Howard Dean Bailey is represented by the Immigrant Defense Project and can be reached through Alisa Wellek at [email protected].

I often think about Friday dinners with my family. Every Friday, no matter what, my wife and I took our two children out to eat; it was a ritual we looked forward to all week. We would sometimes try new restaurants, but my children’s favorite was the Olive Garden. My daughter loved to order Shirley Temples and my son always wanted whatever I was having, so I’d order two of the same meal for us.

Those memories feel a world away from where I’m living now, in Trelawny, on Jamaica’s north coast. I’m trying to get a start as a pig farmer, but it’s much harder than I expected. It costs about $200 a week to feed the pigs, and there’s a water shortage so I have to walk about a mile each way to get river water for them. My family in the United States sent me $1,500 to get the business started but now I fear I may lose it all.


Just a few years ago, I had a great life in the Tidewater area of Virginia. I had a wonderful wife who is a glass artist, and our two children were thriving. My trucking business was starting to take off. We were hauling goods from Norfolk’s port to distribution centers for Target and Wal-Mart. My wife and I bought our first house and had money in the bank.

I applied to become a U.S. citizen in 2005 and answered all the questions on the application honestly, even admitting to a stupid mistake I’d made years earlier. I passed the written and oral tests and completed the Citizenship and Immigration Services biometrics exam. I waited and waited, and when I called to ask whether there was a problem no one had answers.

( Sign up for Politico Magazine's Friday Cover email)

Then at 6 a.m. on June 10, 2010, I answered loud knocks on our front door in my pajamas. Eleven armed immigration officers supported by state troopers were there with their weapons drawn, some wearing bulletproof vests. They stormed into my living room and put me in handcuffs while my wife came down the stairs, screaming, and my daughter, who was 12 years old, watched in horror. A few minutes later I was in their custody, just partially dressed, heading to the Hampton Regional Jail.

***

Who would have expected things to turn out this way? I was 17 when I came to New York to join my mother, who had left my siblings, my father and me behind near Kingston while she worked to build a better life for us in the United States. She was a legal permanent resident and worked two jobs as a home health aide, saving money so we could join her. My mom left for the United States in 1985 and came back four years later to get me and my brothers. She’d saved enough money and finished all the paperwork so our family could be reunited. Each of us was able to come to the United States legally with a green card.

I entered Boys and Girls High School in Brooklyn. It was a hard adjustment—math and science were so easy for me, but I struggled with history and economics. There were some other Jamaicans at my school, but it was the first time I encountered people from so many different backgrounds. Most of the students were immigrants—from Guatemala, Mexico, St. Kitts, different parts of the Caribbean and Central America. I graduated in the middle of my class, but in math and science I was at the top.

We were chained together like slaves and kept handcuffed and shackled for seven hours before boarding an ICE chartered plane.

Deportation By the Numbers 11.1 million Number of unauthorized immigrants in the U.S 2 million Estimated number of deportations during the Obama administration 34,000 The number of immigrants ICE is supposed to detain at any time 478,000 Total number of immigrants detained in 2012 150,000 Estimated number of U.S. children who had a parent deported in 2012 $2 billion Annual cost to the U.S. of immigration detention

Navy recruiters came to my high school, and I quickly decided I wanted to enlist. It was a way to make my family proud and serve the country I now called home. So I signed up for a pre-entry program while I was still in high school and I worked on an aircraft carrier during the weekends. I graduated in May, and by August I was at boot camp in Chicago. It was hard and even scary at times—to wake us up in the morning, drill sergeants would come into the dorms with large metal trash cans and throw them across the floor. The first time I heard that sound, I was certain my heart would leap out of my chest. One of my dorm mates jumped out of his bunk in shock and broke his arm. Some guys washed out, but I stuck with it and when I finished and came home, I was proud to show off the uniform I had worked so hard to earn.

I was assigned to the big naval base in Norfolk. Our ship was in dry dock when I got there, but before long I was loading food supplies and bombs on board and we were in the water headed to the Middle East to serve in Operation Desert Storm. We spent six months at sea, and then came home for a month before shipping out again for three more months. We were a supply ship—carrying everything from underwear to bombs—backing up destroyers and carriers and other combat ships. We weren’t on the front lines, but we were always in the danger zones.

I loved the Navy, but I wanted to go to school, so when my four years were up I decided not to re-enlist. I was honorably discharged and signed up for community college and started working in clubs as a DJ, playing the Caribbean music I love. I was “Dutch B” on a local radio station, and for three consecutive weeks a girl called the station and asked me to play the same song. Her name was Judith, and she was an art student at Norfolk State.

I was deejaying at a restaurant when Judith came to meet me for the first time. We were finally able to put faces to the voices we had been hearing on the radio, and I asked her out on our first date. She met me at the radio station and we drove to IHOP, where we laughed and talked all night. I loved everything about her, but especially her smile. I knew at that point that I didn’t want any other woman; she was it for me. We dated for a while and then I moved in with her. We did everything together. When I was on the air, she was my silent co-host, always by my side. We got married in 2001.

After I moved in with Judith, I met another Jamaican guy on the base and we became friendly. We shared a love for the music and the culture of our home country. One day I bumped into him and he asked for a favor. A friend was sending him a couple of packages from New York, he said, and he didn’t have an address other than the base. Could they come to my house? I gave it no thought. Sure, I said. When the boxes arrived one morning, each about the size of a case of beer, I was a little annoyed because I needed to get out the door to school. I called the guy to ask what he wanted me to do with them and he asked me to drop them off. I jotted down the address and tossed the packages in the car, running late already. I was driving toward the city limits when the police pulled me over. I never saw that “friend” again.

The boxes came from California, not New York, and were filled with marijuana. The cops had been tracking the packages. I had never smoked marijuana—still haven’t to this day. I don’t do drugs and rarely drink. But Virginia has always been tough on drug crimes, and the lawyer I hired suggested I take a plea deal: admit to felony possession of marijuana with intent to distribute, and do 15 months in a state work camp rather than go to trial and risk much more. As best I can tell, the other guy was never arrested or charged with anything.

The judge was compassionate but said he had no flexibility under the strict mandatory sentencing laws. I spent a few weeks in the city jail and then was transferred to a prison near Richmond, where I worked in the kitchen. Judith was pregnant with our second child but made the 90-minute drive to see me every weekend, even in the heat of summer, with no air conditioning in the car. She gave birth to our daughter, Jada, without me, but brought her to see me as soon as she could. She was so strong, and we were so in love. When the time came, she and my mom came to pick me up and I promised Judith nothing like this would ever happen again.

Bailey with his wife and their daughter Jada.

I was anxious to get back to work and be a good husband and father. I took over a restaurant that was going out of business, renamed it the Caribbean Hut and started serving Jamaican and American food—everything from mac and cheese to jerk chicken. Money was tight, and I had to work night and day, but I was thankful to be able to provide for my family.

A customer who liked my food told me about his work as a truck driver. He took me out on some back roads one weekend and taught me how to drive a big rig. I decided to go back to school and get a commercial license. I then had to make the difficult decision to close the restaurant, but trucking promised to allow me to spend more time with my family. I started out hauling ice to convenience and liquor stores, but before long I got a better job hauling containers from the port of Norfolk. I bought my first truck in 2003, an old Volvo in good shape for just $10,900, and I signed on with a big trucking company. Working within a 75-mile radius meant I was home every night and I was earning enough to buy a house.

The kids were doing well in school. Jada was on a little league team, and was doing some acting and modeling—she even appeared in a few TV commercials. My son, Demique, who is two years older than Jada, excelled at basketball and football, and he constantly talked about his dream of playing football in college. Like me, he loved to cook; he wanted to be a chef, and we would often work together in the kitchen. We took family vacations each year, and I remember our first trip to Disney World and how excited the kids were because it was their first time on an airplane. These were our best days.

***

When the immigration officers and state police banged on my door that morning, I thought perhaps one of my drivers had done something wrong or had been in an accident. By that time I had three tractor-trailers on the road most of the time. But when I opened the door the officers had guns drawn and pushed their way into my living room. “We’re here to take you away,” one of them said. They wouldn’t even let me go upstairs to get dressed. Judith was screaming and crying. They let her bring me my pants but because I was cuffed she had to help put them on me. They took me back to the same immigration building where I had applied for citizenship. It turned out they had a detention cell there.

Why did they come for me? While waiting to hear about my application for citizenship, I had hired a lawyer to find out why it was taking so long. Years had passed since I had finished the process. My attorney had set up a meeting with United States Citizenship and Immigration Services officials, who told me the delay was due to a problem with my application. I had admitted to my old conviction, but they had been unable to document it—the Virginia courts had not provided them the papers they wanted as backup. There was nothing in the system. Had I not admitted to the conviction, they probably never would have known about it, but they told me it disqualified me from citizenship.

I know a lot more about American immigration law now. No one—not the judge, nor the lawyer I’d hired—told me when I pleaded guilty to the drug charge that I was giving up my right to be a legal permanent resident of the United States.

I’ve since learned that what happened to me happens to thousands of people every month. Congress actually passed a law that requires ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, to keep a minimum of 33,400 immigrants locked up, awaiting deportation, at any given time. I tried to get back in front of a judge to plead my case, but I was again told that the judge’s hands were tied. This time, he said federal immigration law prevented him from considering the circumstances of my case because of the old drug conviction. He couldn’t take into account the fact that my conviction was for a nonviolent crime many years earlier, that I had never had another brush with the law or that I was a father to two U.S. citizens, a veteran, and a husband who owned a home and a business. We tried to reopen my old Virginia case. My lawyer even agreed to my claim that he hadn’t competently represented me. But too much time had passed and my request was turned down without even a hearing.

***

I spent two years in immigration detention, a much harsher environment than the prison where I’d done time for the marijuana conviction. The first stop, beginning in June 2010, was the Hampton Regional Jail, where I shared a cell with one other guy and didn’t see daylight or get a chance to exercise for weeks at a time. I spent one year and 20 days inside that cell. Then I was shackled in chains with a group of other men and flown 2,000 miles to the Otero immigration processing center, a private facility run under contract with ICE in the high desert outside of Las Cruces, New Mexico. It’s in the middle of nowhere, but there were hundreds of people, mostly Mexicans, there—separated from their families, not able to see a lawyer or have a judge consider anything about their lives in the United States and often without the money to make a phone call.

I had no idea what would happen next. There were lots of rumors but no clear information.

Bailey's two children Jada and Demique.

From New Mexico I was moved first to Arizona and then to Louisiana. Each time, we were chained together like slaves and kept handcuffed and shackled for seven hours before boarding an ICE chartered plane. The flight itself lasted about three and a half hours. I needed to use the bathroom, but was told no one was allowed to, even when I begged the officers and threatened to relieve myself in my seat. They only let me go to the restroom once I actually began to urinate on myself. We all sat in silence, terrified of what lay ahead. None of us knew what we would encounter upon landing.

While in detention, I spoke to my family when I could. The calls were expensive and the time difference was a problem, but when we were able to talk we all did our best to stay positive. My children often asked why I was there. They knew that I worked every day to provide for them, and couldn’t understand why I was taken away. Jada often said “it’s just not fair” and Demique told me to be strong and that he was holding things down until I could come home. I promised my children that I would do my best to get back to them. I asked them to pray for me as I was praying for them.

***

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.