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Setbacks dampen holiday season

A father is deported to Mexico, leaving his wife and two young sons, all U.S. citizens, here.

By GINA PACE
Published December 12, 2006

ADVERTISEMENT [Times photo: Zach Boyden-Holmes] Andrew Trujillo, 5 months, sits on the lap of his mother, Rosaura Sanchez, 24, as she explains how her husband, Marcelo Trujillo, 30, was deported. Sanchez is a U.S. citizen, but it didn't help her husband to get a green card to work and stay in this country.

DADE CITY - Rosaura Sanchez knows that this Christmas is going to be different.

She'll be with her two young sons. But her husband won't be there. He was deported to Mexico in October.

"To me it's not Christmas," she said. "It's like a regular day."

She said the holiday won't have the same meaning it used to when they were together. Sanchez, who is a nursing assistant in Zephyrhills, is working all the extra shifts she can to pay bills now that her husband's paycheck is gone. Expensive Christmas presents for her boys are out of the question.

So Sanchez will celebrate the holidays with only part of her family, like many others in Tommytown, a largely Hispanic community where many undocumented workers live.

"The depression and the whole thing of Christmas can get pretty bad," said Margarita Romo, the director of Farmworkers Self-Help, a nonprofit group in Dade City. "It's a very hard time for people who come here, and have left grandparents and uncles and aunts to try and make a better life."

* * *

Sanchez, 24, was born in Santa Ana, Calif., and is a U.S. citizen. She met her husband, Marcelo Trujillo, when she was 14. Her father, a soccer coach, had brought Trujillo to the house because he was one of his star players.

Trujillo, now 30, taught Sanchez to dance, and was her first dance partner at her quinceanera, a 15th birthday party that marks the transition from childhood to womanhood. In time, he would pass flowers under the dinner table to Sanchez and write her secret love notes.

Trujillo came to the United States in 1994. He stayed in the country illegally. He spent his time working on farms, picking anything from squash to oranges. Eventually, he got a job with a construction company in Crystal Springs doing asbestos abatement.

He married Sanchez in August 2002.

The couple tried to gain citizenship status for Trujillo, a long process that started in 2004, but couldn't.

Angela Kelley, the deputy director at the National Immigration Forum, an immigrants' rights organization, said that those who enter the United States illegally have very few options for gaining legal status. While it depends on the specifics of an individual's case, obtaining citizenship often becomes more difficult the longer someone is in the country illegally.

Only 5,000 visas are given in the service sector every year in the United States for jobs in restaurants, hotels and landscaping, Kelley said. Yet, about 500,000 immigrants cross the border illegally, she said, many eventually filling those types of jobs without legal status.

Chris Bentley, a spokesman for Citizenship and Immigration Services, said that marrying a U.S. citizen does not confer citizenship status. An illegal immigrant married to a citizen would still face repercussions for illegal entry.

In Trujillo's case, he faced those penalties when he tried to apply for citizenship, Sanchez said. He went for an interview Oct. 4 with immigration officials that Sanchez thought would lead to citizenship. But authorities were waiting to take him into custody instead. He was deported Oct. 16, she said. He is not to return for 10 years.

"The law is very tough and very unforgiving," Kelley said. "As undocumented people try and secure legal status, they run up against pretty immovable roadblocks to achieve what seems logical: a unified family structure."

* * *

Trujillo is now working in Mexico City, making $15 a day unloading trucks for a clothing vendor. He doesn't make enough money to help the family with bills, Sanchez says.

She doesn't know how she'll make ends meet on her own. Her son Andrew, who is 5 months old, was born premature and has respiratory problems that have required numerous trips to the doctor's office. This summer, son Jesus, who is 4, had his tonsils removed, and most of the family's savings went to pay for that, she said.

Sanchez said that Jesus knows that his father is gone, but doesn't understand why. After he talks to his father on the phone, he tells his mom he wants to go to Mexico.

But Sanchez doesn't see that as an option. She said it's almost impossible to get a good job there.

"This is my country," she said. "If I got to Mexico, my babies are not going to learn English and they are not going to have the opportunities that they have here."

So she's working on short-term goals and waiting for her tax refund so she can travel to visit Trujillo.

But it won't be in time for the holidays.

[Last modified December 11, 2006, 22:59:29]