Snatched Away: Man seeking legal residency arrested during immigration interview
Published 4:00 pm Saturday, April 1, 2017
- CARL RUSSO/Staff photoKatherine Arriaga holds her baby, 3-month-old Jade Arriaga Ramos, as she talks to her husband Leandro who was arrested by ICE Friday.
LAWRENCE, Mass. — Leandro Arriaga and his wife, Katherine, had just finished interviews at the federal Citizenship and Immigration Services office on Wednesday — a first step in the process needed to gain legal residency status for Leandro.
After questioning them separately, the interviewer concluded that their marriage was valid and told Leandro his application for a green card would advance.
The couple, relieved and joyous, was directed to a waiting room.
Minutes later, Leandro was waved back into the office. Agents with the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency were waiting for him.
Sixteen years after he arrived in Puerto Rico on a boat with 60 others from the Dominican Republic and then made his way to the United States — where he married twice, had four children, bought a home and started a business — the stepped-up enforcement of the nation’s immigration laws ordered by President Donald Trump caught up with him.
The net ICE agents cast in Lawrence — a community of 77,000, known as the “Immigrant City,” — a caught five people in all, including Arriaga and sparked protests.
At his arrest, an ICE agent asked Arriaga if he would like to say goodbye to his wife. He said no, the embrace would be unbearable for the both of them. He left without seeing her and was taken to the Bristol House of Corrections in North Dartmouth, Massachusetts.
“I knew it was going to be really sad,” he said Friday during a telephone interview from the jail about why he left without seeing his wife. “It’s hard for me. It’s really hard for me.”
Katherine delivered their first child, a girl they named Jade, on Dec. 15, 2016. Arriaga has three sons by another marriage, ages 8, 9 and 13, who live with their mother in a neighboring city.
Arriaga — now unemployed — pays their mother $300 a week to support the three children.
Arriaga’s lawyer, Tania Palumbo, said the final deportation order recently issued against him means he can be returned to the Dominican at any time. She said she’ll ask for a stay of the order on Tuesday.
The deportation order was the second against Arriaga. The first came following his arrest 16 years ago, after he stepped off the boat in Puerto Rico. At that time, a voluntary deportation order required him to return on his own to the Dominican. Instead, he continued on to the United States.
Shawn Neudauer, a spokesman for the agency, would not release details about Arriaga and the other four, including their names and hometowns. Paulia Grenier, a spokeswoman for Citizenship and Immigration Services, also declined to provide details about them.
Boston radio station WBUR reported Friday that at least three of the five had come to the Citizenship and Immigration Services office to begin filing applications to become legal permanent residents. The station reported that one was a Brazilian woman who — like Arriaga — was ordered deported before marrying a U.S. citizen. The station did not say where she was living in the United States.
The five arrests injected Lawrence — again — into the roiling nationwide debate on immigration. The City Council last year directed local police not to cooperate with ICE agents seeking to identify and deport undocumented residents, unless the agents have a criminal warrant for their arrests signed by a judge. The council’s vote added Lawrence to the scores of municipalities that have declared themselves sanctuary cities.
On Feb. 7, Lawrence went a step further and joined the city of Chelsea, Massachusetts in a suit seeking to block Trump’s executive order cutting off federal funding to municipalities that don’t cooperate with ICE agents.
Zoila Gomez, who practices immigration law in Lawrence with Palumbo, said Arriaga first filed for legal permanent residency on March 1, 2016, when Trump was given little chance of winning the presidency. She said he decided to continue with the application after Trump’s election, in part because his application had served as a heads-up to Citizenship and Immigration Services that he was here.
His worst fears were realized when the agency notified ICE about his appointment Wednesday.
“I said, ‘Leandro, with the new administration, there is a possibility you’ll be arrested at your interview. Do you still want to go forward?’” Gomez asked him. “He said yes. Otherwise, his petition (for residency) would have to be withdrawn” and there would be no hope for removing the deportation order that had hung over him for 16 years.
Friday evening, Katherine Arriaga was at home with her daughter, mother and brother, who share the comfortable, tidy three-bedroom home on Warren Street bought by Katherine and Leandro in 2012. She said her concerns were multiplying, including her fear that she would not be able to manage the small real estate company her husband owned, which has two homes in Lawrence and three in neighboring Springfield.
Katherine arrived in the United States with her mother in 2009, eight years after Leandro. Her grandmother sponsored their immigration and steered them through the citizenship process.
A mutual friend introduced her to Leandro in 2010. They bought the house in 2012, moved in together and married at Lawrence City Hall in 2015.
She said they each came to the United States for the same simple reasons: “Better jobs. Better education. Better lives.”
She said she’ll visit him in Bristol on Saturday.
Eddings writes for the North Andover, Massachusetts Eagle Tribune.