The story of Esperanza

When she got a call from her husband, less than an hour after he left home for work, he told her he had been detained by ICE. She didn’t believe him.

“I thought he was joking with me,” the wife said. “I told him to stop lying.”

It was later that morning, after a trusted friend had checked the area and accompanied her to pick up his car a few blocks from their Rifle home, that it finally hit her. 

“I felt like he had died,” she said. “To see his truck and all his things abandoned there. His work tools, his cigarettes. It was a very difficult moment.”

The wife, who we’ll call Esperanza, is one of many women forced to carry an invisible struggle after the detention of their husbands.

Esperanza struggled when she first realized her husband had been taken in a fake traffic stop just minutes away from their home. She struggled to raise her children on her own while figuring out how to get her husband a strong legal defense. 

Her husband had never had any problems with law enforcement. He had never even been pulled over by police in his nearly 12 years in the country. 

That was the main thing Esperanza kept reminding herself as she struggled, hoping that because her husband was not a criminal, the system would see him as a person worth sending home to his family.

In the end, her husband’s situation turned out to be an outlier case. He was one of only a few people Voces Unidas has seen released on bond to continue to fight their immigration cases outside of ICE detention. Now, he is home, even if forced to wear an ankle monitor, waiting for his next court date. 

Even when people don’t have a criminal past, Voces Unidas has documented a trend where the majority of cases still result in deportation. In those cases, the family impacts are magnified. But Esperanza’s case gives a glimpse into how one family on the Western Slope managed to hold on to hope and how they are now trying to move forward, despite not knowing whether that hope will be enough.

Data from the Deportation Data Project at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law shows that ICE detains men much more often than women. Some data shows men make up about 90% of those arrested and detained by ICE. 

The impacts at home

Esperanza’s husband was in detention for more than two months. 

Her first challenge was telling the kids when they came home from school. The oldest, a middle schooler, was quiet, but she asked the questions Esperanza could not answer. Could he be deported? And what happens then?

Esperanza decided to be open with the kids and tell them as much as she could. 

Yes, it’s possible he could be deported. But she put on a brave face and said she didn’t think it would happen. She told them their dad would be fine. He would call. If he did get deported, the family would prepare and leave for Mexico to be with him, even though that would mean uprooting the children from the only home they knew.

The oldest daughter worried about that. She worried about leaving her friends. About living in a country she had never visited. Esperanza told them life would be different if they lived in Mexico. 

“The hard thing is not knowing what’s going to happen,” Esperanza said. “If we were sure he was going to be deported we would have started making arrangements. But we tried to have hope.”

Her husband made a point of calling home almost every day. He talked to the kids often. 

Still, grades slipped. The middle daughter, an elementary school student, would come home and sleep most of the day. The youngest, a toddler, became more clingy with his mother.

Besides keeping a strong face for her kids, Esperanza spent much of her days tracking down paperwork. The lawyers would ask for proof of how long they’d been here. A letter from a community member. School records. Utility bills. Each document became another way to prove a life the family had already lived.

And Esperanza had to learn how to pay bills. 

“It was very difficult for me,” she said. “I didn’t know how and where to make the payments for anything. He was the one who worked and took care of the bills.”

Esperanza said the anxiety didn’t help. She asked a friend for help to create a Gmail account so she could start tracking down everything she needed. 

She said fortunately her husband had built them some savings, but once she secured a lawyer, she also had to figure out how to seek help to pay legal fees. She relied on friends, family, and organizations like Voces Unidas to help pay for his case. A few thousand at first, then more and more as the case progressed. 

She worried about getting scammed. She was reassured when a consultation with a lawyer, provided by Voces Unidas, confirmed the lawyer they had retained was well known and trusted. 

Esperanza said she had previously provided daycare for her goddaughter. She thought about taking on more kids to earn some money toward their fees.

“But I couldn’t concentrate,” Esperanza said. “I’d spend the day on calls and talking to the lawyer’s office.”

And then her hope was tested every time her husband’s court case was cancelled. It happened multiple times. Often at the last minute, after the family had already prepared itself for an answer.

Just before the last court date when the judge granted him bond, he told Esperanza that he couldn’t stand the conditions in detention anymore. If the hearing was cancelled again, or his bond was denied, he would ask to self-deport.

“For him to say he can’t stand it, I knew it was bad,” Esperanza said. 

But the hearing finally happened. His lawyers did their job, made the case, and the judge granted bond.

Then on the date he was to be released, Colorado had snow. Esperanza didn’t feel confident driving from the Western Slope down to Aurora in those conditions. Her husband told her he could figure it out, even after more than two months in detention.

Still, Esperanza said her husband described being released and instantly feeling confused and disoriented. She said he was blessed a second time because volunteers from Casa de Paz found him walking outside and picked him up. They provided him with a sweater for the cold, fed him, and then took him to the right bus stop. After everything, he asked for a Coca-Cola.

Then when he finally got home to the family, the toddler didn’t recognize him. 

Esperanza said her husband’s beard had grown out. He was skinnier and had dark circles around his eyes. She said he smelled, not like body odor, she said, more like abandonment. 

Every part of the journey was sad, Esperanza said. But mostly, she wants others to understand how the detention of her husband sent ripple effects through her children, their grades, and every part of their family’s life.

“Kids suffer so much,” Esperanza said. 

Today, things are slowly returning to normal, Esperanza said, despite the wait for another court date and the uncertainty still hanging over the family.

“I kept hoping that he was going to be released,” Esperanza said. “It was hard, but I kept hoping.”

This story is part of a Voces Unidas series documenting the impacts of immigration detention and deportation on families in Colorado’s Western Slope. Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy and safety of individuals and families.