An immigration judge’s ruling Tuesday afternoon means a Pentecostal Christian singer who was recently arrested by the Memphis Safe Task Force will have to leave the United States by late January, the man’s lawyer said.
Immigration Judge Maithe Gonzalez rejected a request from Delmar Gomez to cancel his deportation because of the harm it would cause to his four U.S. citizen children, ages three to 17, according to Gomez’s attorney Skye Austin with advocacy group Latino Memphis.
However, the judge allowed Gomez to leave the United States on his own, rather than accepting a formal deportation, the attorney said. He must leave the country by January 26.
The attorney said some logistical details are still unclear, but it’s likely that once the family or a representative buys Gomez a return ticket to his native Guatemala, he will be released from an immigration detention center in Louisiana and allowed to return to his family in Memphis temporarily.
“He has stated that he wants to see his children as soon as possible, and that he is ready to get out of there,” Austin said. “So, me and my team, we’re going to work as fast as we can to make that happen.”
The attorney said Gomez does not wish to appeal the judge’s ruling and prefers to depart voluntarily.
“We always prepare our clients for the worst, and then we do our best to get a positive outcome,” Austin said. “I was hopeful for the best, and the best just didn’t happen, and unfortunately, that’s the reality of immigration law right now.”
The lack of a formal deportation order on Gomez’s record could help him later.
“Basically, voluntary departure means that you don’t have a formal order of removal on your record. And so, when his oldest U.S. citizen child turns 21, she could petition for him (to return legally to the U.S.),” she said.
Gomez’s wife, Sandra Perez, told The Institute for Public Service Reporting late Tuesday that the other family members hadn’t yet decided whether to remain in Memphis or go with Delmar Gomez to Guatemala.
“When he’s here, we’re going to make that decision,” she said in Spanish. “But I think that yes, we’re going to go with him because we’re not capable of sustaining the costs.”
Perez is a stay-at-home mom, and Gomez was the main wage-earner in the family until his arrest. He was making a living mostly by mowing lawns.
Gomez’s oldest daughter, Nancy, is a high school senior who has already been accepted to the University of Memphis, and Perez said she hasn’t had a chance to talk with her about the possibility of her staying here to attend college: “We haven’t really talked about it because right now she’s very upset.” To calm down, the teenager had left to eat dinner with one of her cousins, her mother said.
The hearing was held at the detention center in Jena, Louisiana, more than 300 miles from Memphis. Gomez and the judge were physically present for the hearing. Austin, meanwhile, attended the hearing remotely from the offices of Latino Memphis. Family members sat outside her office most of the time because they were serving as witnesses.
Immigration court administrators denied a reporter’s request to watch the hearing remotely.
“Unfortunately, Señor Delmar took quite a long time in his testimony, and so the court would only allow me one witness, and so I brought (Gomez’s oldest daughter, 17-year-old Nancy) to the stand,” Austin said.
“The basis of my argument really came down to how the children would suffer from lack of education in Guatemala,” she said.
“The oldest, she’s already been awarded a scholarship to the University of Memphis. So, I talked about that and having to choose between either staying in the United States without her entire family, who would go back with the dad,” she said.
Austin also spoke about the mental and emotional suffering of the children since their father’s detention, and also the specific challenges of the area of Guatemala that they’d be moving back to – the dominant language there isn’t Spanish, which they speak, but rather an indigenous language, Mam.
The attorney described the immigration judge’s ruling like this:
“As I understand it, she said that the children would not experience extreme and unusual hardship upon the father’s return to Guatemala — that essentially, the hardship that I presented, the evidence and the testimony that was given did not rise to the legal standard of extreme and unusual,” she said.
“And it is a very high burden to meet, given recent case law.”
Rather, the judge said that “everything that they would experience would be something that is normal in a family separation,” the attorney said.
Austin had to pause during the conversation to collect herself emotionally after a hearing that stretched over three hours. “I had to break the news to the family,” she said.
The arrest of Delmar Gomez was especially notable because of the amount of community support he received from various people who know him, including church pastors, neighbors and teachers at his older children’s school.
In all, the attorney collected about 46 letters on his behalf.
“In most cases, I’m lucky if I get five to 10,” she said. “So 46 is incredible.”
That community support contrasts with a Department of Homeland Security news release Oct. 20 portraying Gomez as one of 11 “worst of the worst” criminal immigrants in Memphis.
The release stated that he had been arrested on an aggravated assault charge.
In another version of the news release, the government published Gomez’s mug shot and listed the wrong name, identifying him as an alleged drug dealer and vehicle thief from Mexico.
During the hearing, Austin said the government tried to introduce a form that said he had been involved in an aggravated assault.
Austin said she challenged it.
“All it said was Germantown, and it gave a date of January 2011,” she said. “Again, when anyone looks in Germantown’s records, it does not exist. So as of right now, I still don’t know where that came from, and I still feel as though it’s a case of mistaken identity.”
The federal government continues to make the claim publicly. Following publication Monday of The Institute’s story online and on WKNO, someone edited the Oct. 20 news release on the Department of Homeland Security’s website.
The news release no longer lists the wrong name under Delmar Gomez’s mug shot. It now says, once again, that Delmar Gomez was arrested on an aggravated assault charge.
The department didn’t respond to requests Tuesday for comment and for evidence to support the claim.
The Institute’s independent review of Gomez’s record located only driving-related offenses, including an incident in 2013 whe he was charged with driving with a burned-out brake light and driving without a license and without insurance. His attorney said he had a total of six offenses on his record over a period of nearly two decades, from 2006 to this spring, all driving-related.
Austin said the driving offenses played little role in Tuesday’s hearing.
“The judge didn’t seem to take too much concern with the traffic violations. Like I said it just came down to that level of hardship because it is such a high burden, probably the highest that we have in immigration law.”
Delmar Gomez’s wife acknowledges that he entered the country illegally in January 2005, when he was 17, but says he’s lived a clean life.
He’s now 38, and a singer in a band called Agrupacion Vision Emanuel, or Vision of Emanuel Group, that makes appearances at Pentecostal Christian churches across the country.
His younger brother Eber Gomez, 30, who has worked as a roofer, was also a singer with a different touring Christian band, Adoradores de Cristo Memphis, which means Christ Worshipers of Memphis.
Delmar Gomez’s wife said that on the night of Oct. 8, the younger brother was having car trouble and needed a ride from a mechanic’s shop on Lamar Avenue.
Delmar Gomez went to pick him up. On the return trip, the Memphis Safe Task Force stopped the vehicle and arrested both brothers. They were among hundreds of immigrants arrested during an ongoing law enforcement surge in Memphis.
After their Oct. 8 arrest, the brothers were held without bond and moved from one immigration detention center to another until they were transferred to a big immigration lockup in Jena, Louisiana.
Eber Gomez, who had no known criminal record, accepted deportation and has already been sent back to Guatemala.
Delmar Gomez remained in detention and fought his case, leading to Tuesday’s hearing.
This story was first reported by the Institute for Public Policy Reporting Memphis
