Home at last Houston father resettles into life seized from him after deportation

Home at last Houston father resettles into life seized from him after deportation

Published July 25, 2019

Walter Escobar’s face fell when his father chose a pair of Skechers from the back-to-school rack at Pearland’s JCPenney and held them out to his 9-year-old son.

His mother, Rose, squeezed Walter’s arm.

“Walter doesn’t like those anymore,” she gently told her husband, Jose Escobar. “Let’s look at these other sneakers.”

Jose’s surprise deportation more than 2½ years ago had seemed to press pause on their life as the family struggled to hold on. So when Walter eventually told his mother that boys on the bus taunted him over his once-beloved light-up shoes, Rose felt as if she had been struck.

She had been so focused on surviving that she had not registered how much had changed. Walter was no longer the small first-grader who loved the Minions and stood by her side in tears after immigration authorities detained Jose on that February afternoon in 2017.

Now her baby was a lanky, video game-obsessed third-grader, Rose’s “man of the house” who helped discipline 4-year-old Carmen and never let his mother see him cry. Carmen, who was a chubby toddler in diapers when federal agents hauled Jose away, had hair down to her waist and was learning the alphabet.

Jose had missed more than half of Carmen’s life and Walter had long since abandoned cartoons, but suddenly their 33-year-old father was back in Houston.

“I feel as if I’m still in a dream,” he said.

After years of sluggish bureaucracy offered little hope, the government last month agreed, in what came as a welcome shock, to grant Jose a waiver for his deportation and decades of unlawful presence here. Officials approved him for a visa as the spouse of an American and put him on track for a green card — a paperwork process that he could have completed in the United States had President Donald Trump’s administration allowed it.

Instead, immigration officers split up the family in one of the first high-profile arrests after Trump’s sweeping executive orders made everyone here illegally a priority for deportation. The president, who promised to end illegal immigration, and his supporters say such steps send a message that the United States no longer will tolerate it. His administration has since tried to limit many forms of migration, including ways of coming here legally.

The widespread campaign swept up people like Jose. It did not matter that President Barack Obama’s administration had given the father a reprieve from deportation as long as he committed no crimes and checked in every year. It did not matter that Jose once held a legal status he lost through his mother’s paperwork error or that he had an American wife and two U.S. citizen children.

“The rules have changed,” the federal agents told him. “Your time is up.”

They put him on a plane to El Salvador, a country he hadn’t seen since he was 13. Jose was still in his work uniform and had only $20 in his pocket.

He’d missed so much

Now, in what still seemed to him a miracle, he was finally back in Houston, though he had missed so much. He did not know, for instance, the significance of the Skechers — how, after Walter told Rose about the bullying over his baby shoes on the bus, she somehow scraped together extra money to buy Walter a pair of “big boy” Skechers on sale.

Without Jose’s $70,000 annual salary as a supervisor at a construction company, finances were tight. Rose, a receptionist at Texas Children’s Hospital, was barely making the mortgage for their split-level house in Pearland, which the middle school sweethearts had long ago decorated with stenciled quotations celebrating their love.

For Walter, the jeers worsened with his new Skechers. Now the boys mocked Walter for being too poor to afford cool shoes like Nike or Adidas. Walter tried to shrug it off.

“It’s none of your business,” he said, trying to sound tough.

Eventually an aunt gave him a pair of Nike shoes for Christmas and the Skechers were shelved. It’s one of many moments Jose didn’t know about.

“There’s a lot of stuff I never shared with him because I didn’t want him to worry,” Rose said. “All you can do over there is think.”

In their bedroom, Rose still has the calendar set to June, having checked off all the days until they would fly to El Salvador that month for summer vacation. Their life was a seesaw of waiting to see Jose, then visits that always slipped by too fast.

For Jose, time dragged on in the faded old port town of La Union where he lived with an elderly aunt, the long, sweltering days punctuated only by texts and video calls with Rose and the children.

He avoided going outside because he feared being targeted by factions of the country’s two ruthless gangs. Once, gang members pulled him from a bus and searched him. They accused him of belonging to a rival group. He worried they would extort money from him after finding out he had family in the United States.

Repeats of ‘Friends’

Not wanting to scare Rose, he never told her about it, barricading himself in his aunt’s house, where there was not much to do but watch the entire series of “Friends” on repeat. The few jobs in town paid so little that it wasn’t worth the risk of catching the wrong person’s attention and starting any trouble.

The family became used to always being on a screen. Jose would virtually eat dinner with them and try to help with homework from afar. Rose fell asleep with the computer in her bed, Carmen and Walter snuggling up behind her. After Jose left, the children no longer wanted to sleep alone.

There were other changes. Carmen stopped talking for a while, and when she spoke, she stuttered. At school, Walter’s counselor said he was struggling. Rose’s thick, dark hair fell out in clumps, and her mother moved in so Rose could pick up extra shifts to pay the bills.

There were moments when Rose didn’t think she could make it. One day, after weeks of nonstop news conferences and meetings with lawmakers in Washington D.C., she broke down at home. Walter was acting up, and she had to tell him that she could no longer afford his karate class. She took him to their favorite Mexican restaurant, where they always dined with Jose as a family, and burst into tears.

“I realized I wasn’t coping,” she said. “I was trying to do things like we used to do them when he was still here.”

That night, she went into Jose’s closet, nestling among his clothes to remember his scent. Then she packed them away into boxes.

“It was too hard to see them all the time,” she said.

Often, Jose left her late-night messages in which she could tell he had been crying.

“If I had never talked to you that day,” he said once, reminiscing about meeting her almost two decades ago in the eighth grade, “maybe you’d be happy with another man.”

They did not know how much longer they could hold on. Then, last month, while the family was visiting in El Salvador, Jose’s attorney, Raed Gonzalez, called out of the blue.

Friends of Jose Escobar and his family arrive with food to welcome Escobar home. Friends of Jose Escobar and his family arrive with food to welcome Escobar home. Photo: Marie D. De Jesús/Staff Photographer Photo: Marie D. De Jesús/Staff Photographer Image 1 of / 5 Caption Close Home at last, Houston father resettles into life seized from him after deportation 1 / 5 Back to Gallery

‘Welcome home, Mr. Escobar’

“Are you sitting down?” he asked. “Your waivers have been approved.”

U.S. Rep. Al Green, a Houston Democrat, helped to expedite Jose’s spousal visa at the U.S. Embassy and flew to San Salvador to accompany the family home.

But none of it felt certain until they touched down in Houston on July 1.

“Welcome home, Mr. Escobar,” Customs and Border Protection officers told him. “We have to talk to you in private.”

Jose went pale. Rose stiffened. Walter inhaled sharply, and Carmen burst into tears. Green bent down to comfort her.

“Princess Carmen,” the congressman said. “I’m here to make sure your daddy’s coming home with you.”

After several minutes of officers inspecting his documents, Jose walked out of the federal screening room.

“You’re good to go,” one said.

That’s when it sank in.

“I realized we’re not living in fear anymore,” Rose said. “He’s welcome in this country. No one’s coming to knock on our door anymore.”

For as long as they had been a family, they had lived with an undercurrent of anxiety as Jose’s immigration battle spanned the terms of three U.S. presidents and seemed to encapsulate the punitive, and sometimes illogical, side of the nation’s immigration system.

“It was always something that was just spinning around in the back of my head,” Jose said.

He came to Houston when he was 13 to join his mother, qualifying for a temporary protected status for people fleeing widespread disasters in certain countries such as El Salvador. His mother thought his permit would automatically renew when she reapplied for hers, but it did not. The family moved, and he didn’t receive the notice that it had been revoked.

By the time Jose figured it out, it was too late. The government had begun deportation proceedings. His lawyer at the time wrongly advised him not to show up at the court hearing, and in his absence, a judge ordered him deported in 2006.

He saw more lawyers, but few had answers, or they said he would have to return to El Salvador and wait out the process there. It could take more than a decade. By then, he and Rose were married and Walter had been born. Jose was the breadwinner.

After return, a blur

Life went on until June 2011, when immigration agents suddenly stopped Jose as he pulled out of his driveway to go to work. He threw his house keys onto the lawn so Rose could grab them later.

She didn’t give up, rallying widespread media and congressional attention. In 2012, after Jose had spent seven months in detention, Obama’s government agreed to release him on an order of supervision. He could work here legally for now as long as he met certain conditions, part of a wave of reprieves Obama granted during his second term to focus on deporting dangerous criminals.

Jose did as he was told. As if he was a felon, he could not leave the state. Carmen was born. Then in 2017, Jose showed up for his routine check-in and immigration officers put him in shackles.

Now, he is free.

“I still don’t know how I really feel about it all,” Jose said. “It’s all been so much.”

For days after his homecoming, it was a blur. There were television interviews and conversations on NPR and celebratory events with Green, U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, another Houston Democrat who worked on Jose’s case, and FIEL Houston, an immigrant advocacy group instrumental in supporting Rose. There was a family barbecue on the Fourth of July, when Jose for the first time waved the American flag as a soon-to-be U.S. citizen.

They have had to settle into each other again. Rose moved Carmen and Walter out of her bed and into their rooms, though Carmen often still sleeps with her parents. Rose unboxed Jose’s clothes. He fixed his truck and a faucet that had been dripping into a closet, causing mold to grow. He got his old job back, though in a new, supervisory role, he will have more flexibility over his schedule.

“I told my boss I want to spend more time with my family,” he said.

Rose still sits at the head of the table, where he used to be. She recently bolted awake to take out the garbage on trash day, which he always did. She’s still running around frantically in what he jokingly calls “Bring Jose back mode,” while he seems a little distant, a bit removed.

“We’ve all had to adjust because we haven’t been under the same roof for so long,” Rose said.

Every day is a little easier. Recently, Jose and Rose both worked late, so she ordered pizza and they all ate it together in the living room. Walter put on “Mary Poppins Returns.” Then he and Carmen jumped on Jose’s shoulders, giggling hysterically as he carried them upstairs to brush their teeth.

Rose led their prayers.

“Thank you that we are together again as a family now,” she said. “Ease the pain of everyone who has to go through what we suffered.”

Carmen clamored for a bedtime game of Uno.

“But you always cry,” Jose teased.

She aced the game. Rose came in second. Walter went to his room to play, and Rose gave Jose a book on Carmen’s pre-kindergarten summer reading list.

“We read one book a night, but you have to encourage her,” she said. “It really feels good that you’re back so you can help deal with all this.”

Jose joked to Carmen that he was going out with some friends instead, grabbing his keys. She started to cry. It took a second before he realized that she thought he was leaving again.

“Mami, don’t worry,” he said, picking her up. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m home now.”

Lomi Kriel is an immigration reporter for the Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter. Send her tips at lomi.kriel@chron.com.

Marie D. De Jesús is a staff photojournalist for the Houston Chronicle where she has concentrated on developing relationships with Houston's diverse immigrant and marginalized communities. Prior to the Chronicle, De Jesús worked for the Democrat and Chronicle located in Rochester, New York and the Victoria Advocate in Texas. Follow her on Instagram and Twitter, or reach her by email at marie.dejesus@chron.com.

Design by Jordan Rubio and Jasmine Goldband

***