Army Sgt. Temo Juarez supported Trump, until ICE deported his immigrant wife, separating his family.
Sgt. Temo Juarez was a Trump guy. An Iraq combat veteran who served as a Marine infantryman and then an Army National Guardsman, his friends called him a “super conservative.” With his wife, he brought up their two daughters in Central Florida. He supported Trump in 2016, eager for a change.
But now, “I am eating my words,” he told the military newspaper Stars and Stripes in an interview published last week.
On Friday, Juarez and his family became the latest victims of Trump’s zero-tolerance policy on immigration.
On that day, his wife, Alejandra, left the country under a deportation order. She had come to the United States from Mexico illegally as a teenager two decades ago and had until now been living undisturbed with Temo, a naturalized U.S. citizen, and daughters, both natural-born Americans. This week, Temo will fly to Mexico with his daughters, 9-year-old Estela and 16-year-old Pamela — and leave his younger daughter there, even though English is her first language. He can’t do his construction job and take care of her in Florida by himself.
Temo Juarez believed Trump would deport only illegal immigrants who were criminals, and his wife had no record.
Instead, as the family fought Alejandra’s deportation, young Estela, with unicorns on her T-shirt, wept as she spoke to TV cameras: “I really do want to stay with my mom and dad. I want us to be together and stay in my house. I don’t want to go to Mexico. I want to stay here.”
For Sgt. Juarez, this was the Trump administration’s unique way of saying, “Thank you for your service.”
Trump’s “family separation” policy is most visible on the border. Last week, the administration said it still had not reunited 572 immigrant children it separated from their parents. The administration, in a court filing last week, said it should be up to the American Civil Liberties Union — the group that sued over family separation — to locate the parents.
But, as the Juarez case shows, the wanton cruelty of the immigration policy isn’t limited to new arrivals. “Zero tolerance literally ripped this family apart,” Rep. Darren Soto, D-Florida, the Juarezes’ congressman, told me Monday. “The administration is so extreme on immigration that they’re deporting the spouses of military veterans.”
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