Jeff Burlew

Democrat senior writer

Rudy Blanco was only eight years old when he left his home in Cuba, stealing away on his grandfather’s shrimping boat with his parents and sister during the Mariel boat lift in 1980.

They landed in Key West, then headed to Miami, where his grandfather and uncles lived. His parents made lobster traps for his grandfather’s fishing business, all the while saving enough money to eventually strike out on their own.

For a couple of weeks, they lived out of a Gremlin hatchback they’d bought. Eventually, they settled in the small Upper Keys town of Tavernier. His parents worked long hours to put food on the table. Rudy started working when he was old enough at a Marlin food store.

When he was 20, he met Shelly Ferguson, a pretty girl from Perry who went to the Keys from time to time to visit her mom. They would go on to get married, have two children, start their own businesses and build a life together in her hometown in North Florida.

But now, Blanco, 44, is in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, sitting in a detention pod in Crawfordville and awaiting deportation back to Cuba. With no forewarning, Blanco, who had a scrape with the law 20 years ago, was taken into custody May 9 after going for his annual check-in with ICE in Tallahassee.

He faces an uncertain and potentially stark future as one of the hundreds if not thousands of immigrants who have been rounded up and taken into custody since President Donald Trump took office. Blanco and his wife, both Trump supporters, fear their business, their lives, their family itself could fall apart in the meantime.

“We’re distraught,” Blanco said in a telephone interview with the Tallahassee Democrat. “And I just don’t understand why they have to put a hard working guy behind bars for something they could get worked out before they start ripping families apart.”

Twenty years ago, Blanco, who had his own landscaping business, saw a chance to make extra cash and sold cocaine for a short time. He got busted in Tavernier and was charged with possession with intent to sell. But he pleaded to a lesser charge, adjudication was withheld and he successfully completed a year of probation.

In 2005, when he was trying to become a United States citizen, an immigration judge ordered him deported because of the felony conviction. But he was allowed to remain in the U.S. so long as he checked in periodically.

Cuba wasn’t accepting U.S. deportees at the time, but it is now following President Barack Obama’s decision to end preferential treatment of Cuban arrivals during his last term. According to government reports out of Cuba, the island nation has accepted hundreds of deportees since the policy change earlier this year.

ICE officials say the agency intends to send Blanco back to Cuba because of the previous felony conviction and deportation order.

“After full due process, Mr. Blanco received a Feb. 3, 2005, final order of removal from an immigration judge with the Executive Office for Immigration Review,” said Tammy Spicer, a spokeswoman for ICE. “He was arrested May 9, 2017, by (ICE) and ICE intends to remove Mr. Blanco in compliance with the court’s order.”

Gisela Rodriguez, an immigration attorney in Tallahassee representing Blanco, said it’s unclear whether Blanco actually will be sent to Cuba, a communist country known for its harsh treatment of deportees. She said in the past, the U.S. deported mostly hardened criminals, allowing people like Blanco to stay.

“Now, because the immigration enforcement is so strict, we’re not making a distinction between violent crimes and people who really deserve to be deported and the people who really have demonstrated a total rehabilitation,” she said. “It just doesn’t make sense. The good citizen part of the story, it just seems like it doesn’t matter.”

With Blanco in limbo, his wife and children are doing everything they can to keep themselves and his home remodeling business going. Their daughter Hannah, who serves in the U.S. Coast Guard out of Guam, returned home to help. Their son Noah, who graduated high school last year, has stepped away from his welding job to stand in for his dad at work.

“My children pick me up and hold me and say, 'Mom, I got you, it’s going to be OK, it’s my turn to take care of you now,'” Shelly Blanco said. “I don’t know how to function without him. He is my reasoning. He is my voice. He is my everything.”

Young love

Shelly Blanco caught her first glimpse of Rudy during a childhood visit to Tavernier when she was in the sixth grade and he was in the eighth. He was working at the Marlin store, where she’d stop in from time to time.

“I saw his face,” she recalled. “And I developed a little crush.”

Years later, during a trip down her senior year of high school, she confided in her mom she wanted to go out with him at least once before she went off to the Army, something she planned after graduation. They went to a Marlins baseball game in Miami, then hung out together at a pool hall in Tavernier. Blanco, confident and quick with a funny aside, began to woo her.

“That’s when he told me some of his corny jokes,” she said. “And then he asked me out.”

They went on their first date a few days later on Aug. 28, 1993, dining on the water at a restaurant in Key Largo. The food was awful — they fed it to the fish — but the date was magic.

“We clicked,” she said. “I was supposed to leave that following day to come back to Perry. And he asked me that night please don’t go. See if you can stay.”

She stayed a little longer and showed her dad a picture of the two of them together once she returned.

“And I said this is the man I’m going to marry,” she said.

A couple of days later, the phone rang. It was Blanco, who’d driven up from the Keys and wanted directions to her house. She introduced him to the family, and they got acquainted over a big breakfast. Afterward, he asked her where her suitcase was.

“He went into my room, pulled out my suitcase and starting putting clothes in,” she said. “And he said you’re coming back with me. And I said OK.”

Past returns to haunt

They got their own place in early 1994 in Tavernier, across the street from a McDonald’s, and married the following year. Blanco started a landscaping business while his wife taught at a Montessori school.

A few years went by before he’d make the mistake of his life, opting to sell cocaine to make a little extra cash on the side. But he avoided a prison sentence and finished probation without any problems.

“It was very hard on our marriage,” his wife said. “We got through it. And we decided to put your big boy pants on and we can make a living a lot easier with the honest dollar, and we can have more. And we did.”

In the early 2000s, they began making plans to move to Perry, where they’d put the past behind them. Blanco began working toward becoming a full-fledged American citizen, eventually passing his citizenship test.

During a meeting with an immigration clerk in Miami, he was told his case had a red flag because of the cocaine charge. The clerk said it was possible he could be deported. But the clerk also noted Cuba wasn’t taking deportees from America and urged him not to worry. The clerk said he should expect a letter in the mail with details on his naturalization ceremony.

Six weeks later, a letter arrived in their mailbox in Perry. Shelly Blanco opened it, expecting to get details on her husband’s ceremony. But her heart sank as she read the letter. Her husband was being deported.

“It said bring 44 pounds of clothing and report to Bradenton detention center to get on a flight to Cuba,” she said.

Deportation avoided

The Blancos hired an attorney and went to immigration court, but the deportation order stood. The judge told him he was not a citizen, he had no rights, the laws were the laws and there was nothing he could do to help, his wife recalled.

But Blanco was allowed to remain in Florida under supervision. He checked in weekly at first, then reported monthly in Tampa and later in Jacksonville. More recently, he was allowed to check in just once a year in Tallahassee.

“They have been very gracious, ICE,” Shelly Blanco said. “Because they could have detained him back then and held him indefinitely.”

Life returned to normal for the family, who figured Blanco was safe when he wasn’t removed after the 2005 deportation order.

“We were soccer parents and baseball parents and football parents,” she said. “If you have little children, you know there are games every night. And when you have two, you are tag-teaming and trying to get to all of them and never missing one.”

Blanco worked for his wife’s father’s residential construction company. He learned the business before starting his own, Rudy Blanco Home Source. The Blancos built their own home, moved Rudy’s parents up from the Keys and built them a house on two acres next door.

Their home was filled with love and laughter. Blanco built a half pipe for the kids to skateboard and an outdoor game room for parties and movies. There was a swimming pool and a backyard filled with animals, from cows and goats to pigs and emus.

“They’ve been the best role models for everything,” their daughter Hanna Blanco said. “(They taught us) that everything you get, you work hard for. Nothing is handed to you in this world.”

'This is from D.C.'

When Rudy and Shelly Blanco made the hour drive east to Tallahassee for this year's ICE check-in, they figured they’d be in and out quickly. He had to get back to a job site. She was planning a Mother’s Day outing with a friend.

But she knew something terrible was happening as she watched her husband interact with ICE officers through an interior window. Blanco, who normally stands proud with his shoulders back, deflated before her eyes.

Officers led him away down a hallway. An ICE officer took her into another room to deliver the bad news. Her husband was being detained and deported, on orders from Washington. She collapsed to the floor crying but summoned her strength, got up and asked what she had to do to get her husband back.

“I kept asking why is he being detained?” she said. “Why? He hasn’t done anything wrong. And (the ICE officer) kept saying 'this is from D.C., this is from D.C.' And that’s all they’re telling us.”

Rudy was taken to an ICE detention center in the Wakulla County Jail later that day.

“They didn’t let me kiss him goodbye that morning or touch him,” she said. “I haven’t touched him (since). And it hurts so bad.”

Nightmares every night

The Blancos can’t visit in person. But he’s allowed four hours a week of visitation through a video conferencing system inside a small portable building next to the jail. Blanco, who can make outgoing phone calls but can’t take incoming ones, talks with his wife two or three times a day.

He told her during a recent visit he was trying to stay productive. He’s been teaching Haitians in his pod how to properly pronounce words in English and helping a Turkish man learn the language. He reads and tries to stay busy.

“You have to or you’d go insane in here,” he said in the telephone interview. “There are so many hours in the day you can just stare at the walls.”

He gets three meals a day, often pasta floating in a soupy sauce. Every once in a while, it comes with a bit of cut up hot dogs or hamburger. A few times a week, he gets spend about 45 minutes outside for fresh air.

“It’s supposed to be a detention center,” he said. “But it’s no different than prison. It’s like they stuck you in a hole and threw away the key.”

He’s a mess emotionally, he said. He breaks into tears when he talks to his wife and children.

“I can barely sleep,” he said. “I have nightmares every night. I keep dreaming that I’m still at the house, taking care of what needs to be taken care of. When I open my eyes, it’s very disheartening.”

'Wherever home is'

The family worried about some of Trump’s immigration proposals during last year’s campaign. But they supported him for the same reasons many others did: he was the lesser of two evils, an apparent non-politician who espoused pro-business beliefs.

They figured under Trump, Blanco and his immigration situation might actually improve. They believed at the time the new administration would weigh immigration cases on an individual basis.

“Nobody expected ICE to just go out and start picking people up,” Blanco said.

The family still supports Trump. They put some blame for his predicament on former President Obama and his decision to end the wet foot/dry foot policy that allowed Cubans to stay in the U.S. if they made it to dry land.

The Blancos are doing what they can to prepare for an uncertain future, selling off boats, a four-wheeler and other assets. Shelly Blanco is collecting testimonials from family friends, letters she hopes might convince a judge to allow her husband to stay. Kasey Roberts, an assistant principal at Taylor County Middle School, wrote one such missive.

“Rudy is willing to help anyone and will give you the shirt off his back,” Roberts wrote. “During Hurricane Hermine, he volunteered his time and money helping the victims. He went house to house at our local beach helping residents salvage what they could. You can ask anyone in our community and they will tell you how much this means to us.”

Shelly Blanco also is reaching out to lawmakers in Congress and the Florida Legislature, pleading for help. Last week, she met with Sen. Bill Montford, D-Tallahassee. She said loved ones were setting up a GoFundMe account online.

She applied for an expedited passport in case the worst happens. She's prepared to move to Cuba — or anywhere else for that matter. If her husband were deported to the moon, she'd take a rocket ship to get there, she said.

“My purpose is to do whatever I can to get him back," she said. “Because if I don’t have that, I think I will just fall apart. And wherever home is — as long as we’re together.”

Contact Jeff Burlew at jburlew@tallahassee.com or follow @JeffBurlew on Twitter.

More stories of immigration on the Big Bend: ICE arrest of Apalachicola man fuels fears

American Strangers: Life inside Tallahassee's refugee community

Leon County hasn't made Trump ICE list — yet

Pepper spray used in "disturbance" at Wakulla ICE facility

Leon County inmates accused of murder, assault were ordered deported years ago