Trump supporter thought president would only deport ‘bad hombres.’ Instead, her husband is being deported.
When Helen Beristain told her husband she was voting for Donald Trump last year, he warned her that the Republican nominee planned to “get rid of the Mexicans.”
Defending her vote, Helen quoted Trump directly, noting that the tough-talking Republican said he would only kick the “bad hombres” out of the country,
according to the South Bend Tribune.
Months later, Roberto Beristain — a successful businessman, respected member of his Indiana town and father of three American-born children — languishes in a detention facility with hardened criminals as he awaits his deportation back to Mexico, the country he left in 1998 when he entered the United States illegally.
“I wish I didn’t vote at all,” Helen Beristain told the Tribune. “I did it for the economy. We needed a change.”
[For years, immigration authorities gave this Arizona mother a pass. Now she has been deported.]
Critics on the left have blasted Beristain for not taking the president’s rhetoric seriously and allowing his administration to plunge the country into what they consider a chaotic and inhumane immigration debacle. Critics on the right have inundated the family with racist threats and attacked Beristain for giving refuge to the love of her life, a man they consider a foreign interloper.
Caught in the middle of the fiery political clash are people like Roberto Beristain — people who have built a successful life inside the confines of the fuzzy legal limbo in which they exist. Supporters say the 43-year-old has never broken the law and doesn’t have so much as a parking ticket on his record. The mayor of South Bend, Ind., the conservative community that the Beristains call home,
called him “one of its model residents.”
But Roberto Beristain’s clean record didn’t stop Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials from arresting him when he showed up for his annual meeting with the agency Feb. 6.
Beristain — who has a Social Security card, a work permit and a driver’s license — was expecting to return home to his family and business. Instead, he was taken into custody, setting off a last-ditch effort by family members and lawyers to free him. Thus far, those efforts have failed. Family members told the Tribune that ICE officials had informed them that Beristain would be deported Friday.
Beristain came to the United States in 1998 to visit an aunt in California, but he decided not to return to Mexico, according to the Tribune. He would go on to marry, start a family and put down roots in Indiana, where he is the owner of a popular restaurant called Eddie’s Steak Shed, which employs 20 American citizens, advocates told The Washington Post. He has worked at the restaurant for the past eight years and bought it from his sister-in-law in January.