Elienay Estrada is a Cuban with I-220B, who just became a mother in Fort Myers, Florida. Her baby, Ainhoa, is only two months old. Although Estrada is married to a permanent resident in the United States and has had a family reunification petition pending since January, she risks being deported to Cuba next week, just as Heidy Sánchez Tejeda was in April of this year, separated from her year-and-a-half-old daughter and her husband, both Americans, despite waiting for two years for a response to a request to reunite her family. The approval came only after her deportation. Now the return to the United States will not be "tomorrow."
In an interview with CiberCuba, Estrada explained that she attended her annual interview with ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) this month and left feeling happy because she was given an appointment for next year. This has been the case since she entered the United States in February 2020 with an I-220B (which includes a deportation order), after her asylum request through the MPP (Remain in Mexico) program was denied in 2019 during Donald Trump's first term.
But times have changed, and her joy was short-lived because she soon received a message and an email from ICE urgently summoning her for this Tuesday, June 24. In the midst of her anxiety, Estrada has consulted lawyers, and they all told her that they are calling her to carry out the deportation order.
In that context, with so little room for maneuver, it has been difficult for her to find a legal representative willing to accompany her to the appointment on June 24 at ICE, to request permission to wait in the United States for the resolution of her family reunification process, considering that she is the mother of a newborn girl.
In Cuba, Elienay Estrada has family, but she asserts her right to live with the family she has created in the United States, that is, with her daughter and her husband. She has not yet decided whether, in the event of being deported, she would take her baby with her to the Island. She admits to having contradictions about this because she does not want to be selfish and force her daughter to grow up amid the hardships of Cuba. On the other hand, she questions whether the baby needs to be with her mother, no matter where she is.
The case of Elienay Estrada is not new, but it stirs the Cuban community, which is experiencing for the first time the mass deportations of a Republican Administration that the majority of the exile community in Florida voted for.
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