On May 30, 2012, at 10 PM I was awakened and told to dress. Seventy-two of us were chained and shackled again and put onto another plane. When we landed, we were told we were near Kingston, Jamaica, and the officers gave each of us a phone card. Most of the men were able to arrange to have family members pick them up. Six of us were stranded. I knew no one in Jamaica—I hadn’t been there in more than 20 years, and my whole family now lived in the United States. I didn’t have any money or even a change of clothes. I’d lost 40 pounds while in detention, and the jeans and thermal shirt I was wearing when I was taken from my house were practically falling off me.

I called my mother back in Virginia and stood outside for about 12 hours while she called distant cousins I didn’t even know. Eventually a friend of a cousin came to pick me up, bought me a soda and a chicken sandwich and took me to his house a couple hours outside the city.

That’s how I came to find myself back in rural Jamaica at age 41, having never visited since leaving as a boy of 17. It’s a very tough place—there are no jobs, and crime and poverty are rampant. There are murders every day. People who are deported back here are stigmatized—seen as criminals who must have committed some heinous crime in order to be sent back—and often become the targets of violence. We’re seen as disposable and worthless, not entitled to anything, not even a job. So I have to keep quiet about my circumstances as I scramble to make a living, desperate to find a way home.

Meanwhile, my family is falling apart. Judith couldn’t run the trucking business, and so it has died. We lost our house through foreclosure, and she has lost hope. We’re no longer in touch and she’s made it clear she has to move on with her life without me. She’s told me how lonely she is and that she needs help that I can no longer provide.

My son and daughter, who were good and enthusiastic students when we were a family together, are now struggling in school. Demique was caught stealing a cell phone; he’d asked me for one and I couldn’t afford it, but I can see how it would be hard for a teenager not to have a cell phone in this day and age. When Jada, who’s 16 now, and I talk on the phone, she tells me how hard her life has become—she wants to go on school trips and be in the cheerleading squad, but we just don’t have the money. My best memories of my family are the road trips we would take together. Jada says she cries when she hears songs that we’d listen to on the road; I do, too.

Before I was detained, I’d started teaching Demique to drive in a vacant parking lot near our house. He was eager and attentive, and I was excited too, because my son was growing into a wonderful young man. “You’re the one who will be driving me around soon,” I’d tell him. I promised to give him his first car once he finished high school, and now I’ve broken that promise.

I can do nothing to help them. And that makes me want to die.

It’s still so hard for me to understand how I wound up here. I served in the United States Navy with pride and honor; I am a husband and father; I was a business owner and a homeowner. I made a mistake, but that was 19 years ago and I never made another. In a country where marijuana laws are changing every day, where marijuana is now legal in two states, how could my one accidental encounter with someone else’s drug deal have destroyed my family?

I don’t know if any politicians will read this. I hear them talk about America’s duty to our veterans and about the need for a “humane” immigration system and about family values. Then I see them pass laws that tear families like mine apart and force people to lose their humanity. I’ve met judges and immigration officials who said that they wanted to help. I believe they felt compassion for me. But all of them said their hands were tied by Congress’s mandatory detention and deportation laws and the Obama administration’s enforcement “priorities.”

President Obama has said that the U.S. is prioritizing deportations of “criminals, gang bangers, people who are hurting the community” and not going after “folks who are here just because they’re trying to figure out how to feed their families.” But I’ve never been a danger to my community, and I’ve never wanted anything more than to be a good father and provider. And by prioritizing so-called criminals the government is failing to consider anything else about our lives before automatically banishing us from our homes.

My story is one of at least 2 million under this presidency alone. I think we deserve at least a chance to ask a judge to let us stay with our families in the country we call home.