you’ve exhausted the very, very last resorts you can find somewhere. Explore every single possibility.”

Mendoza-Sanchez’s case attracted a great deal of attention — including the vocal support of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.; Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland; and Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf — because it embodied the perceived cruelty of President Trump’s war on immigration.

Her story began in Santa Monica, a small Mexican village where she grew up two hours north of Mexico City. Life was harsh and she left home at age 14, first going to Mexico City, then Tijuana. Eventually, she hiked through the border-crossing hills near San Diego and made her way to Oakland to join an old friend from her village, Sanchez — her future husband.

Mendoza-Sanchez started out selling fruit and cleaning homes but fulfilled her goal of getting an education, first at City College of San Francisco, then in the nursing program at Holy Names University in Oakland. Along the way came three daughters, Vianney, born in Mexico, and Melin and Elizabeth, followed by a son, Jesus, all born in the United States.

Sanchez found work driving trucks as his wife took a job cleaning a nursing home, then moved up to administrative assistant and on her way to the career she had dreamed of. What she gave up in return was sleep, averaging about two hours a day or a night, whenever she could grab it.

When she landed a six-figure job as an oncology nurse at Highland Hospital in Oakland in 2015, Mendoza-Sanchez seemed to have everything working for her except the one thing she needed the most — citizenship.

She had work permits and had applied for legal status starting in 2002. Ten years later, an immigrant judge ordered both Mendoza-Sanchez and her husband deported, but under the Obama administration she was allowed to stay, provided her work permit was renewed every six months.

That all changed with the election of Trump, who had made border tightening a major facet of his campaign. He signed an executive order calling for deportations, and that caught up to the Sanchez family in May 2017.

They were given three months to arrange their departure. The Chronicle picked up the story, and Feinstein tried to intervene, calling it “a travesty” that Mendoza-Sanchez would be deported. Nothing worked, and in August 2017, Mendoza-Sanchez and her husband, along with their son Jesus, 12, boarded a red-eye flight for Mexico City.

At the security checkpoint back then, Mendoza-Sanchez hugged each of her daughters one last time and told them she would see them “very soon.” That turned out to be overly optimistic.

“When I left the airport, I’m glad that I didn’t turn around when I said goodbye to my kids,” she recalled at her homecoming Saturday. “I think if I had turned around and seen that much pain, I wouldn’t have been able to leave.”

Now that she was back, her eldest child, Viannney, summed up the 16-month separation from the family’s point of view.

“This was the best Christmas present I’ve ever gotten,” she said. “I don’t need anything else.”

Megan Cassidy and Sam Whiting are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: swhiting@sfchronicle.com, megan.cassidy@sfchronicle.com. Twitter: @meganrcassidy, @SamWhitingSF Instagram: @sfchronicle_art