This should be one of the proudest moments of Felix Garcia’s life. His eldest daughter, Belsy, has just about one year left before she graduates from Loyola University Chicago’s Stritch School of Medicine. Instead, the dad of three is sitting in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention with a deportation date just days away, on April 4. Lots of people have been talking about undocumented immigrants needing to “follow the rules,” and that’s exactly what Garcia had been doing.

For seven years, the undocumented dad checked in regularly with ICE, to show that he was working, paying his taxes, and continuing to have a clean record. Garcia hoped that after seven years of checking in the agency would at least spare him one more year here so that he could watch his daughter graduate. “If he could just be present for that moment, he’d buy his own ticket to Guatemala.” But, “the officer said no”:

For now, Garcia is at Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia, where he sleeps in a room with 60 other men. Many of the other men he’s talked to have also been in the U.S. for years and have clean criminal records. “They are not sending only people that deserve to be sent,” Garcia said. “They are sending everybody.”

Belsy’s Loyola community has rallied behind her dad’s fight, organizing a recent rally to call on Atlanta ICE Office Director Sean Gallagher to halt Perez’s deportation. “My father considers the United States his home,” Belsy, herself a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipient and one of the estimated 100 medical Dreamers in the U.S., said earlier this month, “and he is a living example of the American Dream.” Gallagher has every power to stop this deportation, but ICE instead seems determined to turn this family’s dream into a nightmare for no other reason than because it can.