Crossing the border illegally has many drawbacks. This man's mother lied to him and he can't return to Houston for 10 years. Apparently when you leave the country without permission from ICE your DACA stops. Let's top it off with, his lying mother is still in Houston illegally. *DACA recipients who leave the US without first obtaining advance parole, but who are later paroled back into the country are eligible to resume their DACA status after their parole expires, according to ICE.*
A Texas 'Dreamer' found out during an immigration meeting that his dad wasn't his biological father. Now he could be trapped in Mexico for a decade.
Avalos, accompanied by his American wife, traveled to the US Consulate in Juárez, in August 2022, for the interview, a necessary step as he began the process of trying to secure US residency, and eventually, he hoped, citizenship.
Avalos, 28, was born in Mexico but spent nearly his entire life in Texas after his mother brought him to the United States when he was just a year old. The August interview marked the beginning of his effort to become a citizen of the only country he had ever called home, after a decade shielded by his Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival, often referred to as DACA, status, which prevented him from being deported despite being undocumented.
The meeting quickly deteriorated into a nightmare, though, when Avalos learned that his mother had briefly taken him back to Mexico when he was 7 years old — a trip he says he doesn't remember — before he was able to establish permanent residency in the US. The revelation that he had illegally reentered the country not only dashed his immediate dreams of becoming a resident, but saddled him with a 10-year ban on returning to the US.
Avalos was apprehensive. If, for any reason, he failed to secure a visa during the meeting, life as he knew it would be forever changed. But with assurances from his lawyers that his papers were in order, Avalos quieted the nagging voice in his head, and embarked on a cross-border journey fated to be a one-way trip.
According to Martinez, who recounted the doomed meeting in an interview with Insider, immigration officers quickly zeroed in on Avalos' Mexican birth certificate, which included an amendment from 2002 — six years after he and his mother first entered the US. Left without answers to officers' probing questions, Avalos called his mother mid-interview, hoping she might be able to explain the discrepancy. She dropped a heart-wrenching bombshell: Avalos' mother told her son and the immigration officials that she brought her child back to Mexico when he was 7 years old so her husband — the man Avalos always believed to be his biological father — could legally adopt him. Because he and his mother briefly left the US after illegally entering, thus unlawfully crossing the border not once, but twice, Avalos' application for residency was immediately denied and he was issued a 10-year ban on reentering the US — his home country, where his wife and son remained.
She shopped Avalos' story around to several new immigration lawyers in the Houston area but said attorneys were hesitant to take the difficult case — until she met Naimeh Salem, who quickly went to work raising public awareness and outrage about Avalos' exile. *Lawyers didn't want to take the case, it's not a slam dunk*
