Father who was allowed to stay in US to care for disabled children is at risk of removal, lawyer says
Ten years ago, border czar Tom Homan, who was then an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official, got an urgent request from an immigration attorney: Please grant a stay of removal to a migrant father of two U.S. citizen children with disabilities, who was at risk of deportation.
In a brief reply to the attorney's email about Juan Marcial Ocampo, a Mexican national who had been living in Maryland for about 13 years, Homan granted the request to allow Ocampo to remain in the U.S.
"Granted one year stay," Homan said in the email obtained by ABC News.
While the reprieve granted by Homan, who is one of the public faces of the Trump administration's hardline immigration agenda, expired after one year, Ocampo remained in the U.S. and regularly checked in with ICE.
Typically, those in removal proceedings are required to report to ICE annually to maintain compliance with their immigration status. Advocates and attorneys told ABC News the check-ins are how ICE has kept track of some people who are not priority for removal.
But now, almost ten years later, Ocampo is at risk of imminent deportation to Mexico after being detained last week during a routine ICE check-in, according to his wife and attorney.
The Trump administration, in an effort to increase the arrests of noncitizens, has been detaining migrants at immigration courts and at ICE check-ins, immigrant advocacy groups and attorneys have told ABC News.
Homan, who granted Ocampo a stay during the Obama administration, has recently warned that every undocumented migrant should worry they could be arrested at any time, even if they have no criminal record.
"There's consequences [for] entering the country illegally," Homan told ABC News' Martha Raddatz in January.
Ocampo's wife and lawyer told ABC News that after being granted the one-year stay of removal by Homan in 2015, Ocampo checked in regularly with ICE for several years without a problem.
"I always accompany him to his check-ins and I was in the car last week waiting for him when he messaged me saying he had been detained," his wife, Maria de Jesus Benhumea, told ABC News in Spanish.
In her 2015 email to Homan, Ocampo's immigration attorney told Homan that a Baltimore ICE office had denied Ocampo's request for a stay of removal.
"The Baltimore field office has denied the request for stay of removal. Mr. Marcial has a 1999 expedited removal order and has lived in Maryland for the past 13 years," the lawyer said in the email. "He has two U.S. citizen children with a serious genetic disease called Marfan Syndrome which will slowly render them blind."
"We respectfully request that ICE HQ grant a stay of removal so Mr. Marcial Ocampo can continue to financially support his two U.S. citizen children diagnosed with Marfan Syndrome," the lawyer wrote.
In the email, the lawyer also said that Ocampo has a DUI on his record from 2008, "for which he is very regretful but attests that his entire way of life changed after becoming a father."
An ABC News review of Maryland and federal court records found a 2018 traffic citation for driving without a license. Ocampo pled guilty, according to the records.
White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson, in a statement to ABC News, said, "This illegal alien has remained in the United States illegally for nearly 10 years longer than the 1 year stay he was granted. During that time, he re-offended and was charged with a second DUI, endangering innocent Americans. The Trump Administration is committed to keeping the President's promise to deport illegal aliens."
After being detained during his ICE check-in last week, Ocampo, according to Bianca Granados, one of his current immigration lawyers, was transferred to an ICE processing center in Texas.
"He's been complying with everything that ICE has asked from him," Granados said. "There's no reason why he should be detained, especially with these compelling reasons as to why he needs to be with his family and continue to provide for his U.S. citizen girls."
Benhumea told ABC News that her two daughters, who are now both legally blind, have been asking about their father.
"They know what happened and they are very scared," she told ABC News. "My husband is a good man, he works and we go to church on the weekend. We need him."
