The Mexican owner of a steakhouse in Granger, Indiana, whose wife voted for President Donald Trump was scheduled to be deported Friday. Roberto Beristain, 43, who immigrated to the U.S. illegally nearly 20 years ago, was attending his yearly U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) check-in last month when officials arrested him in the state capital of Indianapolis, the New York Daily News reported Thursday.
Beristain’s family, which is made up of his wife Helen and their four U.S.-born children, has implored a federal immigration judge in New York to take up their father's case in an effort to buy him some more time in the country. Beristain’s stepson, Phil Kolliopoulos, created a petition for the judge to open the case, which has garnered more than 600 signatures, the South Bend Tribune reported Thursday.
A Republican, Beristain worked at Eddie’s Steak Shack eight years until January when he bought it from his wife’s sister. Helen Beristain voted for Trump because she agreed with his hardline stance on immigration and the sentiment that undocumented immigrants who were convicted of crimes in the U.S. should be driven out of the country, his s 14-year-old daughter Jasmine Beristain told the New York Daily News. Her mother, however, had no idea that doing so would affect her father, Jasmine said.
South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, a Democrat, penned an essay Tuesday arguing that the “conservative community” would lose a “model citizen” if Beristain were to be deported.
The last time Beristain’s family spoke with their father was Tuesday night while Roberto Beristain was being detained in a country jail in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Roberto Beristain's incarceration was because a deportation order was placed on him in 2000 while he was on a family vacation to Niagara Falls along the U.S.-Canada border. Beristain, who was driving, took a wrong turn and his family found themselves on the Canadian side of the border. When he tried to come back, U.S. border officials found out he was in the country illegally and placed a deportation order on him.
After the incident, Beristain was ordered to leave the country voluntarily on two separate occasions, which he refused to do because his wife was pregnant, Jasmine said.
Protests have erupted across the country reaction to more than 680 immigrants being arrested within a month of Trump taking office, BuzzFeed reported last month. That was largely to due to an executive order Trump signed Jan. 25 called “Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States," which resulted in more than 2 million legal immigrants becoming the targets of deportation raids for having criminal records for low-level crimes like marijuana possession or writing a bad check. Before the executive order, legal immigrants could only become a “removable alien” when convicted of a crime.
There were approximately 11.1 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. in 2014, making up 3.5 percent of the U.S. population, the Pew Research Center reported in November. Among those, more than half were Mexican.
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